Protection....

Update: I originally didn't want to publish this because I didn't think it was good enough, but I hit the wrong button. Anyway, Alistair Morgan read it and thinks one of the premises of the whole thing is wrong. Namely, the weapons were going in the same direction as the drugs, not the other way around. Well, at least the story moved on a bit, but this renders mostly useless a whole additional post I put together from reading a lot of crazy-but-interesting stuff out of the bottom of the Internet. Also, despite the Jessie J reference there's better music at the bottom if you get that far.

So, Alistair Morgan's twitter feed frequently hints at "cocaine, weapons, and Ireland" as well as police corruption as being factors involved in the case of his brother, Daniel Morgan, the private detective murdered in 1987, probably by people who were since employed by News International. It's often been said that Morgan was on the point of publishing some sort of huge revelation when he was killed, but nobody knows what it was beyond his brother's hints based on what the police told him at the time.

Since the eruption of the phone-hacking scandal, a number of sidelights have come up which linked the News of the World, its cadre of ex-police gumshoes, and its contacts inside the police force. Notably, it seems to have spied on the former Army intelligence agent-handler, Ian Hurst, on an NGO, British-Irish Rights Watch (because documents of theirs were on Hurst's computer when they hacked it), and perhaps on the chief of police, Sir Philip Orde. It would have been hard for people working for the press not to have covered at least one Northern Irish story in the last 20-odd years simply because it was such a news staple, but it's worth noting their interest.

The War Economy of Northern Ireland

So, what might link Morgan, cocaine, weapons, Ireland, and policemen? There are some fairly well-known stylised facts or stereotypes about the economy of the Troubles. The IRA mostly funded itself from money collected in the United States, from bank robberies, and from unofficial taxes it collected in the North. It also got contributions from friendly countries, specifically Libya. The Loyalists didn't have a reliable source of their own money abroad like NorAid, and so specialised in protection and drugs. Both sides also got involved in smuggling across the border as a commercial exercise.

That's a glib summary 'graf; obviously, I collect a revolutionary tax for the struggle, you impose fines on drug dealers and dishonestly stick to some of the money, and they are merely thugs operating a protection racket. Traditionally, both Sinn Fein and the British tended to stereotype the Loyalists as basically criminal and the IRA as proper insurgents - there may be some truth in there, but the distinction is one of emphasis and degree and also of propaganda rather than of kind.

Having obtained money, they both needed to convert some of it into arms. The IRA got a famous delivery in the 80s from Libya in its role as Secret Santa, and also often bought guns in the US over the counter and smuggled them back. I don't know how well characterised the sources of Loyalist arms are, which of course gives me license to speculate.

Permanently Operating Factors

Now for the cocaine, which has often been known to land in bulk quantities on the wilder, less populated bits of the Atlantic coast that also offer good harbours. This is a rare combination, as people live near ports. Two of the best bits on that score are northwest Spain and southwest Ireland. Having landed, you can move it on anywhere in the UK-Ireland common travel area without much more trouble. Since the creation of the Schengen area, Galicia is even better for this because there is such a choice of markets you can reach without a customs inspection. But in 1987 this was an un-fact, so you might as well go to Ireland.

This transit trade had important consequences - notably the rise of Martin "The General" Cahill, the assassination of Veronica Guerin, and probably a substantial chunk of the Irish property bubble via the laundering of profits and also by the boost to those ol' animal spirits the drug provides.

Imagine, then, that an important criminal actor supplying the London market with cocaine also had access to a reliable surplus of weapons. There is the potential for trade here.

However, it's not that simple - the famous Libyan shipment would have fit in a couple of shipping containers, and it kept the IRA going up until peace was signed, with a fair bit left over to be buried in concrete by the international commissioners on decommissioning. It is very unlikely that any plausible flow of arms to Northern Ireland would have paid for the flow of cocaine into the South-East.

We Don't Need Your Money, Money, Money, We Just Wanna Make The World Dance...


There's something else going on - Diego Gambetta would have already pointed out that you need to understand the trade in protection. To sell protection, you need weapons, which are the capital equipment of the business of private protection. In so far as the buyers in the UK were paying in guns as well as cash, they were arguably expressing a protector-protectee relationship. While on our territory, we protect you, and license you to provide protection. This was also reciprocated. In accepting them, were the sellers of the cocaine undertaking to protect it in transit on their own territory?

Another way of looking at this, which Gambetta would also approve of, would be in terms of costly signalling. Being both a supplier and a protector is a powerful position, but it might be worth letting the other side have it as a guarantee or hostage, to signal that you didn't intend to break the agreement and deal with some other supplier. This makes even more sense given that you still have a regular supply of guns you could cut off or use against them, and therefore both parties have something to lose.

Now, Gambetta's work mostly deals with Sicily, where a very important protection supplier has often been irrelevant. London is a very different society from this point of view. Whatever you think of the police, you can't just ignore them as a factor. In some other societies, the police might be protection consumers, but here, police corruption usually takes the form of policemen selling protection. (In a sense, the more effective the police, the more tempting this will be. Nothing sells like the good stuff.)

So, gazing down on this complex, neo-medieval exchange of cash, credit, and protection, there is a sort of Sun King whose permission is required for any protection contract to be signed. It's like a feudal society. My liege lord is only so, because he is the King's subject, and the King at least theoretically owes duties to the Emperor, or later, directly to God. Our buyer is in a position to offer protection for his end of the business because he enjoys protection supplied by the police.

Who were the recipients, the sellers? They might have been drug dealers who needed to buy protection from one or other paramilitary group. They might have been drug dealers who wanted to build up enough arms that they could stop buying protection, or rather, change protector. Or they might have been paramilitaries who sold protection to the drugs trade. The distinction is surprisingly unimportant.

So, to put the pieces together, there was some group of South-East London villains importing cocaine from transit providers in Ireland, who were also exporting weapons in the opposite direction as part of an exchange of protection for their common business. This required buying protection from the police. Where did the weapons come from? And why is News International involved?

as for the Mahler, I think it could do with a helipad

China's neo-con blogging fever-swamp, via (of course) Jamie K.

For instance, Gao Yi, a well-known music critic, tweeted: "Compared with a war, US$7 billion is much more worthwhile. Right now, we lack the off-shore staging capacity for a mid-intensity war.

A well-known music critic? Now that's special. You don't get detailed comment on the Royal Fleet Auxiliary's seabasing capability from Martin Kettle when he's in one of his SUCK ON MY CULTURE, PROLE moods, or indeed when he's editorialising, do you? Does Brian Sewell take a view on whether the much delayed Maritime Afloat Replenishment Ship project should go down the Dutch/Canadian JSS route, perhaps building on licence from Schelde in the UK, or stick with specialised tanker and dry-replenishment hulls?

It's a pity that this doesn't mean their politics is any more pacific.

review of a movie that doesn't exist yet

I think most of my readers also read Patrick Lang's blog, but I think this guest post is the best thing yet written on the Taliban/SIS/McChrystal/Petraeus fake sheikh affair. Really, there's a great movie to be made here - the multiplicity of motives, the ironic contrast between the absurd story and the deadly serious interests and emotions that drive it forward, the eternal ambiguity of the relationship between the manipulator and the manipulated.

The ISI comes out of it as being dastardly clever, but in a deeply futile way. They succeed in preventing a dangerous outbreak of peace and sanity, but what have they gained? The wars grind on, the butcher's bill ticks up, the fantasy of a Pakistani empire of trucks and pipes across the Hindu Kush is as far away as ever, the Indians continue with their industrialisation across the other border.

The Americans come out of it as being well-meaning but naive. After all, they only get into this story because they want peace. So does the real Taliban leader. They both share a sort of big, stupid nobility.

The British do almost as badly as the ISI; not only do they end up being the dupes of the piece, they do so without the saving grace of having good intentions. They're as naive as the Americans but more underhanded. SIS gets involved purely as a way of sucking up to the Americans and putting one over its real enemies, GCHQ, Her Majesty's Forces, MI5, and the main-line Foreign Office diplomats. The Government is desperately keen on the project for similarly base reasons - to suck up to the Americans, to grab at an opportunity to solve its problem in Afghanistan, and of course to embarrass the Labour Party. Of course, it would have been a brilliant political fix had it come off - but the master manipulator is not Bismarck but William Hague.

The fake sheikh, meanwhile, is a classic example of the Pinocchio/Hauptmann von Kopenick theme - the puppet of bigger forces who becomes a power in his own right. Without his successful performance, of course, none of the many expectations curling around the tale have a hope of happening. His agency is real, and his character expands to fill the role. The fact that the whole project is an exercise in theatre is interesting in itself - a film within the film. The actors in the film are, of course, puppets of the script and the direction, and it is a work of fiction. The enduring purpose of the theatre and the cinema, however, is that works of fiction have real influence on their audiences. Like the fake sheikh.

After all, the grocer of Quetta (not a bad title) is the only character in the drama who successfully pursues his interests. He gets some interesting time off away from his bazaar stall, and even gets rich. You could play this as the ordinary man who succeeds in making fools of the powerful who insist on involving him in their schemes, or perhaps as a microcosm of all the people who are getting rich off the continued war, Mother Courage rather than Kopenick. Alternatively he could be killed off, casting the whole thing as an utterly bleak tragedy. However, arguably the classic in this vein is The Third Man and that sticks with the tragicomic.

Why are these scumbags so scummy?

John "War Nerd" Dolan got a job, as a lecturer at the American University of Iraq. Hilarity ensued. You bet. It's a tale of un-fantastic right-wing academics, a kind of glaring dullness, a total lack of character, and an endless supply of raw cash. It so happens that John needed that more than anything else, so good luck to him. Read the whole thing - what stands out is the vast gap between the neo-con obsession with The Western Canon! Classicism! Principle! Courage! and the petty, provincial, small-mindedness that people like Joshua "Not The Blogger" Marshall practice in their lives. It's not even the incompetence. It's the style that gives them away.

The other interesting thing in the piece is John Agresto's role. Again and again, he turns up wondering why a string of horrible political thugs treated him with disrespect. Lynne Cheney, his old boss, seems to have been a really awful human being close up. Who knew? But somehow, it never crosses his mind to wonder why this keeps happening every time he associates with the Cheneys or Bill Bennett or some other horrific political gargoyle. It's....full of bastards, just this particular astronaut isn't going to get out of the ship.

I also loved the notion of a neo-conservative as someone who got mugged by reality and now never goes into town for fear of running into reality again. A lesser writer would say that he started carrying a gun in order to shoot reality. However, that would imply some kind of grand, tragic struggle against brute fate. You can't have tragedy without dignity, and that's one thing the administration of the American University of Iraq doesn't have.

This reminded me of two things, or rather the other way around. If you want Mitt Romney to speak, you've got to take a bulk order for his booky wook. Hence the book is a bestseller (for whatever that means in today's book trade). Similarly, 'bagger Sharron Angle's campaign raised $14m and paid $12m right back to the political consultants who organised the donation drive.

The other thing was this documentary series on YouTube about Americans and steroids. Two points come to mind - the enduring role of the quack, and a sort of grinding optimism. And this quote: "Everyone wants to be a monster."

A critical point, though - I'm fairly sure the sheaf of documents one of the doctors waves while reading out a list of horrible side effects that turn out to relate to vitamin C is from an open-access "adverse event reporting system", which basically gathers anything anyone anywhere feels inclined to report. They aren't verified in any way. Anti-vaccine people often abuse this.

Fortunately, someone's done the actual journalism and documented that the ties between multilevel marketing, quackery, and extreme-right politics aren't just style, they're organisational and financial. It goes back a while, too.

2006 again, and a brief history of recent wrong

Adam Elkus has a piece out entitled The Hezbollah Myth and Asymmetric Warfare, in which he criticises what he sees as a tendency to over-rate the power of guerrillas in the light of the 2006 war. Having read it, I think the real question here is about expectations and goals. Hezbollah didn't defeat the Israelis and hold a victory parade in Tel Aviv, but then nobody least of all them expected or aimed for that. The outcome of 2006 can only be understood in the light of a realistic assessment of the conflict parties' capabilities, interests, and priorities. A score draw is a much better result for Stoke City against Manchester United than it is for Manchester United against Barcelona.

For Hezbollah, the first and overriding goal was surely survival - as it is for everyone, it's even the title of the IISS Journal - followed closely by survival as a force in Lebanese politics, survival of their capability to maintain their self-declared insecurity zone in northern Israel, and finally, inflicting casualties and costs on the Israelis in order to create a deterrent effect. In that light, the result of 2006 was surely just as good from their point of view as they made out - they came away still in the field, still firing rockets, and with their status in Lebanese politics enhanced.

For Israel, well, perhaps one day they'll work out what their strategic aims were.

Elkus argues that the tactical situation at the point when the UN ceasefire went into effect was favourable for Israel, and that had the war gone on they might have done better. This is possible. However, it's also very common for wars to end like this. The Israelis' campaign in 1967 was designed, once they got the upper hand, to get to the Canal and onto the Golan before the UN blew the whistle - one of Ariel Sharon's frequent blind-eye manoeuvres in 1973 was also intended to complete the encirclement of the Egyptian 3rd Army before the UN ceasefire went into effect. The Indian plan for the 1971 war was explicitly intended to take Dhaka before a ceasefire was imposed. More recently, the Russian operation in Georgia was subject to a similar deadline. International intervention is part of the environment, and only fools wouldn't take it into account as a planning assumption.

An interesting sidelight on this, also from Elkus, came up in a parallel blog debate about "network-centric warfare" - he pointed to this gung-ho but good piece about the action in northern Iraq in which John Simpson was blown up. What struck me about it, however, was more that it was an example of this kind of thing - which should certainly make you think about 2006, especially in the light of this.

Tangentially, Sean Lawson's essay on the history of "network centric warfare" is well worth reading, especially for the way so many US officials in 2001-2006 seem to have been competing to see who could validate all the most extreme stereotypes of themselves the fastest, and more broadly on the way a basically sensible idea can become a sort of gateway drug to really insane strategic fantasies.

Cebrowski talked of a “booming export market for…security” and warned those who would resist, “If you are fighting globalization, if you reject the rules, if you reject connectivity, you are probably going to be of interest to the United States Department of Defense” (Cebrowski, 2003c).

Measured against the sort of capabilities the NCW thinkers knew they had, and the kind of goals they dreamed on the basis of them, what possible results wouldn't look like failure? Compared with the enormous arrogance of this vision - they really did want everyone who thinks the CIA wants them dead, dead - what resistance wouldn't look like success?

cutting down on your mercenary miles

Here's something interesting.

We must also consider the alternative that many of the most prominent and powerful Afghans are in fact motivated by greed and opportunism. [harrowell: ya think?] It is therefore in their interest to maintain the status quo of massive US and international spending that fuels the Afghan "rentier state" economy.

This isn't just recreational cynicism; they argue that the latest announcement of a clampdown on private security companies in Afghanistan is to be taken more seriously than the last six, and that this actually represents an effort to integrate them into the Afghan government's forces or at least its allies. Importantly, and very differently from Iraq, the main players are local rather than foreign - like the 24,000-strong Watan Group. (Check out their Corporate Social Responsibility page.) Rather than just being part of the ISAF baggage train, they're a significant nonstate actor in Afghan politics.

If you were feeling optimistic, you might consider this as being similar to the various political fixes the Soviets arranged in 1988 to keep the roads open for the Afghan government post-withdrawal. If you've been reading this since at least 2007, you'll know that I think the absolute best that could happen in Afghanistan would be to get back to something like the 1989-1992 period, just without the continuing US/Pakistan/Saudi destabilisation and the cut-off of Russian aid that kicked off the civil war (and the destruction of Kabul, the invention of the Taliban, and so on). I agree this is pessimistic, but then, well, I wouldn't start from here.

In Iraq, understanding the business/organised crime environment may have played a bigger role than is publicly acknowledged in getting the US Army out of town. For example, here's a Joel Wing piece on the history of oil-smuggling (you'll note that the Baiji refinery comes up. party like it's 2005!). Interestingly, the initial Awakening Council leader Sheikh Abu Risha was an important oil smuggler, and you can bet those networks were of use.

Leaving aside the obvious Afghan export, the analogous business is probably selling stuff to ISAF. Bagram now has its own cement plant, inside the perimeter, but that's a Turkish construction firm.

we flippin' murdered them

Peter Beaumont goes for a Holt's battlefield tour of southern Lebanon:

Cruising through the serene green wadis that connect south Lebanon to the Litani river to the north, the commander explains what happened at the end of the last war. "We knocked out three of their tanks on the first day, as they tried to enter," he explained at a turn-off by the village of al-Qantara. "But after they entered the wadi, we knew they were going for the river and had to be stopped. So we called out to all the special forces anti-tank teams in the area. And they all swarmed the wadi. Boys would set up and wait for the tanks, fire off their rounds and then pull back. Then they would pull back a kilometre or so down the wadi and wait for them again."

According to Israeli military reports, after the first and last tanks were hit by rocket fire or mines, killing the company commander, the 24 tanks were essentially trapped inside a valley, surrounded on all sides and pinned down by mortars, rockets and mines. Eleven tanks were destroyed and the rest partially damaged and Israel lost at least 12 soldiers.

Go read the rest; there's a fair amount of speculation of the informed sort, and an appearance from Andrew Exum opining that the reinforced UNIFIL has succeeded in moving Hezbollah away from the border, rather as it was meant to. Actually, the reinforced UNIFIL should surely be counted as one of the unexpected successes of the last few years - especially if you remember all the yelling at the time.

However, this may be less important than it appears, especially if the Hezbollah guy's account of their tactics in 2006 is representative - there's no reason why they couldn't keep doing that every kilometre, and indeed that's what the original idea of a screen of small groups of men with guided anti-tank weapons was meant to do in front of the main NATO armies in Germany (remember this post and Stephen Biddle's analysis?)

Further, the whole concept of a buffer force assumes that both sides would rather not fight, but that neither is willing to make the first move - that a classic security dilemma is operating. If one or both parties are determined to initiate more violence, though, this breaks down. And it's worrying to see how a lot of Israeli commentary about 2006 has changed over time - in the first 18 months or so, there was a lot of frankness around. The war had clearly been a failure, and Hezbollah had surprised everyone by defending southern Lebanon effectively. Roughly since Gaza, there's been a denialist phase - a bit like David Lloyd's crack that "we flippin' murdered them" after the England cricket team ran out of time trying to beat Zimbabwe. A lot of stuff was blown up in Beirut, and if it wasn't for those pathetic politicians, we'd have won. You know the pattern.

it is never too late to MEND

This won't be a substantive post, but more a notice to myself to build one. A seriously under-reported story on the global guerrilla beat is that the Nigerian government has succeeded, at least for the moment, in either defeating the Niger Delta rebels or making deals with them.

It's worth rolling back a little; time was when they were roaring about the rivers of Rivers State in RIBs with three or four huge Evinrude outboards, assaulting oil installations and demanding money, following a strategy that was based on the current situation of the oil market, including things like the latest hurricane sweeping towards the Gulf of Mexico, refinery stock drawdown - essentially, they followed the market for oil like IPE traders in London. Their faceless spokesman operated from a Hotmail account and a PAYG GSM phone somewhere in South Africa, usually.

Everyone, especially J-Ro, reckoned they were our insurgent future. The lumbering energy infrastructure, supposedly, could never be defended from persistent but random disruption aimed at its key network nodes. They certainly were a guerrilla navy that was tactically and operationally very effective, and whose leaders were pursuing an intelligent strategy; their technology was obviously of the moment.

But what happened, then? A key element, of course, was the price of oil. However, the relationship between the Brent index and the violence in the Delta wasn't linear; as the price of oil rose, MEND was more able to cause trouble, but the Nigerian government and the oil companies had more money. They could spend it on soldiers, or on bribes. In the other direction, as the price of oil fell, the power of the insurgents to send bursts of panic into the market fell - but the Nigerian state would itself be weaker, and the pool of recruits wider.

Crucially, the demand for oil fell; this is possibly more important than its price. Here's me in August 2008 on this subject. As an oil-bombing insurgent, it's not so much the price that you're interested in as your ability to cause trouble. Much of the industrialised world has passed its peak demand for oil; the US may have done, or it may be the recession. We will only know in hindsight. This means that the oil market is structurally less sensitive.

This is, of course, less to the point if MEND was indeed a new kind of rebellion. I rather doubted this; it always struck me as a fight for a share of export revenues. Oil, as resources go, is remarkably suited to landlordism. Its extraction is capital-intensive, not labour intensive; much of the work is done by expatriate specialists. And, crucially, it helps to run an artificially high exchange rate, which is an excellent way for an elite to loot a country. As a robber elite, most of what you want in the way of goods are imported, and most of what you want in the way of the capital account is an export. You want to get your money out. This also tends to destroy local industries and favour importers; especially importers who need to get a licence from you.

This, and the back story of the rebellion, suggested that the main aim was what they said it was - to extract oil revenues from the Governor's gut. Unlike tension in the oil market, the money you raise from high oil prices can be stored for later use; the government deployed it this summer, both for force and for persuasion.

I hope this post can expand to take in more information; I'd like to know more about how it happened. I do know that some of the rebel leaders' men paraded through Port Harcourt getting drunk and shooting in the air before piling their rifles. But that's about it.

eternal September

An American PR man in Afghanistan speaks some Pashto. Actually, the fact he speaks some Pashto is the news he's currently engaged in pushing on the press. As David Petraeus says, they managed to teach noddy German to hordes of US servicemen going there in peacetime. More to the point, the British army managed to slurp chunks of German into its own culture.

Looking back at this post from June, 2005 - and wasn't the summer of 2005 a fucking joy? - it looks a lot like nobody really wants to do this. Which mirrors the strategy with uncanny precision. Bureaucracy knows; if you want information, measure what you're actually doing.

coming to a security theatre near you

US security agents indulge in street theatre, frequently accidentally involving members of the public:

As a presidential limousine rolls closer, an instructor cues, "How about a little homicide bomb?" Bracaglia throws himself at the limousine and detonates.....Mike "The Horse" Dutch, who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 280 pounds, has been playing villains for five years. He's been hit by so many training bullets that he has "black-and-blue dots all over . . . the size of a dime." When Dutch sunbathes at the beach, people stare, "like I have leprosy."

"I hate getting shot in the rear end," says Bill Embrey, who wears shorts under his pants to soften the impact. "I'm stiff, for goodness sakes. When did we have our last 'force on force?' "

"Tuesday," says Dennis O'Toole, his role-playing partner. They ambushed President Obama's security detail during in-service training, firing simulated AK-47s.

O'Toole rolls up his sleeve, revealing a pocked arm. "Sister Mary Margaret is in these FX [special-effects bullets]. They will help you learn your lesson."

Embrey and O'Toole play "op-4s," opposition forces, and "tangos," terrorists. They specialize in assassinations. Embery's wife, a kindergarten teacher, describes Embrey's job as "playing all day." Some days the men hide out for hours in the woods at a secluded Maryland site, waiting for a motorcade to prey on. Once, after a snowfall, they wore white camouflage and lay so still, O'Toole says, that an agent "stepped on me."

How many times has he assassinated the president? I suspect he must have some very strange dreams. The bulk of the trainers are out-of-work actors, who volunteer because it beats the usual round of restaurant and bar jobs, but they also include a clinical psychologist who specialises in portraying the maniacs of today. Since the Reagan administration, he's changed the style but not the content.

When Spodak first played a character named Jeffrey Barry, he was "a mentally ill person, picking up trash and babbling about killing Reagan." During the 1990s, Jeffrey Barry believed Joan of Arc wanted him to kill Bill Clinton. Today Barry, still mentally ill, wears a Muslim prayer cap, receives messages from the 12th-century sultan Saladin and tells trainees he has incinerated a kitten as "a sacrifice to Allah."

Characters also change with presidencies. "I just had to dump 18 roles from the Bush administration," Spodak says.

For Obama, Spodak created a new character, Gideon Caine, a white supremacist who works as a data-entry clerk at Wachovia...

I really, really want to know what the acts whose run in this very special repertory company ended with the Bush years were; wasn't a Muslim kitten-torcher Cheneyesque enough? You can't fault the cultural observation, though; where else would a berserk racist teabagger work but at a huge, semi-bankrupt, South Carolinan mortgage lender kept alive by transfusions of public funds?

More to the point, in a real sense, nothing has changed - whatever their props and verbal furnishings, Spodak's character remains the same, the archetypal crazy gunman. Stephen Sondheim, come to think of it, dedicated a whole drama to the notion that this is a fundamental American character type, and it looks like these guys agree. However, the style is very different. Both highly formalised - motorcade, escorts, crazies - and formless, it can be staged anywhere in the public space, literally shooting holes in the fourth wall and recruiting random civilians into the action. Brecht would approve. Like this:

Five minutes before his job interview, John Fisher parks at Ace Fire Extinguisher Services in College Park, his window open and his stomach jumpy. He is nibbling on spoonfuls of cottage cheese when shouts erupt from the car next to his.

Fisher believes what he is seeing is real.

"Gun! He has a gun!" a man with a Secret Service earpiece yells, riffling through the glove compartment.

Actually, it's not Fisher who's pulled a gun, but how long before that happens, and someone who was a spectator a few moments ago gets to become the Crazy Assassin? Until then, of course, the main message the lucky participant/spectators will take away is that they should remain terrified, as David Kilcullen said about airport security. (Come to think of it, that's another theatrical exercise where you are both a spectator, and also get to play the role of Suspect.)

And this is no surprise; the impresario behind what you might call the Unmarked Gulfstream Ensemble is Military Professional Resources International, Inc, a company better known for hiring ex-servicemen as instructors for armies the US wishes to support.

it's the new Middle East, or something

What's happening on the Viktorfeed? Something called "Skyway Ltd", using the ICAO code DGD, is doing quite a few flights into Iraq and Afghanistan; so is "Transaviaservice" or FNV. This last is the current owner of Antonov 12 ER-AXE/7345201, which we've had here before, both with Aerocom and with a shortlived project involving routes from South-East Asia to Australia that somehow required a cargo door that could be opened in flight. They also have ex-Air Van aircraft, and one that was used by Astral in Kenya; and several of their An-72s are on lease to SkyLink.

Since the An-12s were banned from the UAE, they've apparently moved to Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq, indeed as far north as you can go before it ceases to be Iraq. Here's a of one of their An-72s in Tarin Khowt, Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Ethan Zuckerman muses on the possibilities of jarking for a good cause; he wants to release ammunition that deliberately jams the firer's weapon into the illegal supply chain. There's much more arms trade goodness, including this cartoon and his realisation that....

As I read the story, I realized I knew most of the terminology used, not from a close study of the issue, but from Frederick Forsyth’s classic novel, “The Dogs of War“.

twitbook: book of twits

Wired reviews a book on the media of the Middle East, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Well, even pirates have press spokesmen these days. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it strikes me that this piece by Tom Griffin about trolls sponsored by various Middle Eastern actors is its critical, rebellious twin.

The GLORIA Center at IDC gathered about thirty Israeli bloggers and members of Israel’s foreign and defense ministries for an informal gathering to evaluate the blogging effort during the Gaza war, new techniques and future challenges. Topics discussed included lessons of the Gaza battle for blogalogical warfare, live-blogging, new technologies and interactions with government. Bloggers delivered short presentations on their personal experiences and discussed future plans for cooperation....

Who wouldn't want to be a fly on the wall? It practically glows with a radioactive mixture of trollishness, self-righteousness, and raging, thinktank/intern ambition. A weaponised version of MessageSpace. You'll laugh; you'll cry; you'll read up on freeze-distilling your own hydrogen peroxide to escape all this hideousness!

As always, if you want a practical policy recommendation, make tools. A little investment in annoying javascript thingies pays off hugely by improving the productivity of your trolls; and it doesn't have to be technically very interesting.

In Italy, meanwhile, they've got a truly impressive legislation tracker going.

It allows one to follow an act in its path across the two perfectly symmetrical chambers (La Camera and Il Senato), from its presentation as a proposal, to its final approval.

It tracks all the votations, highlighting rebel voters. It tracks who presented an act, and wether as a first-signer or a co-signer. It also tracks speeches of officials on given acts.

Access to textual documents related to an act is easy and documents can be emended by users online, using an innovative shared comments system (eMend), that allows discussions on a particular act to take place.

Users can describe the acts, using their own words, in a wiki subsystem, acts are ratable and commentable, too.

All acts are tagged with consistent arguments by an editorial board, and that allows to know what’s going on and who’s doing what in relation to a subject.

An event-handling subsystem allows the generation of news. Whenever an act is presented, it moves towards approval or refusal, a votation takes place, someone gives a speech or anything worth noticing happens, news are generated. A dedicated web page and a customized daily e-mail, containing just the news related to those acts, politicians or arguments monitored by the user, allows him/her to follow almost in real time what’s going on.

Pretty cool; better than anything we've got. And, I think, that's much more a piece of real citizen technology than any of the TwitBook propaganda apps, which are all about creating a sense of participation; possibly, they actually exist in order to provide that sense as a substitute for real participation, in order to prevent it.

If that's not hardcore enough for you, the Make blog has a HOWTO on listening to satellites.

there'd better be such a thing as "cyberwar"

Because we've set up the bureaucracy for it. Laugh! as the people responsible for the new US Cyber Command try to work out what it's for. As far as I can see, it duplicates all or part of NSA, DISA, CIA, DHS, NIST, and the services' signals commands and electronics materiel agencies. It is true that IT is a little like the famous crack about economics - a science so wont to usurp all others - but this is ridiculous. Apparently we're getting one too. Oh joy. Fortunately it's described as a "coordinator", a traditional British term for someone with no power or budget, so it can't do too much damage.

giant symbol crashes and overturns, killing billions of dollars

You thought the Hummer being put on the block was symbolism? This is symbolism: the bloated, militaristic, fuel-guzzling cultural trope itself is being sold to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery. Yes; an unheralded outfit from the deep west, not even Shenzhen or Shanghai. Seeing as its core business is making construction gear, tankers, and off-road vehicles, it may even return to being something roughly designed for a purpose.

It's probably worth mentioning that the Humvee, in its post-2004 up-armoured version, and its later, baroque replacements, get singled out in David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla. Specifically:

As Steve pointed out, this is truly an urban submarine - we drive around in an armoured box with three-inch thick windows, peering out through our portholes at the little Iraqi fish swimming by. They can't see us, and we don't seem human to them. We are aliens, imperial stormtroopers with our Darth Vader sunglasses and grotesque and cowardly body armour. The insurgents have done to us what we said they would do to them - isolated us from the population...

An artefact is an ideology made manifest; the caricature America we've known since the 1980s could hardly be better illustrated, whether outwards in its violent and paradoxically vulnerable military sense or inwards in its lumbering, debt-bloated, hyper-capitalist civilianised sense. Both of which relied upon the engine technology of the 1950s.

twittering the home front

This is interesting; the US Army in Afghanistan has an official Twitter account. The interesting thing is the explanation:

If prevailing wisdom about “population-centric” counterinsurgency holds, why is the U.S. military using Twitter to post body counts? Apparently, it’s about maintaining the support of the population back at home.

In a must-read article, Michael Phillips of The Wall Street Journal has a key quote from Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Green, spokeswoman for the 101st Airborne Division: “It’s a concern that at home, the common perception is this war is being lost.”

So this new-media push, it seems, is directed at winning domestic support — not explaining U.S. motivations or broadcasting successes to the Afghan population.

The curious thing here is the assumption that there is a significant political constituency in the US that wants to hear that foreigners are being killed. This is fair enough, they're called "wingnuts". And they will reliably go into a frenzy of wanking if you feed them vicarious violence, just as pouring minced fish into the shark tank creates a suitably spectacular response.

Right; we've got an officially sanctioned pipeline set up to deliver ground troll-chum direct to the wanker feedlot. It even implements irregular positive reinforcement in order to keep them hanging on. But why? After all, as pointed out here, in this kind of war the last metric you want to follow is the body count - you need a measure of the absence of war, if such a thing was possible. But that's never going to play well at Redstate or wherever.

So it's the opposite of the original Iraq spin strategy - deny that anyone got very much hurt while boasting of using ATACMS short-range ballistic missiles (does anyone remember that one now?). Instead, you're trying to maintain political cover for your low-intensity campaign by sounding more brutal than you actually want to be. Furchtbarkeit for internal consumption.

The only question this leaves, of course, is why anyone would want the support of the fever swamp these days. Unless keeping them in a constant state of crazed hypermobilisation is the strategy...whether to wear them out or for the political effect of a continuous 24/7 rightwing crazefest.

Review: Alistair Crooke, "Resistance: the essence of the Islamist revolution"

Resistance - The Essence of the Islamist Revolution is Alistair Crooke's survey of modern Islamist thought. It would be clearer to say it is a couple of books occupying the same space; one would be a history of Islamist thought since the origins of the Iranian Revolution, with a polemic for greater understanding of such thought, and another would be a slightly eccentric, neo-Platonist rant with overtones of Ian Buruma's notion of Occidentalism.

Well, that sounds fun, doesn't it? Then you have to add in Crooke's career; the book glosses him as an advisor to the European Commission on the Middle East, but makes absolutely no mention of his term as SIS station chief in Tel Aviv, in which role he negotiated a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which lasted until an unfortunate air raid resulted in the deaths of a round dozen civilians and not the Hamas man the Israelis were after. (The story is here.)

The war resumed, and Crooke was recalled; officially this was for "security reasons", but if anything imperilled his security it was probably that after the event, the Israeli tabloids discovered his job title, identity, and photograph with un-mysterious suddenness. He eventually fetched up in Beirut, running a thinktank called the Conflicts Forum, devoted to contact between Western powers and Islamists. (Time was, it would have been a nightclub, but we live in fallen times.)

So, what upshot? Crooke makes a strong case for modern Islamism as a classical reaction to colonialism and modernisation, or rather an interwar vision of modernity. He relies on an impressive battery of reading ranging into cultural Marxism at one end and into hardcore conservatism at the other. More controversially, he tries to place Islamism since the 1950s in a context of rebellion against free-market economics drawn from Naomi Klein; but the Ba'athist and similar regimes hardly qualify as Friedmanites, with their nationalised oil companies, state military industries, and extensive Soviet influence in administration, secret policing, and military doctrine and structure.

He draws on a battery of confidential interviews, which are some of the most interesting things in the book, to illuminate current ideas and practice, specifically among Hezbollah thinkers. Notably, they argue, the Caliphate should now be seen as a world-wide network of loosely interconnected "communities of resistance", rather than a state or any other kind of hierarchical organisation. The aim of these is to uphold the practice of an ideal, self-organising community of believers against a total onslaught by the forces of liberalism, which wishes us all to be atomised individuals.

In practice, this demands a sort of liberation theology/community-organising/vaguely anarchist drive to create base groups everywhere, drawn together by the practice of mutual aid and the study of critical texts, and if necessary to form the underground shadow-administration common to all good guerrilla armies.

Crooke is interesting on the military implications of this, but I think what he describes is less original than he suggests. Flat, highly networked command structures, with a high degree of autonomy down to the squad and the individual, are not characteristic of Islamic or Islamist warfare; what he is describing here sounds a lot like Auftragstaktik. Also, he describes the requirements of a Hezbollah leader as integrity, authenticity, reliability, personal charisma, and ability to mobilise others; would anyone at all disagree?

There is an interesting side-trip into Islamist economic ideas. He criticises Westeners who assume that the main aim of these is to find technical workarounds to make the normal course of business sharia-compliant; apparently the real thing is considerably better. However, a lot of it (as described here) consists of accepting a market economy but not letting money be the be-all and end-all of everything, etc, etc; in practice, this seems to mean a welfare state. No surprise, then, that one of the thinkers he quotes had to write an entire book to rebut the charge that his ideas were indistinguishable from European social democracy.

According to Crooke, the main distinction is in the field of monetary economics; but, in so far as his writing is a true misrepresentation of it, it seems to be distinct in a way which isn't particularly original. Apparently, Islamist economists are very exercised about M3 broad money growth, on the grounds that this represents the growth of credit in a fractional-reserve banking system and that this is the root of the evils of capitalism. Instead, they are keen on...the gold standard, that most free-trade imperialist of economic institutions!

At this point you might want to halt briefly; Islamist Auftragstaktik applied to community organising? The Caliphate in terms suited to Clay Shirky? Dear God, Islamist monetarist gold bugs? Phew! And you could, perhaps, take comfort from the thought that however strange Iranian political thought may be, their economic thought is no stranger than Fraser Nelson's or Jude Wanniski's. Placing an upper bound on the strangeness, after all, is probably an important step towards international understanding.

Then we get into the second book. Crooke is always quoting Plato, specifically the apposition between the port and the city; he attacks Karl Popper, and uses a great deal of Horkheimer and John Gray. It is fair to say he accepts entirely the complex of critiques that argue that life is meaningless without a higher purpose usually decided by higher people, that the freedom offered by liberalism is no such thing, that trade (or commerce, or industry) is "mere"; it is harder to say whether he accepts this for the sake of argument, as much of the Islamist thinking he is discussing bases itself on these ideas.

And there is a valid argument that a lot of it claims to represent the up-side of such critiques - the need for a self-empowered, cohesive community, the problems of the free market - but might just as well be the downside. The economy should be directed, at a national level, towards certain "great concepts"; this could be post-war French indicative planning, and might well be, having been written in the 1950s - or it could be a Straussian exercise in National Greatness Conservatism. We should work and care for society; or is it, as one of Crooke's interviewees says, that "life is not worth living without something worth dying for"?

None of this stuff about "false reconciliation" and "self-pacifying", materialism, etc, etc, answers E. P. Thompson's classic attack on "theories that assume that ordinary people are bloody silly", either. Strangely enough, towards the end of the book, we have a sudden swerve back towards liberalism; freedom is not so bad after all, it turns out, compared with a neoconservatism informed by Leo Strauss.

Curiously, I left the book with a feeling that it had set out to make right-wing Americans feel closer to political Shi'ism.

I am troll, hear me roar!

Is tragic diva SNLI cracking up, ask friends? "Creepy obsession" with blogger raises old rumours about starlet; Max Clifford is holding on line one.

"He's very good with colours", says Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security. "Everyone around here relies on him for style tips before their TV appearances. I'd never have thought of giving my shemagh a light spritz of Crazed Wingnut before going on Rachel Maddow, but it made my performance..."

(In the future, trolls will be considered a strategic resource like oil.)

Afghanistan the Doonesbury way

There is more truth about Afghanistan, counter-insurgency, insurgents and empires in this cartoon than in the vast pile of thinktank and military-academic reports on my local hard disk.

(Today's is pretty good, too.)

Pyongyang: no carrier

HYPOTHESIS: Anyone who uses the word "cyberwar" where they could use the phrase "network security" is one or more of the following - a) incompetent to discuss the issue, b) trying to sell something to members of a), c) lying.

EVIDENCE: This ridiculous drivel at the sad husk of what DefenseTech used to be before Wired hired all the talented people and just left the right-wing mouthbreathers. North Korea is the third strongest threat to U.S. and allied information security? Seriously? North Korea doesn't even have redundant submarine cable connectivity. (Now, South Korea would be a truly formidable enemy, with all those people from Samsung, KTF, SKTel, LG etc...)

And where are the real cyber-attackers? "Cyberwar" is still a PowerPoint presentation, but attacks on IT systems are as common as spilt beer, and they come from non-state actors. But there is no sign of, say, the RBN, the Storm botnet, or indeed anyone else. In fact, the best demonstration of my point would be this quote:

It is important to remember: this is Cyber Warfare 1.0. The next iterative release is on the whiteboards of think-tanks right now.

Indeed. Not in national signals-intelligence agencies, or on the IRC channels of disgruntled hackers, but other think-tanks. The real enemy is your rival in the budget wars.

but what do the poor do with their lives?

The times change; children don't respect their parents, and everyone's writing a book. However, the forces of interest don't change, and one place you find them pure is the defence procurement economy. Consider this story. The first thing you'll note is that it's kinda plausible, if you're the kind of person who reads this blog. Giving a contract for helicopters to Italy in return for their cooperation in beating up the Iraq story is the sort of thing George Bush would have done.

The second thing you'll note, I hope, is that it doesn't offer any actual link between the two facts. They are just placed close by. On the same basis we ought to be wondering why France invaded Iraq - they were offered a contract for jet tankers. But the new target audience are waiting for horrors about the Bush years, and there are plenty; this is how you convince without lying.

Drill into the text. There are fossils in there which tell us about the history of this stuff; the key to the past lies in the present, as Lyall said. We have the idea that the EH-101 is too heavy to take off - this is 2002-ish Europhobia. Note the implication of European unmanliness, lack of Hard, to say nothing of the raging projection. EH-101s, Merlins, fly daily with maximum loads in hot'n'high Afghanistan and off the decks of frigates in the winter North Atlantic; we even started a new Naval air squadron to go to Afghanistan. Then we have the appeal to uniforms; the pilots! None are quoted, but the Warrior Ethos is invoked. Beyond that, there are vague implications that Finmeccanica (or Westlands as some call it) does business with teh China. Unclean!

Beyond that, all we need to know is encapsulated by the demand that Obama give the job to "the proper supplier, Sikorsky". Ah, the proper supplier. Clearly, what we are dealing with here is vendor bullshit in a high form - carefully tailored to the concerns of the new government. When We are the masters now, you have to expect that they'll come up with a new set of lies.

It's also interesting that Italy is the happy hunting ground of War on Terror drivel, where anything is possible; first of all, the complaisant secret service that facilitated Ledeen's meetings, then the handy source of interesting documents, later still a provider of reliable carabinieri - they held the Nasiriyah bridges on the first night of the first Shia Rising, unlike all the other flexible friends - and a source of canny disinfo against the same people who are now being offered canny disinfo by the same people who handed out the last lot.

After all, why would SISMI care about a medium-sized light industrial plant in Yeovil? Nobody speaks for them.