Thug Rule

Originally posted on April 1, 2003 to my "Liberty Politics" list at Yahoo Groups.

28IVOR1841
Originally uploaded by onohoku.

As we're gripped by a telegenic "clash of civilizations" in the cradle of civilization itself, it's easy to miss one of the biggest political trends in the world today.
A vast percentage of the globe is ruled by thugs -- or, even more worrisome, is a battleground between competing gangs of thugs, without a clear ruler.
A major war has caused us to ignore a major world event -- the leader of a country assassinated by crooks. Why was Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic killed? The Washington Post doesn't beat around the bush: "Djindjic had made enemies by declaring war on organized crime."

In the world of thugocracy, Serbia is small potatoes. It's easy to make the case that Russia is run by thugs -- I cannot think of a single person I know who's done business there who says anything else. In our "Washington consensus" worldview, Russia is now a stable, responsible, market democracy -- which just happens to be run by a former senior KGB official; the secret police is apparently the only organization that can stay one step ahead of Russia's mobsters.
Most of the former Soviet sphere breaks down into one of three models; lawless chaos, oligarchic warlords, or centralized thugocracies. This is quite simply rule by power, and it jumps past several hundred years of political thought right back to Hobbes and nature red in tooth and claw.
It's not just the former Communists that are having problems; most of Africa is in the same state. Sometimes it's state-sponsored thugs, as in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, but even more depressing is the wholly grass-roots thug phenomenon visible in such war-torn places as the Ivory Coast.

The NYT writes, in an incredibly depressing article, 'The Child Soldiers of Ivory Coast Are Hired Guns,'

"Dancing between the tables, another boy, his dirty T-shirt stenciled with the face of the lewd American rapper Sisqo, dangles a Kalashnikov from one hand, a loaded clip from the other. A third child soldier sits clutching a hand grenade the way a teenager in a saner place might hold a cellphone. ... Here in Ivory Coast's wild west, in the most volatile theater of this country's conflict, the detritus of globalization meets the logic of war, West African style. A far cry from the war occupying international attention, this is how the world's other half fights today."

The next time you hear someone bemoaning the violence of teenage boy's music or video games, point out to them what teenage boys do when left to their own devices in a continent littered with weapons.

Oh yes, the weapons... those true weapons of mass democratized destruction, cheap guns and explosives. The world is simply full of the stuff, the detritus of a century of mass production, mass ideology, and mass conflict. Despite the quixotic attempts of American gun aficianados to buy up the world's entire stock of ex-military arms, a great many of them get sold at incredibly low prices to whoever wants them.

A recipe for thugocracy.

Somalia. Afghanistan. Ethiopia. Eritrea. The Hutus and the Tutsis (who skipped the guns and went straight to machetes). A large portion of Africa is ruled by thugs as well.
How do you combat this trend? Well, as the U.S. government demonstrated with Waco and David Koresh, even the sophisticated resources of a highly advanced nation may not be enough to deal with well-armed locals determined to have their own way. Koresh, though no angel, wasn't a thug; his equally well-armed counterparts in other nations of the globe have larceny in their hearts, and very little to lose. Their hired (often child) soldiers have even less constraint.
Most of these people are not fighting for anything more than plunder, loot, pillage, or simply pay. They have no ideals; no goals; no positive vision of how society should be organized or structured. They are the antithesis of civilization. If we're to have a war of civilization, perhaps we might think about fighting this one, instead of setting the more developed and cultured and law-abiding bits of the world against each other.

There are many other movements in other part of the world which do combine a goal or a mission with thug tactics. These rarely bring much better results; ideals are apparently a poor buffer to automatic weapons. I understand what the Palestinians are fighting for, but their methods are those of the gutter. The rebels of Columbia, and Bolivia, and Aceh in Indonesia, want their fair share of the resources of their own country. The newly exploited oil fields of central Africa are driving the same dynamic. People who have been left off the gravy train, or who feel a grievance, taking up weapons ready at hand to get what they want. The Irish Republican Army. Timothy McVeigh.

These are all of a sort. They have ideas - usually negative ideas of what they *don't* want -- and yet they do not have either the capacity, or the will, to carry out their objectives by any means other than violence. Are they right? Have their intransigent foes left them no other recourse? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's never simple. But the result, in every case, is an absence of law and order; death, bloodshed, and misery.

Democratized destruction in the form of guns and bombs is here to stay, and thug rule today covers as much as a quarter of the globe. The countries where this depressing order is in place can participate in the world system only in the most base and resource-extractive ways -- as even the mostly civilized Soviet Union is demonstrating, as it sinks to a position of agricultural subsistence and mining for profit. It is very much in our interest, and the interest of evey civilized country, to bring these areas, and their people, into something resembling the rule of law. Not just for their sake, but for ours.

What are we going to do about this?

It's not a problem that can be solved with cruise missiles and the "giant hammer" mentality.
It's not a problem that can be solved with the market and "shock therapy."
It's not going away, unless we fix it.

Do we have better things to do? Apparently.

Democratization of Realpolitick - AAA comes up to the big leagues

Originally written on August 11th, 2003 for my "Liberty Politics" list on Yahoo Groups. Reposted here as an extension of my comments to a recent post over at Yelnick's Politick

I've gone on [elsewhere] at some considerable length about the
'democratization of destruction' that global technological and social trends
have brought about.

What has been less discussed in this forum, but is equally important, is the
levelling of the playing field between the 'first tier' of countries and the
second-third tier. It's as if, in American baseball terms, the AAA teams
began to play in the major leagues. Or for all you Brits, if the Premier
League and the first division were suddenly integrated.
Here is a list of the top 22 countries by population, 2003:

1 China 1,286,975,468
2 India 1,049,700,118
3 United States 290,342,554
4 Indonesia 234,893,453
5 Brazil 182,032,604
6 Pakistan 150,694,740
7 Russia 144,526,278
8 Bangladesh 138,448,210
9 Nigeria 133,881,703
10 Japan 127,214,499
11 Mexico 103,718,062
12 Philippines 84,619,974
13 Germany 82,398,326
14 Vietnam 81,624,716
15 Egypt 74,718,797
16 Iran 68,278,826
17 Turkey 68,109,469
18 Ethiopia 66,557,553
19 Thailand 64,265,276
20 France 60,180,529
21 United Kingdom 60,094,648
22 Italy 57,998,353

handy USG link for forward and backward population projections:

Here are the ranks for 2020:
1 China 1,424,064,346
2 India 1,296,848,219
3 United States 336,031,546
4 Indonesia 287,890,561
5 Brazil 211,507,717
6 Pakistan 199,744,808
7 Bangladesh 189,861,451
8 Nigeria 189,118,674
9 Russia 138,977,962
10 Mexico 124,653,623
11 Japan 123,254,059
12 Philippines 111,343,388
13 Vietnam 99,894,445
14 Egypt 97,294,896
15 Congo (Kinshasa) 92,008,771
16 Ethiopia 85,965,178
17 Iran 82,151,319
18 Germany 81,422,373
19 Turkey 79,678,914
20 Thailand 71,893,534
21 United Kingdom 63,068,016
22 France 62,817,497

What we see here is that Europe and Japan are falling off the map; the
United States is hanging in there as a major player; a whole new 'second
tier' of regional powers are growing, and will likely challenge the current
status quo in their attempts to assert a more balanced international role;
and that China and India are bigger than nearly everyone else put together.
The other obvious point here is that many of the emerging regional powers
are Islamic, Asian, and have huge oil reserves.

Islamic, 2020 population list:

4 Indonesia 287,890,561
6 Pakistan 199,744,808
7 Bangladesh 189,861,451
8 Nigeria (partial) 189,118,674
14 Egypt 97,294,896
16 Ethiopia (partial) 85,965,178
17 Iran 82,151,319
19 Turkey 79,678,914

That's 1.2 billion Muslims in just 8 countries.

Asian, 2020 list:

1 China 1,424,064,346
2 India 1,296,848,219
4 Indonesia 287,890,561
6 Pakistan 199,744,808
7 Bangladesh 189,861,451
11 Japan 123,254,059
12 Philippines 111,343,388
13 Vietnam 99,894,445
20 Thailand 71,893,534

That's 3.7 billion Asians.

Major oil producers, 2020 list:

4 Indonesia 234,893,453
5 Brazil 182,032,604
6 Pakistan 150,694,740
7 Russia 144,526,278
9 Nigeria 133,881,703
11 Mexico 103,718,062
16 Iran 68,278,826
21 United Kingdom 60,094,648

That's a billion people attached to a majority of the world's oil. Note
that none of those billion people are Americans, and only a handful of them
are white Europeans.

None of those three lists (Islam, oil, Asia) are dominated by the sorts of
"first tier" countries we Americans are used to thinking about. Places like
Russia, Japan, Germany, and Britain -- the major players of the past 150
years, the guys who had railroads and tanks and top hats and colonies. They
are dominated by former colonies, regional powers with big and growing
populations, strong cultures which are divergent from our own (Asian or
Islamic), and often, by ownership of significant resources which we *need*
to continue our current way of life. This is a changing landscape, which
will have dramatic impact on how we conduct our foreign relations.
Our little war in Iraq (and the absence of war in North Korea) have
dramatically demonstrated three key points to the world:

1) America can overthrow any government/military in the world, with little
effort or cost, in very short order, simply by invading with our amazing
technology.

2) America cannot afford, either fiscally or emotionally, to commit to the
level and volume of interaction over long periods of time which is required
to truly change the social/political situation within any country.

3) If you have nukes, and preferably missiles as well, America will not
overthrow your government, out of fear of your reprisals and response on its
own territory, allies, and interests.

That is a high-level stand-off, just like the democratized power to destroy
is a lower-level standoff. We can take out any government, but we can't fix
any country -- we can destroy but not make. Any government can be
overthrown by us, but nearly any society can resist our attempts to change
it, simply by inertia and guerilla tactics. This means that while there may
be fuss and bother around the edges, the major trend over the next few
decades will be the solidification and formalization of a system of regional
powers, which will almost entirely be driven by the triple weighting factor
of strong culture, population size, and resources. You can predict how the
world will look in 2020 by seeing who are the large, wealthy,
civilized/cultured countries in any given region.

This leads to new (for us) and strange (for us) situations like Liberia,
where we are currently heavily depending on Nigeria (Nigeria?!) to sort out
local democracy and stability issues. Nigera is a mess, but it's a huge
regional power, which has huge energy resources, and also coincidentally has
major internal issues with Islamic fundamentalism which have brought it into
the "global war on terror" as both an object and an actor. Regardless of
the morality of the situation, realpolitik means that we need Nigeria on our
side; in the same way we need Indonesia, Pakistan, and Russia on our side,
but can take or leave Britain, Germany and France.

Slate has an interesting article on Nigeria and its peacekeeping entry into Liberia:

What's most important to us all is that America both manage its own position
within the emerging world order, and manage a relatively smooth and peaceful
transition of that emerging world order. That's the big problem of the day,
and of the decade.

Here is my top list of global players, 2020 (in approximate order)

1) America
2) India
3) China
4) Nigeria
5) Indonesia
6) Russia
7) Iran
8) Brazil
9) Mexico

Wild cards here include coalitions (if the EU sorts itself out as a single
entity, it can be a major player) and regional competition effects -- e.g.
what influence will China and India have upon each other, and how will the
combination of China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines sort itself out as
they collide over resources, economic production, etc.? Will Japan
reinvigorate itself, or fade away?

It's going to be an interesting world. May we be blessed with good luck and
great leaders.

Duncan made me do it

OK, 18 months after I created my first blog, focused on technology, Duncan has again nudged me to create a public forum for my thoughts. This one will be entirely focused on politics and international relations, increasingly my first love.

GIGO, game theory, and Nash dominant strategies

Firstly, a little historical note: Despite the PR boost that a box-office hit movie can create, John Nash did not create game theory; in fact he's hardly even a leading light of the field, despite the Nobel Prize for his equlibrium observation. In fact, rumors within the [small and close-knit] scholarly field are that the Sylvia Nasar biography and subsequent Russell Crowe-starring biopic were part of a deliberate PR strategy by Nash's friends to rehab his then rather battered image to coincide with a back-room push for the prize. In fact, the canonical text of game theory is John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's classic 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, which like most truly revolutionary texts, was a complete bust when it was first published, but in fact laid out not just the seeds, but an entire prescription for a new field. After von Neumann and Morgenstern, the second key text of game theory has to be Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, one of "the three great negative results of the 20th century" according to my friend Raja Sengupta. (Heisenberg's uncertainty being the second; can you guess the 3rd?)

Secondly, a direct response to the guest game theorizing of Ahpah on Yelnick (is that you lurking behind that screen name, PM?)

1) The vast statistical advantage of Bush in the coin-flip scenarios (~ 2/3 - 1/3 vs. Kerry) is entirely dictated by Bush's 19 electoral vote lead in "solid" states, 222 - 203. Thus Bush only needs an additional 48 electoral votes to reach the magic 270, whereas Kerry needs 67.

So what, you say?

Well, let us turn to a historical example for elucidation. As discussed at great length in the excellent book Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, which happens to have been written by my ex-wife and copy-edited by me, game theory was invented by von Neumann and Morgenstern and almost immediately applied by them and a host of other RAND-affiliated researchers to the problem of nuclear strategy. The most notable policy success of this group, any of whom could have aced the GLAT (or, more likely, written it - von Neumann invented computer science as we know it) , was to convince first the proto-Kennedy administration, and later much of the governing establishment of the United States, of the existence of a "missile gap" between the well-armed Soviet Union and the weakly-thewed United States.

The only problem with this policy 'success' was that while the math was impeccable, the data was sadly lacking. All intelligence estimates regarding Soviet capabilities were wildly overstated, and in fact all that the build-to-catch-up missile strategy of the United States accomplished was a serious escalation of the Cold War. The recently departed Paul Nitze, author of the seminal NSC 68 and a founding member of this game-theoretic cadre, perhaps realized the folly of the strategy late in his life, when he significantly departed from form with his famous "walk in the woods" at an arms control summit under Ronald Reagan, where he attempted to set aside tried-and-dead-end strategies and cut a sensible deal.

But I digress.

The real point here is that ahpeh's analyis is based entirely on Rasmussen polling data, which spots Bush a formidable 19 vote electoral lead before the calculation even begins. This year, we have empirical evidence that reputable polls are returning both externally (to each other) and internally (to themselves over short time periods) inconsistent data. We further have logical evidence that the polls are systematically mis- or under-counting huge groups of voters, including cell-phone-only, caller-ID screening, not-answering, living-at-home, etc. Finally, there is systematic bias in any "likely voter" poll calculation, given today's (or rather, Tuesday's) highly "unlikely" voter climate.

Garbage In = Garbage Out, and the precision of the calculation mechanism only improves the seductive fineness of the trash. Based on my HUMINT from the field, a long-forgotten and implicitly discredited tactic in governmental (and, to our detriment, CIA) circles, I will boldly state that someone is going to win big on Tuesday, and that someone is almost certainly John Kerry.

- Ethan