Syria and its ramifications

Wall Street Journal

Syria is becoming uninhabitable.

Russia has understood the lessons of the last decade and a half; that propping up a brutal dictator creates greater local stability than taking the lid off the latent sectarian hatreds and rivalries. The risk, however,  is that it becomes the target of terrorism.

The US on the other hand appears not to have learned that taking off that lid while still meddling in the region not only unleashes violent extremism, previously tamped down by totalitarian regimes, but that by not disengaging, it remains a convenient scapegoat for all sides and the threat of terrorism therefore remains.

With the Kurds making the most effective progress against ISIL in Iraq, it looks increasingly likely that both Iraq and Syria may soon cease to exist as countries, at least in their current form. They almost certainly will have to grant almost complete autonomy to the Kurds, and a sectarian partition or the remaining parts of both may be inevitable.      

Millennials staying with their parents

According to research referred to by the PBS Newshour yesterday, around 45% of women and 24% of young men still live with their parents a high increase from 20 years ago. There is considerable speculation as to why this shift has occurred. In addition to increasingly burdensome student loan debt and wage stagnation, which are almost certainly causes, increasing uncertainty must also play role. Twenty to thirty years ago, when expectations were based on the relative stability experienced by one's parents, a young person could expect to secure gainful and stable employment which would enable them to plan ahead for the reduction in the debt burden. However, with increased uncertainty in the labour market, and the widespread belief that stable employment is a thing of the past, it makes no sense to take on large commitments like marriage, children or a mortgage. The model used by Lippmann and Rumelt in 1982 for firm entry applies equally to entry into a life of independence from ones parents. 

Fantasy games of chance

Ostensibly, picking a fantasy football team and being paid based on its performance seems credible as a game of skill. It is clearly different from games like roulette which are obviously games of chance or even poker which, while  undeniably requiring considerable skill, does nevertheless depend on the drawer of the cards; that is by definition random draw (or at least should be). 

However, a better analogy might be horse racing. Money is won based on the performance of athletes, in this case horses and their jockeys on the day whose track records, like athlete in other sports like football or baseball, are well known. And betting on the ponies is almost universally regarded as gambling.

If there is one thing that is clearly a gamble it's pushing the envelope and hoping that the courts will decide in your favor.

Paris - a watershed moment?

Is tonight’s horrific, appalling, reprehensible act of terrorism in Paris a watershed moment?

Wall Street Journal

We have dichotomized the threat of terrorism from Islamic extremists into two categories; those (older-style) well planned, centrally coordinated attacks like 911 and those carried out by the 'lone wolf'. Doing so has has created a false sense of security; the conventional wisdom is that the large attack will be detected and prevented because their  'footprint' is large and detectable by  current surveillance, and the lone wolf, though harder to catch, won't do that much damage (little enough that we accept that there's little we can do but live with the threat).

Tonight's attack, coming somewhere between these two suggests that we can't be that complacent; a pack of self-organising, locally coordinated lone-wolves can do enormous damage. 

It's hard to predict what might happen at these points of discontinuity; responses are seldom linear. The long term, however, is perhasp easier to predict that the short term. Europe is in turmoil from the migration crisis. This will only add to calls for tighter border control, and fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. Borders will close; countries will become more xenophobic and nationalist; immigration will be curtailed and immigrants subject to increasingly close and unequal scrutiny. Surveillance will increase; Edward Snowden will come top be regarded not as a defender of civil liberties but as a naive fool; "Big Brother" will be watching us all and we will simply have to get used to it. In hindsight, the last 50 years of relative calm and increasing openness will come to be seen as a temporary aberration.

ISIL vs Al Quaeda

One key difference between ISIL and Al-Qaeda noted by Michael Haydn, ex-Director of the CIA on GPS today, is that Al-Qaeda is a top-down, hierarchical organization that  tightly controls its operations. ISIL, by contrast, is bottom-up and somewhat populists, relying on inspiration to motivate, rather than fiat and loyalty to compel, its members to act. ISIL is a franchise, a loose affiliation of allied interest groups.

That makes it harder eradicate because taking out its senior leadership has little effect. But it also gives rise to a different targeting strategy; without a strong command and control structure, decision making and motivation needs to be more proximate. "Think Global, Act Local" (with a nod to Yves Doz). Strategy follows structure.

"Distant" enemies like the US are less likely to be targeted when they are not directly involved, while directly involved participants are more likely to generate local ire and in so doing become targets.

Exceptionalism and escalation

I have written elsewhere about the choice between doing something and doing nothing as competing strategies; that sometimes doing nothing is better than any of the proposed courses of action.

Well, the question is rearing its head again with Obama's recent decision to put 50 SOF personnel into Syria. Many commentators note that this is too small really to matter, just as the timid aerial campaign has been relatively ineffective.  
Both seem to reflect the Obama's dilemma; his instinct tells him to do nothing while the country and probably most of his military advisor tell him to intervene with military force.  The result falls between two stools. it is neither the clear statement of disengagement, key to getting the target off our backs, not will it make much of a difference on the ground.

As in Vietnam 50 pairs of boots on the ground could easily escalate to 500, or 5,000 (in Vietnam it was 500,000). Why is every change in direction a doubling down?

My guess is that the "Doctrine of American Exceptionalism", combined with the youthful self confidence of a fairly young nation leads to the hubris that there is nothing that America can't fix. Combine that with a certain impatience and a seemingly broad cultural admiration for direct action (violence) over diplomacy, and every time a foreign adventure needs a change of course, the hawks will accuse the diplomats of appeasement, and more dogs of war are unleashed.

Almost a 3-party system

The Freedom Caucus, in exchange for  its acquiescence of the recent bill to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, apparently now has a section of the Capital building named in its honour. Which got me thinking that a small group that agrees on so little with the rest of it's party should probably be a party unto itself.  

Doh!

Robert Reich posted some observations he'd made while on a book tour of the 'red' states. He observers that "Heartland Republicans and progressive Democrats remain wide apart on social and cultural issues. But there’s a growing overlap on economics". 

It has always astonished me people seem to have forgotten that when the Tea Party was just taking off, before it was over-run by the right, it was the nearest thing to a populist up-rising we've seen. At the time, it seemed to me to be an expression of angry disenchantment with the prevailing power structure and its lack of accountability. The Occupy movement, while less coherent in its message, was born of similar misgivings. As surprising to me is that these two groups are so divided on the 'social and cultural' issues that they can't come together to change a system that is beholden to wealthy political donors.