Wednesday, April 21, 2004

memo from the neocon desk officer This item from the Wiskeybar made me laugh out loud. Some of the examples are downright comic, as when the writer notes the oppressive effect that Coalition security procedures have on the willingness of ordinary Iraqis to speak freely: It is ingrained in the Iraqi psyche to keep a close hold on their own thoughts when surrounded by people with guns. I guess I must be part Iraqi, because I actually have that same problem myself.[Wiskey Bar] 2:27:34 PM    comment []

John Robb describes the role in technology used by terrorist networks to accumulate and grow their social capital. Cohesion is a big one they use the "Struggle" or issuance of a "Fatwa" to increase their cohesion insuring that the thing that binds them to cooperatively work together prevents them from working cooperatively with others outside their network in the future. What is the optimal size of a terrorist network?. Distributed, dynamic terrorist networks cannot scale like hierarchical networks. The same network design that makes them resiliant against attack puts absolute limits on their size. If so, what are those limits? A good starting point is to look at limits... [Global Guerrillas] 1:33:08 PM    comment []

Coalition of the Unwilling Loosing Poland would be very bad. I think they are the fourth largest force in the "coalition of the willing", with about 2500 troops. I think he got that concept from covert action where the public doesn't have a list of the members of the "coalition of the willing" The problem with this concept of forming ad hoc "coalitions of the willing" is that they tend to help your alleys loose their elections then you end up with coalitions of the unwilling. Reuters.  Poland reviews plans to withdraw from Iraq in the wake of Spain's pull-out. [John Robb's Weblog] Some forms or activities that create cohesion at the expense of future cooperation may reduce the stock amount of social capital. That is why we blundered so badly on the failure to make the case to Germany and France. German foreign minister said directly to Rumsfield, you didn't make your case (for WMD), you simply haven't made your case yet. We have to understand that many people do not see how after 11 September, after the deep solidarity with our American partners who had suffered attack, we can reach a peaceful decision on Iraq. Your speech didn't shed any light on this. Most Europeans don't understand this. If this question is not answered, you will not bring them round to war. To this day, I have not heard a truly convincing answer to this question. Let's look at the risks. Our Basic Law obliges us to do all we can to avoid war, also because of the dreadful humanitarian consequences. We all know, if there is military action in Iraq, many innocent people will lose their lives. This is exactly what obliges us to do all we can to find alternatives.[Minister Fischer Speech] That was about the time Rummy came up with the concept of Old Europe and New Europe. By using the term New Europe to create a team cohesion for the coalition of the willing he made future cooperation more unlikely. That is a bad thing to do in the accumulation of social capital. It goes back to the hacks versus the wonks. Hacks didn't care about the complexities of the policy and didn't carefully or were not able to properly analyze the situation. Going on gut they did not possess the ability to step back and consider or listen to the wonks. 11:11:33 AM    comment []