Global warming coincides quite exactly neatly with the use of petroleum-based products on a large scale, something which is hardly coincidence. Industrialization and globalization were literally fueled by oil, and an unexpected consequence of that is climate change. Melting ice caps, the spread of disease in now-warmer climates, and severe drought in some areas are just a few of the effects we are now seeing.

Thus, our carbon-based economy is a direct cause of climate climate. So concludes Jim Kunstler in The Long Emergency in the chapter Nature Bites Back. Because it’s not just climate change that is problematic, it’s also the damage humans are doing directly. Water levels in aquifers are dropping precipitously primarily due to irrigation for farming in arid areas, something made possible by fertilizers created from oil-based products. Gigantic flood control projects like those in China created dams that divert water from elsewhere and then silt up within 100 years anyway.

Kunstler asks, what happens when large farming areas go bust due to lack of water? Will those affected be peaceful about it, get angry and take up arms, or migrate elsewhere, causing huge strains on those areas. I’m guessing on the last two.

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Author Richard Bookstaber, a hedge fund “rocket scientist”, presents a scary scenario in Demon of Our Own Design. Today’s financial markets are so complex and tightly coupled that a tremor in one area can have massive, unexpected fallout in another. The current subprime crisis which has triggered hedge fund implosions and cratered the housing market is a timely example of this.

Worse, attempts to add safeguards to prevent such problems can instead make things worse. “The catalyst for the ValuJet crash was a regulated safguard. The problems at Chernobyl started with a safety test.”

Added to this is current financial theory that posits that markets are rational and behave in mathematically precise ways. Not hardly, says Bookstaber. Worse, the theory does not allow for feedback loops. If a hedge fund gets a margin call and it forced to sell stock fast, this very action may drive the price down (aided by other big players who see a wounded animal that needs killing) and this in turn may force more margin calls. Because of the tight coupling of the markets, players who don’t even own that stock may find their holdings have dropped in value.

To solve these problems, Bookstaber says, we need to reduce market complexity, slow the speed of order execution, and cut down on the amount of leverage possible. This may make markets less efficient but will also create a market that is like a cockroach, it can survive and adapt to any circumstance. Because, as s now obvious, turmoil in seemingly arcane financial markets can have real-life consequences for millions.

The book is easy to read, non-technical and highly recommended.

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The author of Why Religious Militants Kill, Jessica Stern, is no armchair analyst. She’s “the foremost U.S. expert on terrorist” and to research the book she traveled worldwide, and met with terrorists. She, a Jewish woman traveling alone, met with jihadi and mujahideen in Pakistan — something most would say is seriously dangerous.

Stern defines terrorism as the deliberate targeting of civilians so as to cause dread, fear, destruction, and loss of life among the populace. In her view (and mine) terrorism is morally repugnant and given the blowback it causes, generally creates even more trouble. The decades of retaliation bombings, tortures, and murders in Northern Ireland serve as proof of that.

Why do religious people sometimes murder in the name of their religion? Stern interviewed Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalist extremists and terrorists. Some are in prison in the US, others running madrassas in Afghanistan. She sees similarities between them.

The techniques of terror - the deliberate murder of innocent civilians - are counter to every mainstream religious tradition. That is why the mission - the articulation of the grievance - is so important. It must be so compellingly described that recruits are willing to violate normal moral rules in its name.

Bizarrely, some of the racist Right in the US want to join up with al Qaida because they think both are fighting the same New World Order. Apparently some leftists agree. I do not. The foe of my foe is not always an ally. If religious fundamentalists were to seize complete political power, whether they are Muslim or Christian, the first thing they’d do is kill and imprison the leftists. That means me, and probably you, since you’re reading this.

The War on Terror is phony, terrorism is not. Someone flew those two planes into the Twin Towers on 9/11, and it wasn’t the Bushies, sorry, 9/11 conspiracists. Despicable comments like Ward Churchill calling the 9/11 victims “little Eichmann’s” only hurts our cause. I mean, what is it with lefties who exult in the death of 3,000 innocents, in the unfeeling belief that 9/11 struck a blow against imperialism?

Call me crazy, but I want to continue walking down city streets without fear of car bombs. Or having a lunatic Christian accidentally shoot me rather than the abortion doctor he’s aiming at. Or be in the wrong place when a Jewish extremist decides to slaughter Muslims. All in the name of God, you understand.

During an interview with a jihadi, he asks her views of the Kashmir situation. Stern replies that none of the sides care about the Kashmiris. That it’s not about self-determination or religion, but rather about political power, profits, real estate, and national identity. That the fight continues because all sides depend on it. They make money running guns and selling drugs and get to feel good about religion too.

What really counts, I say, are perceived humiliation, relative deprivation, and fear - whether personal, cultural, or both. The rest is sloganeering and marketing. I see this all over the world, including in America. But holy wars only take off when there is a large supply of young men who feel humiliated and deprived; when leaders emerge who know how to capitalize on those feelings; and when a segment of society - for whatever reason - is willing to fund them.

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Joe Bageant grew up redneck in Winchester Virginia, escaped to the city, became a “godless commie,” moved back thirty years later, and wrote this book about it.

It’s subtitled “Dispatches from America’s Class War.” He looks at the people that he grew up with, and most are in debt way beyond their means, have serious health problems, and have been grinding away for 30-40 years at a no-future job that pays next to nothing. The redneck class helped put George Bush in the White House, but have gotten screwed to the walls by the Republicans and elites all their lives. So how, Bageant asks, did this happen?

Because the Democratic Party stopped caring about them, that’s why. That left a void the Republican Party promptly filled. Yes Virginia, there was a time the Democratic Party stood for the working class, for minorities and the poor, for unions, but those days are long gone. Bageant thinks the Democrats cluelessly and stupidly stopped trying to appeal to poor whites. Me, I think it was quite deliberate. But the result was the same.

If progressives want to organize among rednecks and hillbillies, first off and most important Bageant says, get a clue about guns. Try to understand that guns have been part of that culture for, oh, 250 years, that accidents are rare because they respect and are careful with guns, and that gun ownership is Constitutionally guaranteed.

Besides -

With Micheal Savage and Ann Coulter openly calling for liberals to be put in concentration camps, with the CIA now licensed to secretly detain American citizens indefinitely, and with the current administration effectively legalizing torture, the proper question to ask an NRA member may be, “What kind of assault rifle do you think I can get for three hundred bucks, and how many rounds of ammo does it take to stop a two-hundred-pound born-again Homeland Security zombie from putting me in a camp?” Which would you prefer, 40 million gun-owning Americans on your side or theirs?

Think about it, progressives.

Much of the book is character sketches of real people. He describes their often grueling lives, endless low-paid work, simmering anger, and uses that to show how badly they are exploited. Mortgage rackets leave them indebted beyond their means with a doublewide that loses half its value the day after the papers are signed. Lack of adequate health insurance means medical bills are often ruinous. Substandard education insures that most are illiterate or close to it. They are the serfs who do crap jobs for the rest of us.

They are also Joe Bageant’s people. His politics are way different, but he understands them, and they are his friends, his cousins, his brother, the people he grew up with. He can explain them to those of us on the outside.

Whatever you think of the leash girl of Abu Ghraib, Lynndie England never had a chance. Abu Ghraib, or maybe something even worse (an RPG up the shorts for instance) was always her destiny.

Money is always the best whip to use on the laboring classes. Thirteen hundred a month, a signing bonus, and free room and board sure beats the hell out of yanking guts through a chicken’s ass.

To get real change in this country will require a mass movement. It’s happened in other countries, it can happen here. The Left would gain many supporters and some serious clues by doing outreach to poor whites, and by listening to what they have to say.

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Blackwater is the best known of the private military contractors (PMC) in Iraq. There are a number of books out now about PMCs and mercenaries — I chose Pelton’s Licensed To Kill because of his reputation and his previous books. He *likes* going to incredibly dangerous places like war zones, finding the local warlord, talking to him, then leaving alive after making a friend.

In one part of the book he went on his own to a military encampment on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, an encampment of a US military / black ops group that officially Does Not Exist. After a bit, they trusted him enough to talk, but did ask how he got there without getting killed. So, I figure an adventurer like Pelton is highly qualified to write about PMCs.

PMCs, for the most part, provide security in the form of the Personal Security Detail (PSD). In Iraq, PSDs protect important dignitaries, shuttle people to and from Baghdad Airport, that kind of thing. They are not mercenaries (soldiers for hire and available to the highest bidder.) But the boundaries can blur. If fired on, PSDs will fire back, and Pelton details multi-day battles they’ve been through.

Transporting people to Baghdad Airport is seriously dangerous. PSDs generally go in a squad of several heavily armored cars with machine guns and lots more weaponry too. Under the State Department rules, if a civilian car comes up on their convoy too fast or slows down too much, the PSD is permitted to open fire to back off the car. If the car doesn’t respond, they are permitted to kill. Can’t see how this will be winning many hearts and minds in Baghdad. But then some of those cars speeding towards them are attacks. PSD members are regularly killed and maimed by car bombs or in ambushes.

PMCs and their contractors have protected legal status. Under US occupation rules, they can not be charged with any crime in Iraq. Trials, if they occur, must happen in the US. Grotesquely unfair and abusive policies like these have understandably enraged the populace and led to reprisals. In one instance, documented in a widely distributed video with an Elvis soundtrack, contractors fired apparently without warning at cars. After a long investigation the reports were classified and no one was charged. (As an aside, I wonder how someone who shoots at cars that aren’t doing what he wants can ever readjust to civilian life.)

Pelton often makes the point that most contractors are in their 30’s-40’s, had been in the military engaged in covert operations, and couldn’t find much demand in civilian life for their specialized job skills. The pay for a PMC contractor in Iraq is $600 a day or so. But that’s for a 24/7 week, which works out to about $25 an hour.

Most PMCs see their business in strictly capitalist terms. They provide trained teams to do specific jobs and bill out at three times what they pay the contractor, just like any job agency does. Jobs can be subbed out several levels deep, with everyone getting their piece of the governmental money pie. Even with that, sometimes it can be cheaper and more efficient for the military to use PMCs rather than doing it themselves. Sometimes PMCs do a better job than the actual military, as witness one attack described in the book where Blackwater fought back while the Coalition force was paralyzed into doing nothing.

But where does it end? At the top level, the PMC executives are plugged into the political and governmental power structures, make huge sums of money, and often able to route around damage or bad publicity to continue their business of being hired guns. Well, not all of them of course. PMC executives are hardly ever anyplace dangerous. They contract everything out. If a contractor is killed, the next of kin gets $64,000 - from the government. The contracts make it clear if anything happens, the PMC is not liable. Even with that, there are ongoing lawsuits, like from the families of four Blackwater contractors who were killed in a Fallujah ambush. Their bodies dragged by cars, then hung from a bridge. (An autopsy showed they were almost certainly killed by bullets in the opening seconds of the attack.)

Pelton points out that Blackwater can’t settle the lawsuits even if they want to, because this would set a precedent that would destroy the entire contractor apparatus they’ve set up. So, in the end, it’s (surprise) about making money. Should someone get killed or maimed, that’s their problem. This is capitalism at its most exploitative.

There are also the outright mercenaries, hired to attack and kill, often working with a government (or insurgents) with their real objective being to get control of the natural resources of whatever country they’re fighting in. The South African company, Executive Outcomes, is profiled here in all their dubious glory. They were the model for future PMC and mercenary companies to come. It doesn’t always end pleasantly for mercenaries either, as witness Niek du Toit who is currently doing thirty years in an Equatorial Guinea prison for attempting a coup there. The coup cover story was they wanted to restore democracy to the country,. But in actuality, it was a privately financed plan to grab the oil riches of that nation instead. Democracy had nothing to do with it. Sound familiar?

Pelton generally keeps an even tone. One of the few times he expresses an opinion is about Jonathan Keith Idema “a transparent criminal” and a small time loudmouth who ended up running a private prison and torture chamber in Afghanistan until being jailed for five years there. That the US military had to know what Idema was doing makes the whole business of unregulated and unmonitored loose-cannon contractors scary indeed.

Blackwater plans to become a full-tilt PMC capable of launching aggressive attacks anywhere. In other, they want to be mercenaries. Given that company’s obvious huge patriotism and US military background, they unquestionably would not back anything not supported by the US government. But what of other mercenaries almost certain to come who will sell themselves to whoever? Not that backing the imperialist aims of the US is a good thing, not hardly at all. But Blackwater, who by all accounts are highly competent, would not be a rogue agent. Other mercenary companies almost certainly will be.

Once the US leaves Iraq (and they will), PMCs will have to do some serious downsizing. Obviously, they will resist this, and resist the ending of the war. As my friend DJ at Asymptotic Life eloquently blogs.

War: Someone always benefits

In politics, they say “Follow the money.” In analyzing a conflict, the concept is similar: look for who benefits. There’s almost always some group or person that benefits from the conflict— and they have a vested interest in keeping the fighting going.

[tags]Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill[/tags]

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What if warfare was reinvented and nobody bothered to tell the Pentagon?

That is the thesis to John Robb’s Brave New War. Globalization, the Internet, cellphones, etc. have created a world in which information spreads very fast, can not be contained, and is available to all. This allows small, highly mobile groups working in loose networks with others to not only create open source software that benefits everyone, but also to create open source warfare whereby just a few can effectively block and cripple nation-states they oppose.

Most of the web servers on the planet run on the open source Apache software. Open source is developed for free by teams of those interested. Anyone can change the code and use it. Changes to the code are voted on by the group, then put into the next release where they benefit all. The profit motive is absent, and the software teams group, dissolve, and re-form at will, bringing their knowledge with them.

Open source warfare follows the same pattern. Using Iraq as an example, there is not one monolithic insurgency but dozens of groups with widely differing beliefs who team up, share ideas, attack a specific target, then disband and plan something else. The organizational structure here is a bazaar, not a cathedral, with lots of “trading, haggling, copying, and sharing”, something which may look chaotic to an outsider, but isn’t really at all. But the dynamics of the bazaar are probably impenetrable to rigid hierarchies like the Pentagon.

OSW also swarms when it attacks. The swarms can be massed but in Iraq are usually dispersed. That’s the key to their power. The attacks are often on the electrical grids and pipelines, where just a few people acting quickly can cause substantial damage. Repeat this often enough, and the government and the US soon appear to be completely inept (not to mention it costing them millions and maybe billions in lost revenue and repairs.) This hollowing out of the state by slow bankruptcy and loss of legitimacy is a precise goal of OSW. Insurgent attacks in Iraq may appear random, but it’s almost a certainty that most of them are deliberately planned to create maximum disruption.

Robb documents something I’ve not seen elsewhere: that Saddam, after the Gulf War, made contingency plans for another US invasion. The plans included stashing huge arms supplies in the countryside, embedding small teams of guerrillas in the cities to destabilize the government and attack US troops, and engaging in systems disruption by assaults on the infrastructure. When the invasion happened, these teams activated and were the leading edge of the insurgency. Robb’s crucial point: given the nature of OSW, what those guerrillas knew quickly and freely spread to anyone interested, who then added their own improvisations and spread it further.

Such systems disruptions can be used to bankrupt an opponent, as well as to discredit them on the world stage. It’s not just Iraq where this is happening. Robb also discusses the rise of transnational gangs, organized crime cartels, homegrown militias, and others who use similar tactics.

That the Pentagon and US government doesn’t understand OSW can be shown by reading the headlines. You’ll often see news stories about how the US has “to cut off the head of Al Qaida” and that’ll end the insurgency. No it won’t. Nor will an Orwellian security apparatus like HSA, which “will prove unable to isolate and defuse threats against us.”

Robb sees the US electrical grid as especially at risk. It’s mostly unprotected. Destroying a few key switching points could cascade much of the grid into collapse. He uses this as a metaphor for what could be done to protect as well as enhance our lives in general. Decentralization. Let every home have the capacity to create its own energy, with the excess going back into the grid. Also, open up the entire electrical system, let it become a true open source platform for all to use. Changes like these would make the entire system more robust and better able to absorb the attacks he assumes are coming.

Robb sees a open source model to be used by all as the best possible way to avoid the alternative: “knee-jerk police states” and “preemptive war,” all of which will be failed strategies anyway.

The resulting highly decentralized world, I think, will be much less a place of predatory capitalism because the interconnectedness of the networks we will live in will preclude that from being so. Also, for those of us on the Left who think socialism has much to offer, a decentralized world where nation-states have lost their power means there will be no state that can control an economy. I suggest this is something Lefties need to start thinking about now, as that decentralized world is coming.

[tags]John Robb[/tags]

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The car bomb was invented in the US and was used to devastating effect by Mario Buda, an anarchist who exploded his horse-drawn wagon on Wall Street in 1920, thus prompting the title to Buda’s Wagon, a new book by often controversial and politically radical Mike Davis. Buda was the first car bomber, his progeny are many.

The Zionist Stern Gang used car bombs in the late 1940’s to blow up buildings in Palestine in an attempt to drive out the British and terrorize Palestinians. The Irgun and Haganah, underground Zionist groups labeled as terrorists by the British, quickly followed suit. The use of car bombs by Zionists represented a major step forward both in the lethality of the bombs and their use as political weapons.

However, Palestinians and Arabs soon learned the technology and responded with the same, prompting one of the founders of Israel, Ben-Gurion, to say after the bombing of a Haganah headquarters, “I couldn’t forget that ‘our’ thugs and murderers had blazed this trail.”

Prophetic words indeed. Car bombs don’t care who use them, and Davis details how the technology to create them travels from one hot zone to the next, as their practitioners spread the knowledge worldwide. Instrumental in the spread of car bombing techniques from the 1980’s onward was the lunatic Bill Casey of the CIA and ISI, the shadowy secret police of Pakistan who are considered among the best in the world and are a power unto themselves.

Car bombs are often successfully used by hardliners in a dispute to destroy the possibility of peace talks. Sow enough chaos, terror, and hatred, and peace negotiations often collapse. This has been a precise goal at times by Zionists, the LTTE in Sri Lanka, the IRA, and many others. Other times, car bombs can be used to force concessions, like with IRA bombings in London in the 1990’s. The bombs were deliberately targeted to damage the faltering British insurance companies, and it did indeed cost the companies billions of dollars and nearly cratered Lloyds of London.

That blowing up a building in an urban area, killing innocents, will often cause mass reaction against your political aims is something that escapes car bombers. Or maybe, blood-crazed with visions of retribution, they don’t care. Sometimes the car bombers are rival drug cartels or organized crime factions. Then, of course, there is little political motive.

Car bombs can achieve spectacular political results. Witness the Hezbollah bombings in Lebanon in the 80’s that destroyed a US barracks dubbed the “Beirut Hilton” and a French barracks as well. In both cases these large buildings (the French barracks was nine floors) were blown off their foundations, which gives some idea of the immense force of the explosions. These bombings led directly to the immediate US withdrawal from Lebanon.

Davis makes it clear that car bombs, while sometimes achieving short-term gains, generally lead to increased violence from the the other side (or sides) thus creating ever more mayhem and dead innocents. Using Iraq as an example, some car bombs are aimed at US forces, others are specifically used to create Sunni-Shia divisions. Islamic hardliners use car bombs to reinforce sectarian divisions because they do not want nationalism to occur because that would mean they’d then have no power base. Doubtless many other players there don’t want nationalism either.

Davis closes by saying

All sides, moreover, now play by Old Testament rules and every laser-guided missile falling on an apartment house in southern Beirut or a mud-walled compound in Kandahar is a future suicide truck bomb headed for the center of Tel Aviv or perhaps downtown Los Angeles. Buda’s wagon truly has become the hot rod of the apocalypse.

Car bombs are an example of how small groups operating in diffuse networks can produce devastating effects against much larger foes. This is what John Robb talks about in his new book Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, which will be the topic of my next book review. He blogs about this at Global Guerrillas and at his personal blog.

[tags]Buda’s Wagon, Mike Davis, car bombs[/tags]

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