Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3975 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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Good Idea Partially Executed

August 11, 2007

Glenn M. Schwartz

The book, an edited work, seeks to address a gap in scholarship, to wit, where others have covered why and how complex societies have collapsed, there is vitually nothing on how some, not all, regenerate. The editors do point out that most collapses are not total, and something is left (see my review of The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) for a more nuanced review of this matter). It fails to go the full distance possible.

The combined authors posit a cycle of growth, collapse, and regeneration between ruralism and local autonomy, and urbanization with centralization of control.

In an excellent but not quite complete summary of the causes of collapse, the editors outline the following:

1. Fragmentation into smaller political entities
2. Partial or complete desertion of urban centers
3. Loss or depletion of centalizing functions
4. Breakdown of regional economic systems
5. Failure of civilization's ideology

They do not mention the latest and best explanation, that the more complex a society becomes, the more expensive it is to make incremental improvements in management, and the unaffordability of the always increasing cost for each always decreasingly effective improvement ultimately leads to implosion (see Collapse as linked above).

They do however mention in passing that large-scale inegalitarian systems tend to collapse over time–they are unsustainable. This tallies nicely with Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People while also contrasting with the literature on the The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization, and so on.

The authors are somewhat narrow in focusing on prior structures of rule, authority, and governability. One puts this book down with the impression it was a first date between a political scientist and an anthropologist, and they fell into psycho-babble as a neutral common ground. See my loaded image, with the full thesis at my web site under my photo/Early Papers.

An isolated but interesting observation on how state control of time and space (e.g. Daylight Savings Time, or in the US the more recent and most unwelcome additional hour of time change) are part of mind control, was worthy of note–just a the power of the state to define crime and insantity leaves us with a The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, legalized corporate greed, and a mendacious Vice President who has committed 25 impeachable offenses and yet carries on with impunity (see Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

The conclusion, in two parts, consists largely of psycho-babble (the first part), and a very fine second part, much more interesting for its applicability to our time, that posits that when a centralized government goes too far in overseas adventurism, this opens the way for the provinces to secede and become autonomous again. I note that we have 27 secessionist movements in the USA, and they are having their second annual meeting in October of this year. I for one feel that there is no one now running, including Ron Paul, that understands that the secessionists, not the “party base” are the ones we should be listening to, for they are the only ones that see clearly that the Republic is no more.

To save the Republic, we must destroy two things and create one thing:

1. Destroy the Democratic and Republican parties (see Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers) and
2. Destory the unbound Executive and the abdicated Congress
3. Create a transpartisan ticket that demands electoral reform prior to 2008 and provides both a Sunshine Cabinet with integrated policies announced in advance, and a sustainable balanced budget that eliminates all personal income taxes while taxing the Federal Reserve for local, state, and federal revenues.

We need to make every budget transparent, and to publish every budget in time for citizen participation in the evaluation of every trade-off. We do this, or the United States of America is destroyed, courtesy of Wall Street, the Bush Family, the Saudis, and Dick Cheney.

This is a useful book, but only an elementary start. The authors are all well-positioned to go on now to the next level. See also the various books on surviving the The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.

2007/08/112009/10/16

Review: Foreign Follies–America’s New Global Empire

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason

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Definitive Statement on How Real Conservatives Despise Bush Lies and Cheney High Crimes,

August 11, 2007

Doug Bandow

Published in 2006, this collection of essays ranges from the late 1990's to its year of publication, and I was quite astonished to discover two things fairly quickly into the work:

First, the author is a conservative–a true conservative–and firmly opposed to what he calls “promiscuous intervention” or elective wars or global rampant empire-building. I was expecting a left of center diatribe against the follies of the Bush-Cheney Administration. Not so. The author is consistent–he railed against the follies of the Clinton-Clinton Administration first, and this followed over.

Second, as an estranged moderate Republican who believes in fiscal conservatism, a small government, and not supporting dictators or decadent despots like the debauched Saudi “royal” family of swindlers, pedophiles, and perverts, I was stunned to find my conservative roots reaffirmed, and the neo-conservatives, the false conservatives, soundly lambasted for their chicken-hawk enlargement of the military-industrial complex.

The author opens early with the statement that America is no longer a Republic, and I completely agree. The author, affiliated with the Cato Institute, has given me a new and deeper appreciation for that organization's intellectual and constitutional line of reasoning.

The early part of the book is a superb collection of varied arguments for completely avoiding foreign adventurism that enriches a few in the military-industrial complex, at three great costs:

1) Loss of lives and limbs among our brave troops;
2) Loss of natural treasure we cannot space on others
3) Loss of morality and rise of vulnerability to hatred occasioned by our foreign presence

The latter point merits special emphasis. The author's views are totally consistent with my own reading and world experience:

1) Morality, as Will and Ariel Durant tell us in their The Lessons of History, is a strategic asset of incalculable proportions. Others, such as Max Manwaring, in The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century tell us that security–long-term security, can only come from legitimacy, legitimacy in the eyes of both our own citizens and denizens in every clime and place where we venture.

2) Bin Laden is on solid ground to use terrorism against us, an asymmetric method that is necessary for smaller actors, and the author is clear in validating the degree to which we merit and invite such terrorist attacks by intervening and by supporting debauched dictators like the Saudis. The author states clearly: “We must reduce the sources of foreign hostility to the US.” The author quotes Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism among others on how suicidal terrorism is correlated with US occupations overseas, *not* with radical Islam per se. He goes on to say, as my colleague Robert Baer has documented in See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, that “American commitment to the Saudi royal family is a moral blemish and a practical danger. See also Ambassador Mark Palmer's denunciation of our support for 42 of the 44 remaining dictators in Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.

In 1999 the author penned this statement against the Clinton Administration that applies equally today to the Bush-Cheney Administration: “Indeed, where the President and his aides are arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent, others must lead.” I agree with this author of the strategic logic of terrorism against US misbehavior, and point the interested reader to Pape's book above.

I am heartened to read this conservative author's sensible denunciation of both the lies of Bush and Cheney to all Americans, and of the idiocy of the neo-conservatives in striving for increased unconstitutional executive power, and in believing in an “immaculate presidency” that can do no wrong. He clearly labels Bush as wrong and as owing all Americans an apology. He properly dismisses the “stay the course” propaganda by pointing out that when you are on the wrong road, you get off at the first available exit.

He segues from that to a proper denunciation of American support for a genocidal racist Israel and offers this lovely quote: “Crackpot theology is no substitute for thoughtful analysis is developing foreign policy.”

The author offers an elegant essay against conscription and the draft. As a taxpayer who now seems that 75% of my taxes are misspent on elective war, secret earmarks, and fraudulent procurements that benefit a small elite while destroying the working poor and the vanishing middle class, I am now all for eliminating federal taxes and forcing the federal government to apply to the states for funding of “common” needs. War is not in our common interest, and we should not have allowed our Congress and our Executive to become spendthrifts with out money–as Davy Crockett learned–it is not theirs to give!

I part with the author only on the subject of Taiwan–he is wrong to see Taiwan as a beacon of freedom. Chang Kai Sheik was one of the greatest war criminals and thieves on the planet in his time, and a cursory reading of the literature, for example, the books by Sterling and Peggy Seagraves, will quickly document that Taiwan is both an inherent part of China, and not at all a bastion of freedom as much as limpet fish sucking the blood from the American's so naïve as to believe these cheating miscreants.

Over-all I found this author to be inspiring. He neglects to address the war crimes of the extremist Republicans, nor does he venture to comment on the very high probability that Dick Cheney, Rudy Gulliani, and Larry Silverstein (and their insurance co-conspirators) are guilty along with Donald Rumsfeld of the mass murder of most of those who died on 9-11 to controlled demolitions in NYC and a missile into the Pentagon. Evidently there are some areas where “true blue” conservatives do not dare venture. For those interested in this aspect of the *other* neo-conservative crime of the century see my lists on 9-11 books and DVDs, and on evaluating Cheney, and most especially, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, where my review lists 23 of the 25 high crimes and misdemeanors of Dick Cheney that are documented in the public record (for the other two, see Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11)

2007/08/092011/10/22

Review: The Collapse of Complex Societies

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Catastrophe

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Utterly brilliant work of genius, joins Allott's Health of Nations

August 9, 2007

Joseph Tainter

This is an utterly brilliant stunning work of genius. It begins with a comprehensive review of what appears to be every work in English relative to the topic being considered. The author has done a phenomenal job of both dissecting and then discussed the varied authors contributing to each of the following lists explanations for prior collapse of civilizations (from page 42):

1) Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2) The establishment of a new resource base
3) The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4) Insufficient response to circumstance
5) Other complex societies
6) Intruders
7) Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8) Social dysfunction
9) Mystical factors
10) Chance concatenation of events
11) Economic factors

This book is exceptionally well organized, well presented, and well spoken. The complex discussion is delivered in easy to read and absorb constructs. After a review and elegant dismissal of all of the prevailing theories, the author leads us into his approach by positing the collapse of civiliazations as resulting from the collapse of the larger systemic process for processing information to effect the increasingly complicated system of systems. In the author's words, at some point the cost of micro-managing a complex system is so high, and yields such poor returns on investment, that the natural and beneficial response of the whole is to collapse into more readily sustainable and resilience smaller parts.

I am reminded of Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, in which he discusses how simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and correct; sophisticated systems have multiple points of failure that interact in largely unforeseen ways and are very difficult to diagnose and correct; and the finally, Earth and Humanity, a system of systems so complex that “Intelligent Design” is failing us, and a natural Darwinian selection is kicking in.

For America to have 27 robust secessionist movements and a plethora of “Home Rule” regimes springing up local levels, while the Bush-Cheney regime runs the nation into bankruptcy with their elective war in Iraq that has cost half a trillion dollars that could have been better used to restore our failing infrastructure and our failed schools, tells us all we need to know: the federal government has collapsed, and the Republic as a whole is next absent draconian public engagement and mandated electoral reform prior to 2008.

The author concludes that “complexity is a problem-solving strategy” and that when it fails to solve the high-level threats or challenges, then the society collapses so that smaller and more resilient parts might be more innovative and adaptive, and hence survive better without the burden of inept “guidance” from above.

In the context of this book, the 27 secessionist movements in America are clearly what the author calls “resistance” to the now unaffordable higher costs and lower results of the federal mismanagement of the nation, best depicted by the grotesquely inept and even inhuman lack of effectiveness with respect to New Orleans and the Katrina hurricane.

There are gems throughout the work, which joins that of Philip Allott, also of Cambridge, who in his The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State suggested that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake, and we should have elevated and recognized peoples instead of sovereign states, as the latter have been too easily corrupted into aided the global elite to loot every commonwealth. A few that I noted:

Military expenditures and arms races suck the health out of nations. See my review of The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs), a book in which one author discusses the consequences of allowing the military to dominate what passes for strategy in the budget, while the politicians pander to domestic interests bereft of any grasp of international reality, and the intellectuals posit solutions that have no political, military, or overall holistic integration of all the sources of national power over time and space. The books on War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898-2005 are mounting in influence today.

The author notes that the physics of time and space make an extended dominance of distant cultures and places impossible when relying solely on the force of arms. I am of course reminding of Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as well as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World.

The author notes that no strategy can be considered viable that steals from the future to support the present. This observation is in perfect harmony will all that has been done by Herman Daly in Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications and Paul Hawkins in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, among other works.

Collapse is cultural, systemic, a collapse of process, not of any discrete event, institution, or location. The information processing becomes impossible for a complex system that does not adapt from an industrial-era model of command and control to an information era model of distributed localized resilience. I think of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) and The The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back on the one hand, and the varied books on the “wealth of knowledge,” wealth of networks.

Although others including myself in my US Institute of Peace paper on virtual diplomacy have expressed concern over the growing gap between people with power and people with knowledge, this author has provided us with what may well be the most erudite focused diagnosis of the coming collapse of the West, a lumbering industrial era mammoth whose small elite brain cannot compete with the sleeker Third World “tigers” that are using leap-ahead technologies to avoid our legacy of ashes.

In my view, the West can be saved only if America achieves electoral reform and restores the constitution, with a draconian reduction of federalism and the federal budget, while restoring to the states all of the powers not explicitly assigned to the three branches. Open Carry, Open Spectrum, all of the “opens” must prevail against the rule of secrecy and the use of scarcity to impoverish rather than enrich what should be “seven billion billionaires (forthcoming from Medard Gabel).”

This is a righteous book. I have loaded two images from my own earlier work (at my web site under the photo in Early Papers) and am now working on War and Peace in the Digital Era. This book here is Ref A.

2007/08/092009/10/16

Review: The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy

4 Star, Politics, Strategy

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Semiinal Work from Early 1990's Badly in Need of Update and Expansion

August 9, 2007

Richard Rosecrance

Published in 1993, this is an excellent book badly in need of reissue with a commensurate updating and expansion of content. The book whets the appetite but does not fully satisfy. What is does have is useful in all respects.

The contributing editors note that the US has never really had a “grand strategy” in the sense of charting out long-term goals and then devising a strategy that uses all of the sources of national power. Instead–and President General Ike Eisenhower warned us of this–we militarized our security and privatized its execution.

The authors' intent is to also show that realpolitik can only go so far, and that a clear integration of the domestic bases and their biases is needed. The books shows that domestic influence can stop external actions that might be otherwise inspired by foreign events; and can also inspire unwarranted actions regardless of how unrealistic the goals might be.

I especially appreciated the chapter by Michael Dole discussing the disconnect between military strategy divorced from politics, political strategy divorced from reality, and the gap-filling intellectual strategy divorced from both politics and the military (as well as commerce and other frames of reference). I am reminded of the philospher that warned that the separation of soldiers from scholars will have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.

Although I enjoyed the 1970's advocacy of Richard Falk and several others seeking to inspire a systemic understanding of the world and how to adapt and sustain, this book is an early proponent for combining systemic thinking with a full grasp of domestic constituencies and their role in driving foreign policy and national security in ways one might anticipate.

The book does not address transnational actors or the global reach of corporations and elites that manufacture wars, move drugs, launder money, and otherwise threaten any traditional structures for conserving, protecting, and nurturing societies at large.

I would like very much to see the authors adopt my construct of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, and recreate this book looking at Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia in contrast with Europe and the US. Now that would be quite an amazing contribution, and I shall hope to see something along those lines in the future.

See also my list on strategy and my recent related reviews.

2007/08/082009/10/16

Review: Living In Hell–A True Odyssey of a Woman’s Struggle in Islamic Iran Against Personal and Political Forces

4 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Religion & Politics of Religion, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

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Downside of Islam and Downside of Poverty

August 8, 2007

Ghazal Omid

When I first read and reviewed this book I left only a cryptic notation, “downside of Islam” but I neglected the opportunity to point out that the book also captures the downside of poverty as well as the enormous cultural and emotionial indignities toward women that are sanctioned by Islam and not only practiced in Islamic countries but also exported to Europe and the USA, where women are treated behind closed doors in a manner that would put any normal American behind bars for years.

2007/08/062009/09/06

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Ben de Jong

Alpha I-L, Peace Intelligence

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The Book

Ben de Jong is secretary of the Netherlands Intelligence Studies Association (NISA). He lectures on Russian and East European Politics at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and recently completed his dissertation on the memoirs of Soviet intelligence officers. He organized the special conference on Peacekeeping Intelligence in 2002, and served as one of the three Editors of the first book devoted to the subject.

Preface

2007/08/062009/09/06

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: Paul Johnston

Alpha I-L, Peace Intelligence

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Paul Johnston is a Major in the Intelligence Branch of the Canadian Forces. He graduated with an Honours BA in Military and Strategic Studies from Royal Roads Military College and earned an MA in War Studies from the Royal Military College. He has served in Germany, the Middle East, and various intelligence billets at the tactical, operational and strategic levels, in many cases providing intelligence support to Canadian Forces involved in peace keeping operations. Many of his writings, which have been published in a wide variety of journals including Parameters and the RAF Air Power Review, are available on his website: http://www.johnston.ca.

No Cloak and Dagger Required: Intelligence Support to UN Peacekeeping