Petraeus may be pulling off a double
THOMAS BARNETT
ARTICLE: Relations Sour Between Shiites and Iraq Militia, By SABRINA TAVERNISE, New York Times, October 12, 2007
Interesting. To extent this repeats like Al-Qaeda in Anbar, Petraeus may be pulling off a double.
How to balance vis-a-vis Sanchez comments? Not easy to say. He's got a career to protect, just like Petraeus.
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Shrink the Gap, save a ton of money
ARTICLE: Wars strip $284 bln from African economies -report, By Paul Simao, Reuters, Oct 11, 2007
In Blueprint For Action, I offered the following rough calculations regarding how much we'd save/divert if we stopped warfare inside the Gap:
While I hear plenty from readers and critics about how much my vision to shrink the Gap militarily will cost, what I never hear from them are the costs associated with doing nothing. Let’s consider just some of the more obvious ones:
-->Think of all the military spending inside the Core that is directed at defending powers there against one another. Given the integrating forces of the global economy and our shared interdependency, this is fundamentally money spent to no purpose. A Core united in its understanding of its collective security strengths and responsibilities would be able to redirect the vast majority of that money toward dealing with security problems inside the Gap.
-->Then think of all the money Core governments currently spend on military aid to states inside the Gap.
-->Then think of all the money Gap nations spend on purchases of military equipment and services from private corporations located almost exclusively in the Core and—within that—overwhelmingly inside Old Core Europe and the United States.
-->Then think of all the money spent inside the Gap on these conflicts and wars.
-->Then think of all the money spent by Core militaries in their responses to these conflicts and wars.
-->Then think of all the money spent by Core governments in their relief and development efforts to these states following all their conflicts and wars.
-->Then think of the economic losses by all the Gap economies in these conflicts and wars.
--> Then think of the economic opportunities lost by Core economies because so many Gap states suffer these conflicts and wars.
Then tell me it’s far too costly to consider massing the Core’s collective military might to impose peace upon the Gap, where—at any one time—roughly a dozen chronic conflicts are raging.
Because at that point I will tell you this: What it costs the Core to send postconflict emergency aid to a Gap state following civil strife is, on average, half as much as what it costs that nation in lost economic development when, as a result of being unable to keep the peace on its own, it slips back into conflict. Comparing just those two measures alone, out of all the ones I’ve named above, gets you at least a two-for-one return on your investment. Spend $10 billion on SysAdmin reconstruction work inside the Gap (I’ll get to the military costs in a minute), and you’ll save the global economy a good $20 billion or more.
Where does one come up with such estimates? The Copenhagen Consensus project brought together a host of scientific experts from around the world in the spring of 2003 to address the question of how best to prioritize the world’s problems. One of the top ten priorities ended up being conflict prevention, and in the analysis offered in their final report, entitled Global Crises, Global Solutions, the authors, using various econometric models, calculated how much money could actually be saved by applying military force in the manner that I just described.
By the Copenhagen Consensus’s best estimates, preventing the average civil war inside the Gap saves the global economy in the range of $65 billion over the lifetime of that conflict (on average, civil wars last seven years). On average, there are seventeen civil wars going on inside the Gap or along its Seam, with two new ones beginning each year as others settle into postconflict periods. When external powers step into any civil war to shorten it by just one year, the estimated savings per conflict in terms of lost economic development is roughly $10 billion.
Once a state exits a civil war situation, it must endure a roughly ten-year recovery period during which it builds its economy back to where it was prior to the civil war. During that ten-year period, the country has about a 4 in-10 chance of lapsing back into civil war during the first five years and a 3 in-10 chance over the second five-year period. At any one time, there are roughly twelve such states inside the Gap in this situation. What the Copenhagen Consensus data shows is that one of the biggest triggers for renewed civil war is the tendency of the surviving state to spend prodigiously on arms in the years immediately following the conflict, which in turn tends to provoke the suspicion and renewed aggression of rebel parties. What tends to dampen such spending most is the introduction of foreign military troops to keep the peace. If such troops can be offered for approximately five years on average, then the country in question typically hits a growth-recovery spurt in years 4 to 7 following the end of the conflict, and when the bulk of the country’s postconflict economic recovery is achieved, the odds of slipping back into civil war decrease dramatically.
What this tells us is that the best payoff for the Core comes in stabilizing Gap nations with peacekeeping forces following conflicts. The Consensus’s best estimate in this regard, using historical averages, was that “an outlay of less than half a billion dollars secures benefits in excess of $30 billion” and that was with “very pessimistic assumptions about risks after the withdrawal of external forces.” The world’s second-best option, as defined by the Consensus, was reducing the length of civil wars through international controls over commodity exports from afflicted countries—again, gaining on average $10 billion in savings for each civil war shortened by one year’s time.
So two seemingly counterintuitive realities emerge in the current globalization era: (1) the biggest cause of civil wars is civil wars (namely, lapsing back into civil strife following extended civil war); and (2) peace costs less than war (i.e., the return on investment for peacekeeping is nothing less than staggering). And to that I will add this important corollary: When it comes to shrinking the Gap, action costs much less than inaction. Beyond that basic truth, my real point in tossing out this sort of data analysis is to note that we’re just beginning to think through the full dimensions of what could possibly be gained over the long haul by committing our nation in particular and the Core as a whole to this worthy goal.
Oxfam's data would seem to support this analysis, yes?
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Beyond reality and parody
Cliff Mountain writes:
I have read and enjoyed both of your books. Additionally, I have recommended and bought both of your books as gifts for friends and family. Therefore, I was curious on your thoughts on the new Naomi Klein book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. There is certainly an agenda driven in the book and Milton Friedman and his school of economic thought are all but flayed. Her solution in the last chapter seems pretty weak and appears to come from a lack of experience in the real world. However, as you read the headlines about Blackwater and see some of the behavior of American companies in challenging situations it is hard not to agree with some of her well documented and footnoted points. What say you?
Tom writes:
Klein can be provocative at times, and some of her market criticisms are apt, but there is a startling lack of real-world feeling in her work. She writes about capitalism with the confident fervor of somebody who's never really set foot on that planet, so her tone--to me at least--is so intellectually unhinged that her writing has a surreal, almost fantastic quality to it.
I suppose I interpret her like she might view Ayn Rand in turn, but quite frankly, I find I can't read more than a few paragraphs of Klein without putting it down, shaking my head, and saying, "What is she talking about?"
I put Klein in with Chomsky on the left. Like the hard-core conservatives, they are beyond parody, although Colbert tries hard.
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You pay for talent
ARTICLE: Six-figure bonuses retain US commandos, By RICHARD LARDNER, Associated Press, Oct 11, 2007
The effort makes eminent sense, both micro and macro.
In an era where warfare has left the system level (no danger of global nuke war) and has virtually abandoned the state level (we're down to a handful of dyad scenarios that all seem outdated: when was the last time Israel actually fought a state?), we are left--as I wrote in PNM--with warfare against individuals: our super-empowered special operators against theirs.
In that world, you pay for talent--one body & soul at a time.
Same reason why top managers and CEOs get paid so much: supply versus demand in a flat world.
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Kim's unlikely to give up our only reason to fear him
EDITORIAL: "Score One for Diplomacy," New York Times, 4 October 2007, p. A28.
EDITORIAL: "The Pyongyang Precedent," Wall Street Journal, 5 October 2007, p. A16.
OP-ED: "Kim Jong-Il's Last Card," by Jason T. Shaplen and James Laney, New York Times, 8 October 2007, p. A23.
The NYT admits that "the next phase--getting rid of North Korea's fissile material and any weapons--will be even tougher to negotiate," but yeah, you have to hand it to State for moving the conversation along and socializing the Chinese on their responsibilities in the region.
Naturally, the WSJ disapproves for all sorts of reasons, but here primarily because of Bush's assertion that this process could be applied to Iran, and the paper's criticism is apt (no regional power to influence Iran like China can with DPRK, plus Iran's got friends because Iran's got stuff to sell).
But Shaplen and Laney make--somewhat inadvertently--the strongest argument against hoping this process gets to the good stuff:
Were [Kim] to give [the 50 kilos of weapons-grade plutonium] up he would find himself seriously weakened and, quite possibly, at the mercy of those who seek to bring down his regime."
Frankly, I don't like people bringing up that point because ... it's my real hope for this process: Beijing cons Kim on being the Korean Deng if he'll only give up bomb and ... then they quietly scheme to marginalize him progressively by cutting his levers of control over the economy--such as it is--by expanding the country's virtually non-existent broadband (meaning, popular) economic connectivity with the outside world.
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