Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts

September 9, 2007

2Blowhards interviews Gregory Cochran on Iraq

As I've mentioned before, although I was highly skeptical of the Iraq Attaq in 2002, my big mistake was that I didn't trust my friend Greg Cochran's assessment that Iraq had no functioning nuclear weapons program. (Here's an email from Cochran that Jerry Pournelle posted on his website on October 14, 2002.)

Here on the one hand were the assembled ranks of the Great and the Good telling us that we had to worry intensely about the possibility of Saddam building the Bomb in his underground laboratories, and there on the other hand was Greg Cochran saying that a quick look at publicly available information shows that no way could Saddam afford to build a Bomb. Now, I reasoned, obviously, Greg is smarter than the average big shot in government and media. In fact, he might be smarter than anybody in government and media. But is he smarter than all of them put together?

As we know now, when it came to the great question upon which the history of this decade hinged, the answer was: Yes; yes he was.

Michael Blowhard of 2Blowhards thinks we ought to try to learn from how Cochran figured it out, and is conducting a two part interview with him. Here's an excerpt from the first part:

2B: When did you start to make sense of the current mess?

Cochran: I knew enough about nuclear weapons development to make my own estimate of what was going on in Iraq. It was obvious to me that Administration was full of shit back in late 2002, either lying and/or totally deluded.

2B: How did you know that?

Cochran: I looked at freely available evidence. For example, when the Feds started telling us that Iraq was a nuclear menace, I knew that the hardest step in making a bomb is obtaining fissionable materials, and I knew what the four ways of making those fissionable materials were (breeder reactors, gaseous diffusion plant, centrifuge, calutron), their costs and difficulty, and it seemed to me that none of them were possible (while remaining undetected) in Iraq, considering sanctions, inspections, aerial recon, negligible local talent, and being stony broke.

Since I read the paper every single day, I knew roughly how much oil Saddam was smuggling out by truck and how big a kickback he was getting on the oil-for-food exports. A horseback guess said that the whole Iraqi state was running on a billion dollars a year. Took about fifteen minutes of Googling to determine that. Not much to pay for an army, secret police, palaces out the wazoo, and an invisible, undetectable Manhattan project. Which was right on the money, as later laid out in reports by Duelfer and Paul Volcker.

I'm told that the CIA doesn't do this kind of capacity analysis, why, I dunno. I've also heard that they had only one guy in the entire agency who knew enough to do the technical-capacity analysis I just mentioned and that he was working on something else. They don't have a lot of physicists, partly because they pay peanuts, partly because it's a hateful place to work where you need a key to go to the bathroom. Sheesh, they don't even play "Secret Agent Man" in the elevator. There were plenty of people at DOE who could have done that kind of capacity analysis -- but the Administration refused to listen to the technical experts.

2B: What do you hear from your friends in the field?

Cochran: They tell me that there's not one political appointee in the government who could do that analysis. Likely true. That must always have been the case. However, the Bush people seem to pay no attention to technical expertise, ever. They don't believe in it. As far as I can tell, their position is that everything ever said by anybody is propaganda. Projection? Ad Hominem rules ok, there is no other argument. Steve Sailer calls it "marketing-major post-modernism."

2B: How did your reasoning proceed?

Cochran: When I began to hear people claiming that Iraq was a big backer of international terrorism, in particular, anti-American terror, I knew that every single article touching upon this subject in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal over the past twenty years said otherwise. When I checked later, official US-GOV statements did too, up until late 2001. The stories I remembered had Saddam down as the fourth-largest funder of the one of the main Palestinian organizations and, once upon a time, a backer of one of the less memorable factions in Lebanon, nobody you've ever heard of. Everything I'd ever heard said that the Mukhabarat spend most of its time looking to whack Iraqi exiles.

In other words, never a big player in that game, too busy with the Iran-Iraq war in the '80s, too broke in the '90s. Everybody knew that the Baathists had been a spent force, nothing that would attract any young and coming hothead, for at least thirty years.

When I heard people talk about how civilized and secular and educated Iraq was, I started out remembering how they'd torn the Hashemite royal family to bloody pieces in the streets back in '58. As I said, not a real middle East aficionado, but that incident is hard to forget. When Wolfowitz talked about literacy, I looked it up in the online CIA Factbook: 60% adult illiteracy, worse than any of their neighbors. When he said they didn't have pesky holy cities as in Saudi Arabia, I thought to myself "Karbala? " -- I guess I did remember something from those medieval histories.

And of course I noticed when the IAEA inspectors followed up about 30 of our tips and every one came up dry. I figured our entire case was wrong, a product of fantasy.

Judging from the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, I figured low-level guerrilla resistance in Iraq was more likely than not. Partly came to that conclusion because of recent examples in the Middle East, partly because of what I've read of the long-running story of nationalism and anti-colonialism over the last hundred years and more: books like Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," accounts of the Boer War, the Philippine Insurrection, Maximilian in Mexico, Portugal's endless colonial wars in Africa, and Vietnam of course.

2B: What are some of the reasons so many observers went so wrong?

Cochran: I think that most people writing about international politics don't have much useable history. They keep making the same two analogies (everything is either Munich or Vietnam) because they simply don't know any other history, not that they really know much about Vietnam or WWII either.

I also think that they have zero quantitative knowledge. Comparisons of Saddam's Iraq and Hitler's Germany used to bug me, since Germany had the second largest economy in the world and was a real contender, while Iraq had the fortieth largest GNP and didn't have a pot to piss in.

I once assumed people were deliberately lying, but now I think that they simply don't have any quantitative picture of the world at all. One, two, three -- many! In the same way, people who equate the dangers of jihadism with that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union really don't know big from small, don't know anything about the roots of national power. I think most writers and columnists are innumerate, just like the average American. Perhaps more so. If they could count, why the hell would they have gone into opinion writing?

2B: Is everyone involved in the great game inept?

Cochran: I think that some of the Washington lifers know what they're doing, particularly in less-technical areas. There are plenty of people in DOE -- Los Alamos and Livermore and Sandia -- who know exactly what they're talking about. As for the generals, a mixed bag. Some knew what they were talking about, some were downright dense. I'd say that Tommy Franks was effectively stupid. So was Sanchez, so was Odierno, who is still there as #2. In different ways. I'm not sure that any commander we've tried is what you'd call smart, in the sense that Sherman, Grant, Nimitz and Spruance were smart. Since Bush wanted people who "believe in the mission," it was hard to get good execution, considering that mission is and always was stupid.

[More]


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 28, 2007

What's the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?

The famous sunk cost fallacy is a particularly popular justification for throwing good money and blood after bad in a war like Iraq. But the U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam during Watergate and its aftermath is a clear example of of the lesser known converse to the sunk cost fallacy.

In 1974, it was clear that
South Vietnam's survival hadn't been worth the sunk cost we had expended during 1961-1973. Yet, sunk costs are sunk. What we needed to think about were marginal costs. The events of 1972, in which American airpower (finally made effective by the mass use of laser-guided smart bombs) and South Vietnamese manpower had turned back a massive North Vietnamese mechanized invasion (which, in itself, showed that we had finally largely defeated the indigenous guerilla movement) at the cost of only 300 Americans killed in action for all of 1972 would seem to show that the marginal cost to America of giving South Vietnam a fair shot at surviving the next North Vietnamese offensive. Yet, being sick of Vietnam, we failed to focus on the affordable marginal cost and got hung up emotionally on the catastrophic sunk cost.

The NVA tried a tentative offensive in December 1974, following the Democrats midterm election triumphs, found that the
US wouldn't provide air support, so launched a massive offensive in March 1975. The South Vietnamese collapsed about as quickly as France in 1940.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 18, 2007

How many bullets are we firing in anger in Iraq?

An AP article says:


Wars squeeze police ammunition supplies across US
Shortage curtails officers' training

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.


Last year, I tried to figure out how many bullets we are firing at people in Iraq every year. (This new AP article drops some hints, but never comes out and says.)

I think a lot of Americans have a hard time grasping just how much firepower the
U.S. military expends. Many Americans seem to assume that because we are in Iraq to help, that our boys must be as lightly armed as policemen back home. Further, we have this image in our heads of America as the plucky underdog winning battles through intestinal fortitude, although the last time that happened on a big scale might have been a couple of hours of the Battle off Samar in October 1944 when Admiral Halsey got snookered by Japanese feint and left a weak fleet of small USN ships to heroically fight off the biggest battleship in the world. In reality, American doctrine going back at least to Grant has been to bury the enemy under the firepower that our industrial might provides. And soldiers aren't carrying single-shot M1s anymore. The M16 can fire at least 12 rounds per second.

What I found last year was that the
U.S. government does not make it easy to figure out how many bullets are fired in anger, let me tell you. I found that the military's consumption of bullets increased by over a billion between peaceful 2000 and bellicose 2005, but nobody seems eager to break that down between increased training and combat.

The best I could come up with was this: In testimony before the House of Representatives on June 24, 2004, references were made to "less than 10 million rounds per month being expended in hostilities" and an annual expenditure of "a hundred million for the war" outside of training.

So let's call it 100,000,000 bullets per year or 8.3 million fired per month in Iraq in mid-2004.

So, that's about 275,000 bullets fired in anger per day by U.S. forces. (If you have a better estimate, please let me know in the Comments.)

Of course, the vast majority of bullets fired never hit anybody, but you can imagine the emotional impact on Iraqis of having 275,000 American bullets per day flying around their county trying to kill somebody. It's kind of hard to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis when you are firing ten thousand bullets per hour, 24/7, in their homeland, some of them winding up in random living rooms.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 10, 2007

Is there anything left to be said about Iraq?

A Google search finds that I've written, assuming my methodology is reasonable, 831 articles or postings with the word "Iraq" in them, going back to early 2001. (Here's my February 27, 2001 op-ed on why the elder George W. Bush was right not to occupy Baghdad ten years before in 1991.)

But I sure haven't written much about Iraq in 2007. It just seems too depressing and boring to rehash again. I'm not exactly sure why I feel this way. As you've no doubt noticed, I'm constantly tempted to use current event X as an excuse to dredge up my old response to past event Proto-X to show that I Figured It All Out Back In Two Thousand Ought Something But It Was Shamefully Ignored At The Time. This, by the way, can get in the way of coming up with new ideas, since it's easier to link to old ideas.

With Iraq, though, much of what I was saying in 2002 has become conventional wisdom, with the exception of exotic stuff like cousin marriage. And I didn't do that good of a job on Iraq, either -- Greg Cochran explained to me a half dozen times why Saddam couldn't afford to have a nuclear bomb program anymore, but I never publicized it. How could he be right and the U.S. government be wrong? My forecast of what would go wrong wasn't bad, but it was off -- I figured the U.S. would stand by the Sunnis and help them put down the Shi'ites, while the Kurds would cause big trouble for the Turks.

Anyway, since I don't have much left to say, what I'd like to do is invite your comments on Iraq.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 1, 2007

Tribalism

A Lieutenant Colonel writes from Iraq:


I just read your 2003 article, "Cousin Marriage Conundrum." You're right on the money about Iraq. I am at the end of my 1 year tour in Iraq serving as a military advisor to an Iraqi Army brigade in the northern Kurdish Region. From my observations, it is clear to me that Iraqi obsession with sect and tribe is a major obstacle to reconciliation and development. Of the two, I must say that I believe sectarianism is the greater challenge, based upon my observations during 110 days in Baghdad with my Iraqi Brigade. But even this is related to tribalism, in that sectarianism as practiced in Iraq has little to do with belief (although shia and sunni do have different beliefs) and much to do with group identity -- for the average Shia and Sunni are simply tags to identify group membership much more than flashpoints for theological debate. This sectarian group consciousness has become so heightened that Arabs I meet even in safe S_______ will only reveal their sect after great prodding, for fear of retalion (interestingly, this same phenomenon prevailed in Somalia when I was their 15 years ago -- in that extremely clannish culture, it is considered very impolite to ask someone about their clan affiliation, and even my local hire interpreter dodged telling me what his clan was -- I still do not know to this day).

On the other hand, pure tribal identity still plays a big role in Iraq. You can see this in evidence in Anbar, where attacks against Coalition and Iraqi Government forces have dropped precipitously after the tribal sheyks determined that Al Qaida was a bigger threat than the US and decided to forge an alliance with us. Another example is in the northern region, where the Iraqi units tasked with defending oil infrastructure were recruited locally, and do nothing to stop attacks on that very infrastructure, because most of the attackers are their relatives and fellow tribesmen.

There is an interesting counterpoint to the enduring nature of tribal loyalty in Iraq, however, and that is the Kurdish Region. As late as the 1960s tribal affiliation was still the dominate social identity for many Kurds - even to the point that the Iraqi regime was able to rally sizeable armed support against the Kurdish rebellion from among the Kurds themselves, by exploiting tribal rivalries and wooing tribal aghas and chiefs. Even as late as the early to mid-1970s, the great Kurdish leader, Mullah Mustafa Barzani, derived most of his power from his tribal base rather than from a political constituency (even though he was president of the Kurdish Democratic Party). Now however, a completely different situation prevails. While the tribes still exist and have some influence, they have mostly been emasculated of any real power. Furthermore, Kurds almost universally identify more with their ethnic identity than with any other source of identity, be it tribe, sect, religious affiliation (christian, Yezidi, Kakiye, etc) or State citizenship. However, all is not roses - to a certain extent, political party affiliation has supplanted tribal affiliation as a claimant to allegiance and a source of patronage, with the two main parties - the Kurdish Democratic Party led by Kurdish Regional Government President Massoud Barzani (son of Mullah Mustafa) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. Needless to say, the vast power of these two parties has led to friction - even major violence as in the civil war in the mid- to late 1990s -- and corruption. That said, the Kurdish Region is far better developed politically, socially, and economically than the rest of Iraq, due in no small measure to the leadership of these two parties. So the chains of tribalism can be broken, as they have been in the Kurdish region.

It doesn't always turn out this well, however. Somalia is another interesting case in point. Here, the power of traditional tribal elders was broken by the erection of the superstructure of the modern nation-state over the country. When this government was overthrown in 1992, people still identified themselves by clan, but the traditional clan leaders had lost all influence. The result - any s***head kid with an AK-47 suddenly was the real power in town - and tended to use that power against other people from rival tribes.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 31, 2007

Pinker on Sailer

Steven Pinker's "Inherit the Wind: Our Weird Obsession with Genealogy" is the cover story in\ the August 6, 2007 issue of The New Republic. Here's an excerpt:


In the struggle between society and family, the exponential mathematics of kinship ordinarily works to the advantage of society. As time passes or groups get larger, family trees intertwine, dynasties dissipate, and nepotistic emotions get diluted. But families can defend themselves with a potent tactic: they can graft the twig tips of the family tree together by cousin marriage. If you force your daughter to marry her first cousin, then your son-in-law is your nephew, her father-inlaw is your brother, your parents’ estate will be worth twice as much per grandchild, and the couple will never have to bicker about which side of the family to visit on holidays. For these reasons, clans and dynasties in many cultures encourage first-or second-cousin marriage, tolerating the slightly elevated risk of genetic disease. Not only does cousin marriage amplify the average degree of relatedness among members of the clan, but it enmeshes them in a network of triangular relationships, with kinsmen valuing each other because of their many mutual kin as well as their own relatedness. As a result, the extended family, clan, or tribe can emerge as a powerfully cohesive bloc—and one with little common cause with other families, clans, or tribes in the larger polity that comprises them. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has shown that the prohibitions against incestuous marriages in most societies are not public-health measures aimed at reducing birth defects but the society’s way of fighting back against extended families.

In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). The connection between Iraqis’ strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as “devoid of any patriotic idea ... connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever.” Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building. [More]



Overall, Pinker does an excellent job of synthesizing what I've been writing for years, with one lacuna, which I'll explain at another time.



My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 8, 2007

The Establishment candidates all want a bigger military

McCain, Obama, Clinton, and Giuliani have all called for more soldiers for them to play with when they come President.

Why? We spend 48-49% of the world's military budget. We have near absolute air supremacy and, in the unlikely event that an enemy tank army ever takes the field to challenge our tanks again, the outcome is likely to be the same as in 1991 in Desert Storm.

Okay, we don't have enough Boots on the Ground to permanently occupy a deeply hostile country. For example, we can't occupy Iraq and Iran simultaneously, but maybe, just maybe, that's a good thing. Especially considering that some of the top Presidential candidates are not what you'd call the most emotionally stable people in the world ...

So, where could they get more cannon fodder? The most obvious source are low IQ recruits. From 1992-2004, only about 1% of new recruits were let in with IQs below the 30th percentile (92) on the military's AFQT entrance test. The Army recently boosted that to 4%, and the Army Reserve appears to be even laxer. But does the modern military want cannon fodder or do they want effective warriors? The problem is that -- as the military has exhaustively documented over the decades -- the lower the recruit's IQ, the less danger he poses to the enemy and the more danger he poses to himself and his comrades.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 22, 2007

Yezidis slaughtered in Iraq: For years, to illustrate how little Americans know about the Iraq we've chosen to meddle in, I've been forecasting since 2003 that we'll all be learning more about, for example, the Yezidis: a religious group left over from the ancient Cult of the Angels that worships seven archangels, including Lucifer, whom they believe is just the victim of bad PR. And for years I've been wrong.

But, in the Middle East, all bad things come to he who waits:


In the northern Iraq attack, armed men stopped the bus as it was carrying workers from a textile factory in Mosul to their hometown of Bashika, which has a mixed population of Christians and Yazidis - a primarily Kurdish sect that worships an angel figure considered to be the devil by some Muslims and Christians.

The gunmen checked the passengers' identification cards, then asked all Christians to get off the bus, police Brig. Mohammed al-Wagga said. With the Yazidis still inside, the gunmen drove them to eastern Mosul, where they were lined up along a wall and shot to death, al-Wagga said.

After the killings, hundreds of angry chanting Yazidis took to the streets of Bashika in protest. Shops were shuttered and many Muslim residents closed themselves in their homes, fearing reprisal attacks. Police set up additional checkpoints across the city.

Bashika is about 80 percent Yazidi, 15 percent Christian and five percent Muslim.

Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a police spokesman for Ninevah province, said the executions were in response to the killing two weeks ago of a Yazidi woman who had recently converted to Islam after she fell in love with a Muslim and ran off with him. Her relatives had disapproved of the match and dragged her back to Bashika, where she was stoned to death, he said.


Do you ever get the impression that Americans and Iraqis aren't really on the same wavelength? That maybe we didn't exactly know what we were doing when we invaded Iraq to turn it into MacArthur's Japan?


On the other hand, some have argued that a bargain with Lucifer might offer the simplest explanation of George W. Bush's Presidency. Still, as Thrasymachus points out, conclusive physical evidence for such a theory is lacking. In The American Conservative, Gregory Cochran offers a more down-to-earth explanation.



My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer