Douglas Farah notes how non-state actors like Hezbollah are able to sustain themselves in semi-autonomous regions.
One of the great successes of the Islamists, particularly the Shi’ites, is the ability to create separate states within weak and failing states. The prime examples are Hezbollah and, as the Washington Post chronicles today, Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq.
One could argue that there are groups within the Iranian intelligence and security apparatus that also form non-state groups. The alliance of these elements, with no formal power, to ally in transnational, borderless associations and alliances, is what poses one of the largest threats to the Middle East and beyond.
The weakness of the states that allow these groups to flourish gives these groups, along with Hamas and other Islamist and non-Islamist organizations, the priceless ability to provide social services, remedy injustice and corruption and generally make people’s lives better on a measureable level.
At the same time, the states in which they reside do not have the strength to drive them out or confront them. Hezbollah was able to launch a war the state of Lebanon probably did not want and certainly could not win.
For Pennies A Day
Let me focus your attention on the third paragraph. In light of my newfound understanding in terms of development and aid provided recently by the altruistic folks at Gapminder, the United Nations official poverty line is 1 dollar a day. Let's call that the new world standard poverty line. By the same standard, $10 a day is middle class. I'm not remembering precisely what the bell curve distribution was on that score (I'd have to fast frame through an hour of online video) by I believe that the median is somewhere around $5-7. Those of in the US are living with an order of magnitude more moola per capita around $100/day.
So let me do a little sepculation about the price of freedom in Sally Struthers terms. For pennies a day, we could, if we had similar values, fund an insurgency or a church or a school or give direct aid to many many millions of people. When you see how many hundreds of millions of people we're talking about, suddenly the tremendous appeal of the Aid Business becomes apparent. So let me rub my hands together conspiratorily and think about what I could do.
For the amount of money I spend on Netflix, Gamefly and Showtime every month, which is about $30 bucks, I could fully fund one household at the UN poverty line. Now such a family is not likely to do much, they're subsistence level. If I upped the ante by a factor of ten, then I'm doing something. For $300 bucks a month, I've got one family, and more towards the way I'm thinking here, one soldier.
Second Fallujah saw the demise of 1,000 insurgent fighters who had previously controlled a city of 200,000. It took the USMC about 6500 troops, 10 days of intense fighting and 6 weeks of house to house searches to clear that city. I underestimate the US cost, but you get the picture. If the town is right, I can own it for $300,000 a month. The economics of assymetry are fairly appealling, no?
Now we all know by now that Congress has approved something on the order of $90 Billion above and beyond ordinary military operating expenses for Operation Iraqi Freedom. So today I am going to make a suggestion, based upon my reading of the various cockups of our full-blown military exercise in Iraq, that strategically...(pause).. strategically we ought to start thinking about buying up villiages, cities and towns. That now that we've recognize some limits of shock & awe, that perhaps it's best to fight fire with fire. Now we go back to Farah's second paragraph.
The US Department of Theater Conflict
I don't really want a return to the ways of Oliver North. In other words, no more CIA headed secret missions. I would like some of the Rumsfeldian / Petreusian military to have its operations expanded. That is to say, convert ways and means of 101st Airborne's Counter Insurgency operations into a permanent branch of the military. That means military advisors, special forces and money for massive bribery (to be blunt) and recruitment.
As part and parcel of this kind of Counterinsurgency weapon, we're going to have to change the rules of the State Department. Which means if we are ultimately going to be about destabilization and working with non-state actors in order to even the balance of assymetry, there are some very high level working principles that are going to be violated. So the point of this is to make the previously covert and unspeakable part of the overt and undeniable, which is to say subject to public and political accountability. We keep struggling with the nature of war and the fight between the Congress (well not really) and the Executive has to do with the scope of our placement of military personnel and the cost geopolitically and economically.
So I would envision a new Cabinet Level department that has elements of State, Intelligence and DOD that handle sub-Strategic threats. I think that I would split the current organizations roughly in half. One half would be Strategic global threat assessment and the other half would be this rapidly deployable counter-insurgency paramilitary force that can live in-country and work hearts and minds, while always being able to call in the shock & awe of the Strategic as a last resort. This would give the US the ability to put 30,000 boots on the ground anywhere, anytime and deal with rebel forces in such regions.
The conflict between Israel and Lebanon is a perfect example of the kind of war we might see for the next generation. This is how I would inject the United States into those conflicts. We always have interests, but we don't always need aircraft carriers, submarines and 4 year wars of occupation to defend them.
Here's a scenario that I would envision. We say to a regime we have a severe disagreement with: here's the diplomacy option. Deal with it or face sanctions. Here's the deadline. If you fail, it's war. But not total war, we're not going to take over your capital or put in a puppet dictatorship, we're going to destabilize your southern border and chop off a piece of your autonomy.
We might say to Sudan, we don't think you deserve sovereignty over the Darfur region. So we're going to make a deal with Chad, Libya and the Central African Republic that will allow them to annex this part of your country. We're going to establish a front west of Khartoum and strategically defend it with B-52s and we're going to bribe your government officials in the region. You will lose control of this area for at least 10 years based on the damage we're going to do in 1 year.
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