Month: March 2022 Page 3 of 4

On March 9, 2022

There’s a good thread here, on how Russian prisons work. Go read it, and come back.

That's the single most suicidal logic in the world. It may be unclear on the international level, but it's obvious on individual one. Let me tell you about social structure and dynamics of Russian prison. The lowest position in the hierarchy is reserved for pariahs, the "cocks" pic.twitter.com/M8uGl5qWXZ

— Kamil Galeev (@kamilkazani) March 1, 2022

Now, I’ve never in been in prison, but I grew up in boarding school and I was near the bottom of the hierarchy most of the time I was there. I’ve also spent time in poverty in rough neighbourhoods and jobs, in which I was not near the bottom of the hierarchy, because I learned my lesson.

One of the best memories of my life is the day someone tried to push me around (reasonably, if you live in this ethos, I had been a coward and was known as one), and I realized I didn’t care how much I got hurt, but I was going to hurt him. My life got a lot better after that day.

At its simplest, the rules are as follows:

1) You must be willing to fight rather than be pushed around, even if you know you’ll lose.

2) Your word must be good: If you say you’ll do something, you always do it.

3) You protect your allies and friends. Again, even in fights you’ll lose, because if you don’t, you won’t have any allies or friends.

4) If you one of yours gets hurt or taken out, you do the same to one of theirs, and often, more than one of theirs.

The movie the Untouchables had Sean Connery state this ethos simply. It’s 15 second, watch it.

This is why I have said that, even though I think the Baltic states, for example, should never have been let into NATO, if Russia attacks them I support war, and if it goes nuclear, so be it.

It is at the emotional core of much of the disagreement over how far the West should go to help Ukraine. Ukraine was not in NATO. It was not in the EU. But for many Europeans and whites, Ukraine parses emotionally as “one of us.” And you don’t let one of us swing.

We didn’t give our word to protect Ukraine and I’m not willing to risk nuclear war over it. Others, feeling more of an emotive tie, are. This is also one reason why, during NATO expansion, so many people said something like, “Are Americans/Europeans/We really willing to die for the Baltic Republics or Poland (or Ukraine)?” What they were trying to say is that expanding an alliance to people we really weren’t willing to die for weakens the alliance, because what makes a defensive alliance work is that there’s no question that fucking with one of you means all of you jump in.

If you make that promise for someone for whom you’re not really willing to get the shit kicked out of you (or to die), and then you don’t keep the promise, even former members of your group, who were solid before, start becoming unreliable. “If they didn’t step up for Lithuania, will they die for me?” thinks Germany.

Next thing you know, your alliance is broken. This is why Russian requests to kick members out of NATO were a non-starter*: Once they’re in, kicking them out means threats can break our alliance. To others, the implication that Russia would get a veto over Ukraine was too far, for the same emotional logic. (Emotional logic is real logic, humans run on emotion, not reason.)

Note, however, that the code of honor also includes “keep your word.” NATO expanded, though it promised the Russians it wouldn’t. We broke our given word. When they asked us to remove most of the new NATO members, they too were acting on the code of honor: You said you’d do X, and you didn’t. Make it good, or else. When someone breaks their word to you, they must either make it good or be punished.

This puts us in a bind. We did break our word, but having accepted new members into NATO, we can’t kick any out without risking the entire alliance. This is one reason why we should never have expanded NATO.

We gave our word, and we broke it. There were bound to be consequences.

This is one reason why smart people have always opposed the US and its allies breaking the international laws they enforce on other people. The law is supposed to apply to everyone. Once people realize your word is bad, that it doesn’t apply to you, they not only despise you, they will certainly come to see no reason to keep your rules, because those rules are just a form of force. You’ve said, “We can do it, because we’re powerful and you can’t.”

And they say, “No, fuck you.”

So, when the West created the new country of Kosovo, despite the notion that borders are supposed to be inviolate, Russians were angered. So they started doing the same thing, over and over again. North and South Ossetia, Crimea, Ukraine. Because to not do it when the powerful do, is to show weakness.

This is also why Russia did not, and will not, give into sanctions. Even if sanctions hurt them more than the West, they still hurt the West. To give in is to submit to inferior status, to say, “You can do what you want to me and I’ll just take it.”

And, this is why Ukrainians are fighting hard. “Okay, fine, but we’re going to make you pay.”

The problem with all of this is that “honor societies,” let alone mafia societies (which is what Russia is, internally), suck to live in. They are horrid places. Russian prisons (and American prisons have a similar dynamic) are some of the worst places in the world. Even if you’re at the top, you’re never free of threat or fear.

Most of the good part of civilization is getting rid of this logic. It is why weregild was introduced, where, if you kill someone, you pay a fee to their relatives, in order to avoid the murder devolving into a blood feud, into the “Chicago Way.” Because if they put one of yours in the hospital, and you then put one in the morgue, well, they then have to put two in the morgue. You scare people with torture and rape and you kill their women and children, if the society gets sick enough.

Societies that live like this have a very hard time advancing, because they’re armed camps. They can only advance when a great tyrant or group arises who can say, “You all belong to me, and only I get to kill people” — and they have to make that stick. This is, sadly, most of what civilization has been. “I get to hurt people, and no one else does.”

To live in a good society, where the weak aren’t treated terribly (and the weak are often, y’know, the scientists and artists and all the people who make the world worth living in), and where even the strong are not in fear all the time, means getting out of this trap.

To do so, you start by treating everyone equally, and by keeping your own laws. If you say someone else can’t do it, you can’t do it either. This makes people trust you, and in time, trust each other. If you move from the rule of a tyrant to the rule of a group that enforces fair and equal rules, then you move into a place of trust. Fear goes down and down, and the society or civilization becomes a better and better place to live.

But unless there is only one society or group, there are always outgroups and the fear of what they do. Things like international law were attempts to make only group, one set of rules, and so on. In practice, the problem has been twofold. First, international law has been obeyed only by the weak — except when the strong have made a law it’s not in in their short term interest to break. The second is that some groups, for example the Chinese, weren’t allowed to meaningfully participate in making the rules. (Heck, in some ways, even Europe wasn’t. The US controlled half the world’s industry, and they made the rules.)

To create a good society, the powerful have to look to the long-term interest; they have to obey rules that are not in their short-term interest. If they are known to obey their own rules and to make fair rules, they are trusted by others and therefore, much safer.

The tweeter in the thread at the beginning of this post said that asking China to intervene with Russia was crazy, because we think they’re our enemies. But, while there are wrongs on both sides, we’re the ones who sanctioned them in order to cripple their largest tech company. We did that in part (this is the DC view) because they were breaking the rules of the international order, but they don’t regard those rules as fair or see that we are bound by those rules.

And so on.

The last important point is that this stuff is at the heart of the pathology of choosing really evil leaders. We often judge how a leader will protect us from outsiders based on how he treats insiders: Is he a mean bastard? One problem is that a mean bastard will spend most of his time ruling you, not fighting outsiders. The next problem is that if the leader has insiders, they aren’t you. Biden is a lovely father and a great boss, by all accounts. But you aren’t his son, his friend, or his employee. You’re an outsider, and to you he will be a bastard.

All of this emotion comprises the trap in which we find ourselves, as a species. We have to pick good leaders, who are kind and fair to people who aren’t in their group, and yet, are able to defend our group. Corbyn, for example, was not this. He was kind and fair and lovely and would not even attack people who were his enemies.

FDR, on the other hand, was more or less this — if you were white (he was a racist). He cared about all white Americans, but not really about blacks, and he hated the Japanese (the one ethnic group he did like was Chinese).

To live in a good society, we must make rules that are fair to everyone, and everyone must respect them. Rules that are ignored by both the leaders and the powerful destroy civilizations and lead to eras of internal and external war. Society must work for everyone, or it will eventually work for no one, and this includes global society.

We have chosen not to respect our own principles and laws and to create laws and principles that are not good for everyone who tries to operate in good faith. As a result, our societies are rotting from the inside, and on the outside, we are slouching towards multiple possible armageddons.

Be fair, be just, be tough, and be kind, or soon, there may be no humans left to be any of these things.

Correction: Commenter Dorian notes and is right: Point of order – it was never a Russian demand that NATO literally kick any countries out of NATO. Rather, it was that all NATO members pre-1997 expansion remove their forces from post-1997 expansion countries. The post-1997 expansion countries would still have the benefit of NATO membership and security guarantees, they just couldn’t be used as a base for foreign military infrastructure and troops.

Guerrilla Warfare: The Way of the Weak

On March 8, 2022

“War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.”
— Clausewitz, On War

The first and most fundamental principle of warfare is to know your goal. This applies to any type of war, anywhere, at any time, no matter what tactic is used.

Last year (this is a reprint, but one most readers probably haven’t read) , I was one of the first people to predict that Israel would lose to Hezbollah — because Israel’s stated goal was to destroy Hezbollah as an organization. Given that during a nearly two-decade occupation, Israel had been unable to destroy Hezbollah, it was laughably obvious that Israel wasn’t going to succeed this time. (It turned out that the magnitude of their loss was greater than I expected.)

In the Iraq War, the US has a similar problem: The goals that were achievable have been achieved (overthrowing Saddam). But the goals that remain are unclear: creating a democracy friendly to the US, establishing permanent bases, making sure western companies have the oil contracts. These remaining goals are probably not possible to achieve with the amount of military force and spending the US is willing to allocate. Therefore, it has been clear for a long time (since before the invasion) that the US would not “win” the occupation in any real sense of the word. Indeed, at this point, the US is reduced to praying it can leave and not have the country crack up in a hot civil war. That goal might be achievable.

So it is with guerrillas. Guerrillas have to know what they can do, what they can’t do, and what they want to do. The primary virtue of guerrillas is that it is hard to wipe them out. The primary weakness of guerrillas is that they aren’t all that good at straight up fighting; as a rule, a competent regular army will routinely hand out loss after loss to guerrillas. Guerrillas have to be content with picking off isolated units, with causing pinprick damage like bombs and snipers, and with disrupting weakly defended supply and rear units. But in straight-up firefights, with very rare exceptions, it’s usually pretty unpleasant to be a guerrilla.¹

We can take Clausewitz a step further. War is less the continuation of politics than the failure of politics. Nations and people engage in war when they feel they can get something they want more easily or advantageously with force than through other means.

If people feel that the occupation of their country won’t end peacefully, then war is inevitable. If certain groups wish to impose their religion, and know that it will not be allowed, then war is a route to their goal. If people want law and order, and occupation forces are unable to provide it, then a new government is necessary, and if one cannot be obtained through peaceful means, then it may be obtained through violent ones.

The failure of politics leads to war. The failure to provide law and order, the failure to rebuild infrastructure, the failure to provide belief in a promising future, the failure to align the interests of the occupation with the interests of the population…all of this sets up the preconditions for guerrilla warfare and rebellion.

Guerrillas in Iraq, for example, were fighting for a good position when the US leaves. This was clear in the pattern of attacks, which throughout the war have been much heavier on opposing Iraqi groups and Iraqi “government” forces than they have been on Coalition forces. Enough pressure has to be kept on the US to make the US leave, but the guerrillas know they cannot defeat the US in conventional terms. They can only cause more attrition than the US is politically capable of handling. So the goals of the various Iraqi armed groups might be said to be: “To convince the US to leave by making the cost of staying too high, and to be in a good position to fight for or negotiate for our place in Iraq after the US has left.”

In Palestine (another guerrilla war, for all that it is not called that), the goals of the two sides are as follows: For Israel, to crush the Palestinian resistance while establishing facts on the ground which will allow them to impose the most favorable settlement in a two-state solution possible; For the Palestinians, to not let the Israelis win.

Note that the Palestinian goal isn’t really to establish a Palestinian state. The Palestinians will take one if they can get a viable one, but they aren’t in a position to really pursue it. The goal is to not lose to the Israelis. (This is one reason why Arafat walked away from Clinton’s talks.) The Israelis have been occupying Palestine for decades now. They can clearly hang on for a long time. They aren’t going to be “forced” out; the Palestinians don’t have what it takes, and the Israelis have a high tolerance for low-level attrition losses.

The Palestine and Israel situation points out something important about the nature of guerrilla warfare: Guerrilla warfare is the strategy of the weak vs. the powerful. Palestinian losses and Iraqi insurgency losses are much higher, respectively, than those of the occupying forces. They always have been. The guerrilla’s equipment is not as good. The guerrillas, in most cases, are not as well-trained. They aren’t nearly as well-organized. They are just not as good at fighting and killing. In fact, the superiority of the coalition over the Iraqi insurgency, or of the Israelis over the Palestinians, is so striking that one wonders how it is that neither can actually really defeat their enemies.

Let’s move to that next, with a quote from the greatest guerrilla leader of the 20th century, Mao Tse Tung:

“Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy’s rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water, the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element, cannot live.”
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare

The relationship between locals and guerrilla troops is the most important point in Mao’s entire essay, and indeed the most important thing you need to know about guerrilla warfare, occupations, terrorism, and insurgency. If the movement has the support of the population, they cannot be destroyed. Period. No matter how many you manage to kill, there will always be more. Now, support doesn’t mean answering affirmatively to the question “Do you prefer the guerrilla movement” in a poll. It means practical support: Are locals willing to feed guerrillas, hide them, and act as their ears and eyes? The general estimate is that if a guerrilla movement has between 10 percent to 20 percent of the population of an area behind it, until you can break that support of the population for the guerrillas, any victories over them will be purely temporary.²

This doesn’t mean national support. For example, if 20 percent of the population of California supported a violent secession movement, that would be sufficient to allow it to operate relatively successfully. For much of the occupation Iraqi, Shia have mostly not been shooting at Americans, but Iraqi Sunnis have supported more than enough insurgents to keep entire provinces in anarchy.

Let’s examine what having support means. If you’re a guerrilla leader, you must do everything possible to build the support of the population. In Iraq, this has meant that such law as is provided is often provided by various militias; if someone rapes your sister, steals your car, or murders your son, you go to militias for help, and they help you. Sadr helped put some power back on line for Sadr city. But more than positive things, what it means is making sure that the enemy does horrible things to the population — but not too horrible. The killing of the mercenaries in Fallujah, for example, was a classic guerrilla move; carefully staged (including the pictures, which are clearly stage-managed) to cause an American overreaction. That overreaction occurred, Fallujah was eventually effectively destroyed, and horrible atrocities occurred. Sunnis then learned to hate Americans even more. On a lesser scale, every time an American soldier frags some old man at a stoplight, every time a girl is raped, every time there is “collateral” damage that takes out a wedding, all of these are grist for the guerrilla propaganda mill. Mao is relentless in his writing that one of the major jobs of guerrillas is propaganda, and that every large guerrilla unit (bearing in mind this was in the early 20th century) should have its own press.

It should go without saying, but apparently doesn’t, that if you don’t want to arouse more hatred, then doing things like torturing people, sweeping up large numbers of people who aren’t associated with the insurgency, and locking them up in a prison associated with torture from the old regime is working against your own goals. It’s the equivalent of handing the guerrillas supporters on a silver platter. Any atrocity that is not sufficiently large enough to make a specific person think, “There’s a good chance this will happen to me,” isn’t just immoral, it’s stupid. It is aiding and abetting the enemy.

As an army fighting an anti-insurgency campaign, there are two routes to take to deal with the population’s support for a guerrilla movement. You can try and win the population over largely with honey, or you can make the population so scared and powerless that they won’t, or can’t, support the guerrillas. The second method is a heck of a lot easier, though the first method has been used successfully, most notably in the Malaysian Emergency.

Let’s talk about the easy way first. Scare and weaken the population into no longer supporting the insurgency. The primary method here is mass killing, and removal of the population to camps. If a city (like Fallujah) is a problem, you destroy it entirely, and you kill everyone in it — or at least every fighting-age male. This is one reason why US marines would not allow men out of Fallujah in the run up to the final assault. Do this often enough, and people get the message that supporting the insurgency is a really bad idea. And if you’re willing to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of civilians, you’re bound to get a lot of the right people, along with a lot of the wrong people. Immoral? Of course, but it does work. Take other towns and cities which are troublesome, but not quite so bad, and move their populations to camps. This allows you to control the population in such a way that they can’t support guerrillas.³ Both of these methods were used by the US in the Philippines on a large scale. They worked. Wiping out a huge chunk of the population also worked for Russia against Chechnya, notable for inspiring enough hatred to spawn female suicide bombers, who were mostly avenging male relatives or lovers tortured to death by the Russians; and for Turkey against their own Kurds, a campaign notable for wiping out entire villages, killing the men, and raping the women. The camp strategy is currently being used by India against some of its indigenous guerrilla movements. A sufficiently ruthless commander could “win” the Iraq occupation in a few years, if given the green-light to commit massive atrocities and kill a few million Iraqis.

The ruthless strategy doesn’t work when you don’t have the stomach or moral imbecility for it (e.g., the US in Iraq), or when you don’t have the means to wipe out enough of the population (e.g., the Japanese in China). It also has the effect of wrecking the economy of the nation you do it to, which can be a negative, but doesn’t have to be. If you’re conquering a nation for its natural resources, you really only need enough natives to extract them, after all. And if there’s no other economy but your plantations, mines, and oil fields, then that just means the workers are cheaper.

The “kill them with kindness strategy” is harder to pull off. It requires more men on the ground, and those men have to have fire discipline. The attitude of US troops that they’d rather make a mistake and blow away an Iraqi family is the exact antithesis of the sort of fire discipline required to NOT alienate a population. You must be willing to take some losses you wouldn’t otherwise take in order not to hand propaganda coups to the guerrillas

You need more men on the ground because you must protect the population from the guerrillas. If you aren’t committing enough atrocities, then the guerrillas will either try and taunt you into doing so, or they’ll commit them for you; this is the method behind the apparent madness of car bombs and suicide vests. The guerrilla in this case is saying, “If you ever want peace and order, if you ever want to feel safe, you will have to let me rule because the enemy can’t stop me. The only group that can stop the killing is us, because we’re doing it, and the occupiers are too weak or incompetent to stop us.”

In a sense, this guerilla strategy is the mirror of the ruthless strategy. In the ruthless strategy, the anti-insurgency force says, “We’ll keep killing, torturing, and raping you in gross quantities until you stop supporting the insurgency.” When guerrillas do the same thing, it’s a retail version. (Although, as Iraq has demonstrated, the numbers can approach gross lots much faster than one would think. B52s aren’t needed to kill large numbers, they just make it easier.)

Safety is job one. If there is no safety in a country, the people will support whoever they think can provide it.

Job two is prosperity. The hard way requires that you flood the country with money, jobs, and prosperity. Important people (tribal leaders, Imans, village headman, etc) should be getting rich. Ordinary people should have jobs. Farmers should find that crop prices are up (support them if necessary, for God’s sake). They should recognize that they are better off under you than they could ever be under the guerrillas

The goal of reducing support for the guerrillas isn’t just about aid, it’s about informants. To break an insurgency, you absolutely must have informants. You need people telling you who are the cell leaders, warning you of attacks, etc. And you must be able to protect your informants. Every time I read that, in Afghanistan, some villagers who had accepted NATO help, or who were friendly with NATO, or who taught girls, have just been killed by the Taliban, I wince.

Job one in the friendly way is protecting your people. Your troops are expendable, but your allies — especially local influentials in the population — are not. It’s important to get this through one’s head: A soldier’s life is not worth more than a the life of a friendly local in an anti-insurgency campaign. Not if you want to win.

Create prosperity, maintain law and order, recruit informants, protect your allies.

So much for the strategy of an insurgency, pro or con. Let’s talk about the operational and tactical details, the stuff that determines whether Petraeus’s plan can work even in the short term, as just one example.

In general, guerrilla units disperse to operate: When the enemy is in over-extended defense, and sufficient force cannot be concentrated against him, guerrillas must disperse, harass him, and demoralize him.

When encircled by the enemy, guerrillas disperse to withdraw.

When the nature of the ground limits action, guerrillas disperse.

When the availability of supplies limits action, they disperse. Guerrillas disperse in order to promote mass movements over a wide area.
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare

When Petraeus flooded Baghdad with troops, what did the enemy do? They dispersed much of their force into the provinces. Dispersal operates at the highest geographic level like that, and at the smallest level. Let’s say you’re operating in urban environments and you encircle a group. They drop their weapons and disperse amongst the population. How are you going to capture or kill them unless people are either willing to point them out to you or you are willing to simply kill everyone? (Or every male, as the Marines did in Fallujah.)

Let’s say a guerrilla unit wants to move from city A to city B? Do they travel as a convoy? No, each man travels by himself, without weapons, in civilian garb, and once he reaches the city, they regroup and are rearmed by local cells or just by the local black market. You can slow this process down by the sort of methods the Israelis use, of dividing the country into cantons and restricting movement between them, but you can’t stop it entirely (and remember that the Israeli occupied territories are tiny compared to Iraq).

Let’s say there are no good targets. You simply don’t fight. But unless your enemy has enough forces to garrison every part of the country in such numbers that you can’t defeat any group in detail, you control all parts of the country where the enemy is not, and the population supports you.

What happens if the the anti-insurgency forces break up into smaller groups to pursue the guerrilla forces which have likewise broken up? Or what happens if you start putting small units in every little neighborhood, to provide law and safety? Sun Tzu and Mao tell us…

If we are concentrated while the enemy is fragmented, if we are concentrated into a single force while he is fragmented into ten, then we attack him with ten times his strength. Thus, we are many and the enemy is few. If we attack his few with our many, those who we engage in battle will be severely constrained.
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Guerrillas concentrate when the enemy is advancing upon them, and there is opportunity to fall upon him and destroy him. Concentration may be desirable when the enemy is on the defensive, and guerrillas wish to destroy isolated detachments in particular localities. By the term ‘concentrate,’ we do not mean the assembly of all manpower but rather of only that necessary for the task. The remaining guerrillas are assigned missions of hindering and delaying the enemy, of destroying isolated groups, or of conducting mass propaganda.
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare

So if the occupiers divide their forces, the guerrillas concentrate and attack in overwhelming force. Because guerrillas can move like fish in the ocean, which is to say, they can usually concentrate at the site of the attack without the defenders knowing because they don’t move as obvious formations of enemy troops, they will have tactical surprise, in almost every case. It is a testament to US military superiority (and air and artillery) that, despite multiple attempts to overrun various smaller US bases, the US has held on to them. But there is always a risk, because you can never tell when an attack is going to happen, and the enemy knows when you concentrate (they can hardly miss it, with the population as their eyes and ears) — but you can’t tell when guerrillas will concentrate and attack.

In addition to the dispersion and concentration of forces, the leader must understand what is termed ‘alert shifting.’ When the enemy feels the danger of guerrillas, he will generally send troops out to attack them. The guerrillas must consider the situation and decide at what time, and at what place, they wish to fight. If they find that they cannot fight, they must immediately shift. Then the enemy may be destroyed piecemeal. For example; after a guerrilla group has destroyed an enemy detachment at one place, it may be shifted to another area to attack and destroy a second detachment. Sometimes, it will not be profitable for a unit to become engaged in a certain area, and in that case, it must move immediately.
– Mao Tse Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare

Again, if a strong force is attacking, disperse, find a weaker force, and re-concentrate to attack it.

Let’s wrap this up, letting Sun Tzu, who wrote the first known treatise on military strategy, start us along the path:

Being unconquerable lies with yourself, being conquerable lies with the enemy. Thus, one who excels in warfare is able to make himself unconquerable, but cannot necessarily cause the enemy to be conquerable.
—Sun Tzu, On War

Guerrilla warfare is the strategy of the weak faced with the strong. It is also the warfare of an oppressed population against those who oppress them. These points can’t be stressed enough. Although a guerrilla movement needs nowhere near the support of a majority of the population, it can’t survive without substantial, popular support. The Taliban have many followers. So does the Sunni insurgency. So does Hamas. So did Hezbollah, when they were fighting a guerrilla war.

Whenever you are fighting a guerrilla movement of any power, you are also, effectively, at war with part of the population. On top of the strategic and tactical implications already discussed, this has moral implications that should be carefully thought through, and even more carefully as the percentage of support creeps up and past 50 percent, as it does in many cases. Does the will of the people matter? Do you have the moral right to force them to accept what you think is best?

This is the case even of movements at less than 50 percent. Perhaps the majority of the population doesn’t support the guerillas, and thus you have a moral mandate to fight them. But why is it that a significant minority is so angry they are willing to support this level of violence? If you don’t understand that “why,” not only will you have a hard time defeating them, but the phrase “tyranny of the majority” could have real resonance. Of course, the minority could be supporting the guerrillas because the guerillas have terrorized them into support, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they like you, either.

Guerrilla warfare is what the weak do when the strong have defeated them. It’s the moment when they say, “No, this isn’t over until I say it is.” At that point, you have a choice of putting the boots to their ribs until they submit to occupation, or you can try and convince them that fighting you isn’t the best path to the peace, prosperity, dignity, and self determination that all people want.

Or you can walk away, and let them rule themselves.⁴

War is indeed politics with an admixture of other means. Understanding those means, what their limitations are, what is required to use them and win, and the moral choices they will force on you, should be required of anyone who is in a position to commit a country or a people to war. Once let loose, the dogs of war often slip the leash of he who thought to control them.

Notes

Originally Published at BOPNews in slightly different form, back in 2004. Has been published in the Agonist and FDL at other points. One of my personal favorite articles I’ve written. Previous version at this site can be found here, but I’m reprinting so it goes out to email and RSS.

The picture at the top is of a female Kurdish soldier, almost certainly a guerilla, though I can’t say for sure. It is from this Kurdish gallery archive site, which is more than worth your time to visit.

Endnotes

1. Important aside: Hezbollah’s troops, while trained to operate as guerrillas, are regular soldiers. As one military analyst quipped to me: “What do you call light infantry trained to operate as guerrillas? Special forces.” Israel smashed its face in against a heavily-fortified, special forces army. Puts it in a new light, doesn’t it?

2. In the Revolutionary war, one estimate is that the rebels had the support of about a third of the population, the Tories about a third, and about a third just wanted all the guys with guns to go away. Note that the rebels did manage to field a conventional army, with the strong support of France. It is generally a good sign for an insurgency if it can support a regular army alongside the guerrilla resistance, again, because guerrillas can only win by wars of attrition (“To hell with it, it’s not worth it”), not through battlefield success. A regular army is not so limited.

3. Protecting the population may sometimes require setting up camps or fortifying existing villages. Because camps are used in the ruthless method as well, and because the ruthless method is used more often, they’re generally considered bad things. But they are usually part of the kinder anti-insurgency strategy as well, especially in rural areas.

4. The full text of Mao’s “On Guerrilla Warfare” can be found here. The section with most of the more generic advice (not particular to the Chinese/Japanese war) can be found here.

5. This isn’t always easy. For example, in Northern Ireland, the Brits would have loved to walk away. Problem was, the majority of the population wanted them to stay. Ouch.

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Thinking Out Ukraine Sanctions

On March 7, 2022

Question:

If you could not buy anything you wanted using Western currency, why would you sell anything to the West?

Western sanctions on Russia are fairly close to: “You can sell us oil, wheat, and gas, but we’ve frozen all your foreign currency reserves we can touch (almost all of them), and we won’t sell you anything that’s useful to you. Anyone who tries to do so using our system is committing a crime, even if not in one of our countries, and we will punish them.”

It’s hard to imagine that Russia is going to keep selling us what they have. Naked Capitalism reprinted a good article by Olga Samofalova (second half, you can skip the first.):

Stopping gas supplies to Europe is even more disastrous in terms of consequences for both sides. Russia will not be able to transfer West Siberian gas, which goes through European pipelines, to other markets. There is no gas pipeline for such a volume to China or other Asian countries. To send gas by sea by tankers, it needs to be liquefied, but Russia does not have so many LNG plants for this, or gas carriers too. This means that Russia will have to stop production. ‘In the western direction, if without Turkey, there is about 150 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia. Where will we put so much gas if we don’t supply it to Europe? Nowhere. We’ll have to stop lifting the gas. This means that the world market will lose these volumes, and immediately there will be a large deficit of gas in the supply-demand balance of the European Union,’ says Yushkov.

‘No matter what anyone says, Europe will have nowhere to take such volumes of gas from. The world is not able to increase production by 150 billion cubic meters. Europeans will try to switch to other energy sources. An attempt to switch to coal will fail, since Russia is also the largest supplier of coal to the EU. The Europeans will try to launch everything that is possible: all the shut-down nuclear power plants [to reopen], the closed coal deposits in Germany and Poland.’

Now, this isn’t quite accurate. One of the main reasons that Iran is finally getting a renewal of the Iran deal is that the West needs oil and gas supplies from Iran back on the market. But even so, there will be a huge effect.

The core thing to understand here is that we in the West don’t know how to handle supply shocks. The last generation that knew how was the Lost, and they’re all dead. No one alive even remembers a properly-handled supply side shock, as we mishandled the OPEC oil shock catastrophically, and even those people are mostly aged out, unless they’re 80 and in Congress.

The Covid supply shocks have pretty much proved it. We could go into all the issues like price gouging, monopoly concentration, supply chain dispersal, just-in-time, consolidated shipping, the hollowing out of the trucking industry, and blah blah, blah, but it doesn’t really matter. Bottom line, we aren’t handling it well. All we really know how to do is raise interest rates and use central bank policy to keep wages below the rate of inflation, thus making the majority of the population even poorer.

So what happens when Russia cuts us off from a whole pile of minerals, hydrocarbons, and food that we need? Russia is the number one wheat exporter. Ukraine is #5. Gas we’ve already discussed. Oil will spike. Energy costs will go through the roof. Most titanium comes from Russia and is used to build planes, and if Boeing and Airbus have cut Russia off even from repair manuals and spare parts, why should they let the West have any?

I’m not 100 percent on this, but if Russia reacts the way I believe it would be rational for them to act, then we will have a supply shock bigger than the OPEC crisis, especially as it is being added to the Covid shock. Our companies will, of course, use the opportunity to increase their profits even more and price gouge (something they mostly didn’t do in the 70s), and we will get massive inflation.

I lived through the 70s. In the late 70s, during a period of about two years, the price of candy bars (you can tell how old I was) went from 25 cents to a dollar.

This is likely to be worse.

The Russians are also just not going to pay back their debts to Western countries in any form they can use. A law has already been passed where companies owing money to countries with sanctions can pay in rubles to the Russian government, who will then handle any negotiations, for example. More such measures will continue. Freezing reserves amounts to theft, and Russia is not going to pay back thieves.

Russia will probably also break all Western IP. With some under-the-table Chinese help, they’ll then set up production.

Meanwhile, China is thrilled — whatever they’re saying. Xi recently told the Central Committee that China could not rely on world markets for food security. But as a locked-in junior partner with a land border, Russia is a safe provider, especially since a lot of markets will be closed to it, and as we mentioned, Russia’s the #1 producer of wheat. Oil and gas supplies can always be interdicted at the Straits of Hormuz by the American navy, but Russian land supplies are not so simple, etc, etc.

Now, let’s talk about the confusion of money for real economic goods. Money does a lot of things, but money cannot buy what a society cannot produce. Conversely, as Keynes pointed out desperately (and was ignored) anything a country can actually make, it can afford. So when you see things about money, or even stock markets, remember, China is the largest industrial state. Russia is the largest wheat exporter and a vast exporter of oil, gas, and minerals. Russia can survive this if they stop their economy from seizing up, because bottom line, they can feed and heat themselves. The food may be a bit boring, but it’s food.

China is hooking up Mastercard and Visa clients who were cut off with UnionPay and their Mir Card. This isn’t something that would happen if the CCP didn’t give the green light, not a chance. Russia’s SWIFT alternative and China’s are going to be hooked together. China’s banking system actually produces more loans than the US at this time, so they’ll keep the Russians afloat.

Many people think the Chinese will screw the Russians since the Russians need them so badly. They may, but I don’t think so. This is Western thinking, the same stupid, short-sighted greed that led us to ship the majority of our industrial base elsewhere, so a few oligarchs and politicians and consultants could get rich.

China needs an ally. They need good will. Give Russia cheap loans and help when they need it, be the country that helped them when almost no one else would or even could, and Russians will remember that for generations. China doesn’t need a resentful ally, they need a willing, happy, and healthy one. They don’t need an ally who they’re strangling with debt, and right now, loading Russia down with usurious debt in the middle of this crisis would make things worse.

Remember, people often fail to pay back debts they hate.

Contrary to Western propaganda, while there have been cases where China has loaned countries too much at too high rates, generally, Chinese development loans have been below market rates. This is because what the Chinese want isn’t a revenue stream, it’s resources. So they’ll build your mines, your factories, and your transportation networks, and throw in some smart cities, hospitals, and schools too, as a form of domestic subsidy. What they’re going abroad for is resources.

So my guess is that China doesn’t screw Russia to the wall, helping cripple them further and making Russia resent them during their moment of need. They aren’t modern Westerners. That doesn’t mean they don’t expect things in return, they sure do, but what Russia needs and wants to sell them, lines up perfectly with their needs, and there’s no need to screw Russia. In fact, I expect Chinese technicians to flood Russia and help with their infrastructure issues, oil industry, and so on. It’s enlightened self-interest and enlightened beneficience. To use econospeak, this is a positive sum game.

China and Russia have issues, sure, but they need each other massively, and each of them almost perfectly fixes the other countries weaknesses and needs. Russia will definitely be the junior member of the Alliance (and Russian tendencies to think in realpolitik geopol terms mean they get this and won’t even even resent it, as long as they feel fairly treated.)

The wildcard here is India. India and Russia have had good relations, indeed, have been friends, since independence. The Indian people themselves have genuinely fond feelings for Russia that they don’t have for the West or the US. But Indians hate the Chinese because of their territorial disputes.

If I were China, I’d just go to Modi and settle the territorial disputes generously. Give them a bunch of land, lay it on thick. I don’t expect them to do this, because it’s an emotive issue, but most of the land the countries dispute is basically worthless. It just doesn’t matter if India has that land. If China were to do this, it could probably move India into its alliance group, or at least keep it neutral.

So, let’s assume that Russia survives sanctions. Western elites don’t think it will, but Western elites are used to sanctioning powers like Iran and Venezuela, not a great power that China needs in its pocket, which has a huge land border with China. It’ll be ugly.

Assume Russia retaliates and there’s a big inflation shock. The West tries to get China to enforce sanctions, China says all sorts of mealy-mouthed stuff, but basically doesn’t do anything. The West then has three options:

Full scale sanctions on China. If they do this, the OPEC crisis will look like a walk in the park. It will be a great depression. China is the world manufacturing center and the West cannot, yet, decouple.
Targeted sanctions, like the chips sanctions that damaged Huawei so badly. These won’t make China change its mind, but it’s what Westerners do, especially Americans, so I assume this is the default.
Try and cut a deal.. “All sanctions off and some stuff you want if you cooperate.” This is probably the best option for the West, but I don’t think China will go for it, because ever since Obama, the US has said that China is actually enemy #1. They’ll probably figure (I would) that once Russia is taken out, all deals are off and China is next in the crosshairs.

So what happens is probably #2 (targeted sanctions), at first. The West hurriedly moves some production back home (but not much, rentier societies are too high-cost for manufacturing) and a ton to low cost western allies, like Mexico. Once it feels confident, it ratchets up the sanctions, and we are in full cold war. I’d guess four to eight years, but it’s really hard to time these things. You can know something is inevitable, like this cold war, and not be sure when. I’ve been talking about this for years, and now it’s started. The Cold War is on: It’s just only with Russia right now. It will spread to China. If the West gets too emotional and foolish and tries to force China right now, it could happen with a year.

So we move into a new Cold War, in the middle of terrible inflation and possibly even a depression. One can expect most of the South to go with China/Russia. They may have voted against Russia in the UN General Assembly, but their arms appear to have been twisted hard. As soon as its credible to move to the monetary area China and Russia are setting up, they’re going to move their monetary reserves en-masse — unless they’re a Western client state, because the West has now repeatedly stolen other countries reserves.

This means most of Africa. Most of South America will want to, as China is their primary source of development loans, but they may be too scared. Any Asian country which isn’t an American ally will go. India is an unknown.

But at the end, you have China which is world’s most populous country, with the biggest industrial base, and even (in purchasing power parity terms) the highest GDP on the other side, along with Russia, and the Number 2 nuclear power, likely still with a massive military, and a ton of southern resource states, all oriented around China. (Though some, like the oilarchies, will try to remain neutral.)

I don’t see this as a competition in which we are the top-dog. Feels like a 60/40 thing to me, and we’re the 40. For too long, we have thought that money and financial games were the same thing as an economy, and that we could just buy whatever we wanted so it didn’t matter who made it, grew it, or dug it up. That world is ending. It was killed by us, with our sanctions, ironically.

Welcome to interesting and shitty times. Put aside your belief in our superiority: We’ve been top dogs for about 200 years now, in some places 500 years, so it’s hard. But all periods in which one group is dominant end, and we’re probably living through that end.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 6, 2022

By Tony Wikrent

On March 6, 2022

Putin the Apostate. We thought he would be our bastard. Then, he became his own bastard.

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 3-1-2022]

never seen weaponization of money on this scale before…you only get to play the card once. china will make it a priority to need no USD before going for Taiwan. it’s a turning point in monetary history: the end of USD hegemony & the acceleration towards a bipolar monetary order

— Dylan Grice (@dylangrice) February 27, 2022

[Twitter, via Avedon’s Sideshow 4-6-2022]

Forget the macho hawkish bleating, here's how the West directly helped Russia invading Ukraine. First, we refused to invest in renewable energy FOR DECADES. Second, we turned the USSR into an oligarchy. Third, we made a world safe for those oligarchs. Fourth, we expanded NATO.

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 2, 2022

Matt Taibbi, February 28, 2022

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there…. I’ve been bitter in commentary about Putin in recent years because I never forgot the way the West smoothed his rise, and pretends now that it didn’t. It’s infuriating also that many of us who were critical of him from the start are denounced now as Putin apologists, I think in part because we have inconvenient memories about who said what at the start of his story. The effort to wipe that history clean is reaching a fever pitch this week. Before they finish the job, it seemed worth getting it all down….

Read More

Open Thread

On March 5, 2022

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent threads (aka. no Ukraine.)

Three Principles for Ukraine & for Great Power Politics

On March 4, 2022

Ukraine is not morally worse than Iraq, Yemen, or many other wars.
Russia is not more evil in its foreign affairs than the US.
Neither fact is whataboutism.

The general cases of these also apply. Most countries that seem good are not good. They are weak, and if they were powerful, they would not continue to act good. (The personal application of that principle will be the subject of another post.)

The point here is that there is NO ethical case for treating the US and Russia differently in terms of sanctions and response. Iraq was just as bad a war crime as Ukraine. So what is happening is not about ethics, it’s about other things. For many Europeans, it’s about fear (that’s another post), but for the US and its allies, this mostly about power: The actual “principle” is “our wars and annexations are good,” and “you can’t do to white, blonde Europeans who we consider part of Western civilization what you do to brown people who aren’t part of Western civilization.”

This is NOT an argument that what Russia has done is not an evil war crime. But countries who are not Western allies, like India, China, and most of the global south, even if they will condemn the actions, do not see this as anything worse than many actions taken by the US and its allies and see no reason to cooperate with sanctions unless those sanctions also benefit them, as they know that this is not about justice, but about power.

Justice applies equally to all. It commands respect. When the ICC declares it is opening a war crimes investigation against Russia, but didn’t against the US, everyone who isn’t a Westerner (and many of us, too) laugh bitterly. Why didn’t the ICC try Cheney and Bush and so on? Because the US threatened to invade if they did. (No, I am not kidding. Look it up.)

Next: Deals made when a nation is weak, do not hold if they are not actually in the country’s self-interest. This is at the heart of the China/US conflict, by the way. The “rules-based” world order was created when China was weak, by the people who put the boots to China for over a century. The Chinese don’t see why they should respect it. They will do so for as long as it is in their interest, and not one second further.

“Don’t keep deals that are bad for you,” is also why Russia is likely to break all Western IP. The only reason why they wouldn’t is that oil and wheat exports are still not subject to sanctions. Do that, and the IP goes. Then China helps Russia reverse engineer and manufacture Western goods, while smiling and denying, since they too hate Western IP. (In WWI, the US broke German patents. The core of the American chemical industry is based on this fact. After the war was over, they did not say, “Okay, we’ll go back to respecting them.”)

I remember the run up to and first period of the Iraq war. Then, as now, pointing out inconvenient truths was regarded as traitorous, and people said, “But Iraq is an evil dictatorship and Saddam, Saddam, Saddam.” Saddamn was an evil dictator, but Iraq was still a war crime (as is Ukraine).

Those same truths, by the way, were acknowledged by almost everyone as true ten years later when it didn’t matter, and many of those people are making the same mistakes now.

This is Great Power politics. The decisions on both sides are not being made for reasons of justice or ethics. That does not mean there isn’t an ethical case, but you can’t say, “We get to have wars, and everyone who isn’t our ally doesn’t.” That’s just the argument of a bully who says, “Only I get to beat people up!” and everyone who is ethical and not ruled by the emotions of the moment knows it.

A world at peace will happen (if it ever does) when powerful nations hold themselves to the same rules they hold the weak to, and not before.

Ukraine and the Coming Inflation

On March 3, 2022

Brief post. Articles about inflation have been coming out, and they’re right, inflation is going to get a lot worse because of the sanctions on Russia, especially when Russia retaliates. If you can afford to stock up now, do. If you want big ticket items other than, perhaps real-estate, you should buy now. If you have a business which needs certain key goods or processed items, buy what you can now.

Russa isn’t really an industrial power, except for arms, but it provides not just energy but an array of minerals that are key to industrial production. While there will be workarounds to sanctions, you should still expect this to hit costs. Russia is also the largest exporter of wheat in the world, with Ukraine as #2, and you can expect food prices in general to keep rising.

Further, it’s hard to say how attempts at enforcing sanctions with China (who will resist), and perhaps with India and other countries, will cause unpredictable inflation spikes in other products.

As for real-estate, the affect is hard to entirely predict. So far, the British have resisted urging to truly sanction Russian money (because it would collapse London real-estate and hurt the City badly), but we’ll see if that continues. Whatever the case, a lot of Europe may be subject to real-estate price reductions due to sanctions, and this might be true in New York. I lack enough expertise to be sure, you should look into it if it concerns you.

Then there is the issue of Chinese money. China won’t be subject to serious sanctions yet, the West can’t afford it. However, the Chinese themselves may be wary of future sanctions, seeing them coming and that may dry up some of their massive foreign investment. Others might increase their investment and seek second passports, so they can flee when the time comes, but I think that’s less likely to be massive than it would have been pre-Covid. Whatever the advantages of living in the West, they are outweighed by, “won’t control the plague” for most, especially older Chinese who control most of the money.

All of this is complicated by the fact that the real-estate market is changing, structurally. Covid was used by private equity and other institutional investors to snap up real-estate, including single family homes and other types that traditionally have not been institutionally controlled. If there is a drop in demand, they will simply hold as much off the market as necessary to adjust supply and demand and allow them to over-charge. Their real risk is financing, but even as the Fed increases interest rates, it will continue special operations to give the rich and large corporations essentially free loans and money, so I don’t think they’ll actually be paying market rates. (We need an article on how this sort of action vastly increases the odds of collapse, and I’ll try to get to it soon.)

Times are going to get worse, not so much because of the Ukraine invasion, but because of its fallout. By itself, it would have changed as much as the Iraq war did (some important things, yes), but because it is being treated as existential and a cause for massive economic war, even centrists have realized that it is the “End of the End of History” (which, of course, never ended).

Welcome back to history and to interesting times.