JOURNAL: Homo Economicus Goes to War

Richard Oppel, writing for the NYTimes, has a good background article on the uptick in the US military's adoption of global guerrilla theory called, "Iraq's Insurgency Runs on Stolen Oil Profits" March 16th, 2008. Choice quotes that depict guerrilla entrepreneurs:

...money, far more than jihadist ideology, is a crucial motivation for a majority of Sunni insurgents, according to American officers in some Sunni provinces...

"It has a great deal more to do with the economy than with ideology,' said one senior American military official, who said that studies of detainees in American custody found that about three-quarters were not committed to the jihadist ideology. "The vast majority have nothing to do with the caliphate and the central ideology of Al Qaeda.”

In Baiji, dozens of active insurgent groups feed off corruption from the refinery, said Lt. Ali Shakir, the commander of the paramilitary Iraqi police unit here. 'If I give you all the names, your hand is going to be tired” from writing them down, he said.

Effects of systems disruption (a feedback loop that feeds the above):

Capt. Stephen Wright, who works at the refinery with Captain Da Silva, is concerned about whether there may be unseen problems looming, like the sort of fatigue that ruptured a propane unit in January. “If something happens to this refinery from neglect, you won’t have fuel for eight provinces,” he said, “and we’ll have 6,000 unemployed Sunnis, who are people we definitely don’t want unemployed.”

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

"for naught. The value the US national security establishment puts on new ideas (despite the centrality of thinking/ideation is to 21st Century warfare) + $2 dollars will barely buy you a cup of coffee. What little new thinking that is adopted today will be washed away in the debates over the massive budgets for conventional weapons systems and bureaucracy (which are increasingly useless in this new environment)."

The counterpoint to this is in the Wall Street Journal:

quote:

The U.S. is at the receiving end of a massive margin call: Across the economy, wary lenders are demanding that borrowers put up more collateral or sell assets to reduce debts.

The unfolding financial crisis -- one that began with bad bets on securities backed by subprime mortgages, then sparked a tightening of credit between big banks -- appears to be broadening further. For years, the U.S. economy has been borrowing from cash-rich lenders from Asia to the Middle East. American firms and households have enjoyed readily available credit at easy terms, even for risky bets. No longer.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120554473788438679.html?mod=hps_us_whats_news

:end_of_quote

The hope for Global Guerrilla and related type policies being adopted is that they will surface as what Stephen Jay Gould characterized as "hopeful monsters."

Basically, the shock of severe financial disruption will so disorient the status quo that Robb, 4th Generation Warfare, and related type ideas will surface as the only viable techniques left.

[The Buffalo In Da' Midst]

Stan Goff, Feral Scholar, put it this way:

"The unfolding economic crisis — which surprised the mainstream commentators and analysts, but about which those crazy leftists have been Playing Cassandra for a decade — is now firmly off the tracks and roaring toward some abyss.

When these things hit, the peasants have a tendency to seize pitchforks from the barns and form scary mobs at the city’s edge. Only in this case, the peasants have been barracked in the low-density exurbs, cleaned up and provided with technocratic educations, provisioned with thousand-mile food and entropic toys, called middle-class (whatever the hell that ever meant… but they believed it), then saddled with the debt that fueled their colossus-cars and, likewise, the runaway train.

The somnambulence of this sector is about to end.

Poor people alrady know the crisis; but the most dangerous potential resides within Suburbia, the political center of gravity in the US.

From yonder financial ridge, where the gran manje had thusfar shushed one another’s feverish conversations, the cries of anguish are being heard in the ‘burbs. The hot-shots are being eaten by bears. We may all be eaten by bears. The ruckus is rousing Levittown.

“The shit,” as we say in Academia, “is on.”

The question, one of the big questions, is what will the peasants do?

That depends, really. If they hear only from demagogues, then they will behave like demagogic mobs. When populism took hold in the US at the turn of the last century, “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman led the mobs who beseiged their creditors (rightly so) away from the banks and out to lynch Black people. Hitler led his peasants into the industrialized slaughter of Jews and Slavs… one might call it Genocidal Keynesianism.

Not having an answer to these questions, my two-cents is this. Start right now explaining that this crisis has a home address: Wall Street.

It also has a religion: property. I don’t mean property like your house (though they probably own that) or your clothes or your grandma’s china. I mean forests and prairies and development properties and strip malls and factories."

In Full
http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2008/03/17/peasants-with-pitchforks/

[Duncan Kinder]

A symptom of creeping Global Guerrillaism:

Matthew Yglesias has just posted an article on Black Swans:
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/black_swans.php

Perhaps the only person to be more surprised than Yglesias himself that he has been called a guerrilla would probably be Robb. Yet this posting illustrates the seeping of global guerrilla ideas into the collective unconscious.