"Tribal loyalty is stronger than national loyalty"
LTC Jack Pritchard, US Army, to the Wall Street Journal.
As globalization accelerates fragmentation, we will continue our
race to the bottom where
primary loyalties -- loyalty to a tribe, gang, clan, religion, etc. -- take precedence over loyalty to the state. This inversion will bleed into economic behavior as the state begins to hollow out, often resulting in the organic emergence of complex parallel/parasitic economies. Given that these economies also fuel the disruption from guerrillas that hollows out the state, the cycle can self-perpetuate. Philip Shishkin,
writing for the Wall Street Journal, provides us with an excellent description of one such guerrilla economy in Northern Iraq:
After months of investigation, Col. Pritchard and his team uncovered the answer [for why oil was being stolen from government pipelines]: The operations were part of a sophisticated network of savvy thieves, unruly desert tribes, bomb-planting insurgents, corrupt security forces, cross-border smugglers and operators of small domestic refineries. At those refineries, U.S. officers believe, raw oil is turned into fuel and sold on the black market, where it's used in vehicles and to power home generators. This loose confederation has all but crippled production in Iraq's northern oil fields, even as the political future of this ethnically mixed city and its underground riches hangs in the balance.
I suggest that someone should send LTC Pritchard a copy of
Brave New War. This shouldn't have been a surprise FOUR years into the war.