View 450 January 22-28, 2007 (original) (raw)
This week:
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Tuesday
Wednesday
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Friday
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Sunday
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
I find myself with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Thanks to all who have recently subscribed, and great bunches of orchids to those who have renewed their subscriptions. Subscriptions have been the difference between scrabbling to stay alive watching savings dwindle until I finish these books, and being able to work on them at the proper pace while keeping this place up. My thanks to all of you.
We have about 140 - 165,000 "circulation" (i.e. unique visitors who look in here at least once a month but usually considerably more often). Public radio stations say they average about 2% subscribers. We're not doing quite that well, but the number of subscribers is slowly growing. We also have a very influential readership, so I expect this is all very much worth while. It is a lot of work.
Maintaining this site does not cut much into fiction writing now, even though we have both this -- I dislike the ugly word blog but I suppose since this was arguably the first blog I may as well submit to the name -- and Chaos Manor Reviews which is the successor to my 30-year column in BYTE (and continues to appear in foreign languages, notably at Nikkei Business Publications, as well as here). There is only so much creative energy in a day, and both my major fiction projects, Inferno 2 and Mamelukes (the fourth Janissaries novel) are moving along. I expect both to be done by summer, and I doubt that working full time on them would get them done a lot earlier. Some things have to be thought about. Inferno 2 is, as Niven observed the other day, a very ambitious work. Of course all my books are "ambitious" in that I hope to do more than merely entertain (but if they ain't entertaining the other stuff ain't much use). The Falkenberg series has been used in US military counter insurgency training classes, so we must have got something right there.
We don't sell many products here. The following is an endorsement. I get a small fee for each nasal pump sold through the link here. It's not a lot, and I recommended it well before they offered me a commission; I will admit that I run their advertisement more often now that they have done so than I would have otherwise:
It is allergy season here, and once again I can recommend:
I have been using it daily and that seems to be helping a lot. Some of what I thought were sinus problems were arthritis sending fake signals. That seems to be nearly over, deo gratia; now my sinus problems originate in my sinuses. This nasal pump works.
Following is a repeat from an earlier view:
Strategy of Technology
I have set Paypal up to allow you to buy Strategy of Technology in PDF format. The price is $6.95, which was arbitrarily chosen. The button below "knows" what you are ordering, and automatically sends me the address you ordered it under and notification that you paid. I will then email you a copy. The file is about 1 megabyte.
My enormous thanks to several readers who converted the html files to pdf format. For those who don't know, The Strategy of Technology (1970; University Press of Cambridge, Mass.) was formally written by Stefan T. Possony and Jerry Pournelle. Francis X. Kane, Ph.D., (Colonel, USAF, Ret.) was an unacknowledged co-author; Dr. Kane was Director of Plans for USAF Systems Command at the time. The book was adopted as a text at USMA (West Point), USAFA (Colorado Springs), and both the Army and Air Force War Colleges, and was there for several years. It was also used in some courses at USNA (Annapolis) and at the Navy Post Graduate School. The book was written with general principles in mind, but the examples were chosen from the Cold War period. It was revised over time and all the revisions are incorporated into the pdf. version. The principles remain valid even though the examples are a bit dated. I don't hesitate to recommend it for anyone interested in the future of strategic doctrine.
Strategy of Technology in pdf format:
Here endeth the money grubbing commercials.
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I suppose it is time to think about what to do after we bug out of Iraq.
The worst possible scenario is that we begin to cut and run; Israel bombs Iran; Iran actively enters war against the United States in retaliation; and God alone knows what happens next. Iran, at the moment, is moving away from the US as Great Satan, and is probably closer to a working democracy than any other Muslim nation other than Turkey. The government and the clerisy in Iran hate us; but the middle classes don't, the students don't, and most of the upcoming generation want to be part of the West. There are not many who think the best thing that can happen in education is to sit barefoot on the floor memorizing the Koran.
Obviously a few bombs -- ours or Israeli -- can change all that. People don't like having their country bombed, and are generally not very grateful to those who do it, even if it's done in the name of some high cause. Nothing unites a country like a common enemy, and nothing will unite Iran like a war with the United States. One would think this obvious, but I see many signs that the neocons either do not know this, or don't much care; and this is frightening.
The Democrats are not going to allow us to win in Iraq. This is not treason; they just don't believe we can do it, and the best thing to do when you are in a hole is to stop digging. If victory in Iraq be possible at all, it will, I think, require levels of commitment that the Democrats will not support (and the Republicans are unlikely to ask for). Victory will also require more skillful application of those resources than the history of this war leads us to expect. I need not go through all the terrible errors, starting with the appointment of the inexperienced and incompetent Bremer (read his book: he tells you he was inexperienced and you don't have to read far to realize that only an incompetent would accept an assignment for which he was so unprepared) and continuing year after year.
Victory in Iraq will require recruitment of an occupation army. My daughter (former Captain, US Army Intelligence) tells me there is the equivalent of about 2 regiments of Gurkhas in Iraq now; they mostly work for private security firms, although some are Her Majesty's Gurkhas. I do not know what it would cost to hire the Brits to go recruit and train about 10 more regiments of Her Majesty's Gurkhas and then rent them to us, but it would be about the most effective way I know to create an occupation constabulary that had no interest in conquest yet has a history of success. This is all idle speculation. Neither a Republican nor a Democratic Congress would do such a thing, and the Brits are not likely to help to that extent anyway. Yet short of about ten regiments of occupation constabulary I do not know what can be done.
Example: middle class Sunni areas of Baghdad are neglected by the Iraqi government. Trash is not collected. Fires are not put out. Banks cannot open. Routine policing isn't done. Ordinary crime rates soar. The hope is, one presumes, that the Sunni will abandon their property which can then be taken over by Shia seeking payback for centuries of oppression. This goes on not half a mile from the Green Zone. American troops are not going to pick up the garbage and do routine policing in those districts. We need occupation constabulary who can protect contracted fire, police, and municipal service people who report to an occupation authority, not to the "democratic" government of Baghdad. It means having semi-permanent occupation government.
General Petraeus knows this; but knowing something and being able to do it are two different things. Petraeus has the right experience and the right instincts; had he been put in charge instead of the egregious Bremer we might well be on the road to victory. I think his tragedy will be to have been sent in too late with too few resources. God knows I wish him well.
I suppose victory in Iraq -- well, at least avoidance of complete disaster -- is still possible, but one wonders whether it can be achieved with the resources the new Congress will put at the disposal of an administration nearly unexcelled for both arrogance and incompetence -- worse, what C. Northcote Parkinson called tertiary injelititis:
�the tradition of British medical science is entirely opposed to any emphasis on this part of the subject [treatment]. British medical specialists are usually quite content to trace the symptoms and define the cause. It is the French, by contrast, who begin by describing the treatment and discuss the diagnosis later, if at all. We feel bound to adhere in this to the British method, which may not help the patient but which is unquestionably more scientific.
C. Northcote Parkinson, "Injelititis, or Palsied Paralysis," Parkinson�s Law.
The employees in such companies are inoculated and infected with what Northcote C. Parkinson calls `injelititis', a disease with a strange combination of incompetence and jealousy. There is no healthy competition among employees to perform better and a depressing, cursing and melancholy atmosphere is pervasive.
Injelititis, or Palsied Paralysis recounts the life and death of corporate and government institutions. Injelititis is a word that Parkinson made up from Inferiority and Jealousy; it is a character deficiency in people that can bring about the decay and death of organizations they work for. The basic mechanism is that the carrier of Injelititis would try to move himself or herself into a position of authority (because of the inferiority complex), having obtained which he or she would try to surround oneself with individuals non-threatening intellectually or professionally (because of jealousy.) Parkinson thus formulates it succinctly, "If the head of the organization is second-rate, he will see to it that his immediate staff are all third-rate; and they will, in turn, see to it that their subordinates are fourth-rate." Parkinson describes the stages of the organizational disease, the symptoms from which they can be deduced, and the possible approaches to cure. These include medicinal (injecting people into the organization which possess qualities such as Intolerance, "... obtainable from the bloodstream of regimental sergeant majors and is found to comprise two chemical elements, namely: (a) the best is scarcely good enough (GGnth) and (b) there is no excuse for anything (NEnth)."; and surgical means. The last stage of the disease is terminal: "Infected personnel should be dispatched with a warm testimonial to such rival institutions as are regarded with particular hostility. All equipment and files should be destroyed without hesitation. [...] As for the buildings, the best plan is to insure them heavily and then set them alight."
Once the cut and run begins and the inevitable happens, we will begin trying to fix the blame on who lost Iraq, etc., etc.
But before that happens, perhaps we ought to be looking at a strategy. What do we do when we find we cannot continue in Iraq and it is indeed time to withdraw? What should our strategy be then?
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Subject: anarcho-tyranny and such
Dr. Pournelle,
Don�t know if you�ve heard about this <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,246060,00.html> yet, but I thought it was pretty jaw-dropping, even among tales of incompetent and overzealous prosecutors.
-David Scott
A prime example. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Anarcho-tyranny is the future.
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And my daughter (Dr. Jennifer Pournelle) says, regarding surges and Gurkhas:
Yeah...You know, when the Brits did this in 1916, the ottomans kicked them back to the Persian Gulf--and then they brought in the Indian Army. I've read most of the correspandance from the time. Back then, the sheiks were still in control, so at the slightest sign of "unrest: they'd fly over & drop a few bombs on a mud fort, cordon the area, and then send when of those multilingual boy's own officers in to negotiate. But even with half the Indian army on the ground, they complained constantly of troop shortages, viewed the place as ungovornable--and finally pulled back to Kuwait & the Gulf.
And here we are today...The Ottomans couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, the Monarchy couldn't do it; the Baathists couldn't even do it without a constant bloodbath & a running war with Iran. I don't think we can, either...
Jenny
To which I can only say, I said all that before we invaded. Presumably among the chicken hawks and neo cons who advised us to get into this war there must have been some plan? Some reason to believe we could do what the Romans, the Persians, the Ottomans, etc. didn't do? Isn't it time to come forth with that plan?
I do not know if a constabulary occupation force can rule in Iraq; I am quite certain that without that, they will just have to be allowed to fight it out. Without us. And I am quite certain that the Congress won't allow us to recruit and train an occupation constabulary.
But then I always did agree with Adams, that we are the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own. Establishing democracy in the Balkans, Iraq, Somalia, and Chad may make people feel good at the prospect, but it is not the business of the people of the United States of America. We had far more interests abroad when the Seventy Years War was on, but that's over.
I hate wasting blood and treasure and I hate presenting the Army with what will be called a military defeat.
But it looks to be time to consider what happens when we realize we have to get out. What then?