Edit:  It appears that Iraq has threatened to sue the Kurds in a Turkish court of arbitration. Iraq threatens to retaliate against any buyer of the oil. Hence, the tanker has no port of call.

But since the Iraqi state is “over”, like a bad relationship, the assertion that the U.S. blocks a sale may not be a complete error.  Indirectly, the opposition of the U.S. to Kurdish statehood  has an effect. Speculatively,  the U.S. could grease the wheels.

My personal frustration caused this slip. It’s hard being a detached predictor when you find you really care about one of the parties.

The tanker, named “United Leadship” (really!) has been floating around the Mediterranean for a couple months already. Read backwards, the chronology is something like:

• Now: Lingering off Moroocan coast.
• June 2, changed course.
• May 23, left Turkish port of Ceyhan.

Originally, it was headed for the Gulf Coast. But the U.S. won’t let it unload anywhere. Bear in mind that, stubbornly, the Kurds actually like us. They have American-style movie movieplexes. Unlike the rest of Iraqis, they don’t consider us intruding infidels.

American foreign policy is so so bureaucratic, finely detailed, sooo…planned, that I wonder if the  experts have managed to  include a numerical  “like factor”, some kind of metric that indicates the likelihood of the various actors actualy having a cultural affinity, which means, having a drink at the bar, and saying things like “pass the salsa”, “I’ll have a little more of that”, or “What are you doing Friday night?”

It is the level of intuition, drowned out  in a school of policy papers, that distinguishes the intelligence community, which has tremendous intuition, from the policy makers and executors, who would probably do just fine if divorced from a system with all the fluidity of a pyramid construction project.

I once sat on a plane with a young woman who was part of a State Department group negotiating with Japan about whale catches. Every question was met with the response that it was impossibly complicated and incapable of explication to a mere rube like me.This was accompanied by a sourpuss facial expression indicating the crudity of my approach. That was about 25 years ago.

Keep talking, guys. It’s better than what Nero did.

No less an authority than Robert Baer, former C.I.A. operative and author of The Devil We Know (Crown, 2008), expressed frustration with the opacity of the Iranian political system  (YouTube interview, 36:12->). On July 26, 2009, then President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenged Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by removing the intelligence minister, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, who traditionally reported directly to Khamenei ( YouTube interview, 39:40.)

But the greater challenge actually preceded, on July 17th, when Ahmadinejad appointed Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie as his chief of staff. The alleged association of both men with Hojjatieh, a secretive religious sect, was a challenge  to the religious establishment, which Mashaie verbalized  in the following two years. Besides his public pronouncements, which comprised heretical conflations of religious and secular, there was this:

• Khamenei is the boss. While secular aspects of the Iranian government are allowed a bounded independence, Ahmadinejad’s rebellion was actually religious, an area where the mullahs brook no trespass.
• Shia “Twelvers” believe that the twelth, Hidden Imam, Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Mahdī is not actually dead, but hidden, and will return to save the World. It appears direct analogous  to the Second Coming of Christ.
•  Ahmadinejad and Mashaie believe they have special, personal relations with the Hidden Imam, to the extent of carrying on personal conversations with the figure.
•  As with other religions where some individuals claim special relationships with  deities and accessory spiritual figures, this arouses negative feelings among those not part of the circle. This is particularly significant because of the hierarchical nature of Shi’ism, where pronouncements about religious affairs are restricted to religious scholars, particularly the highest rank, ayatollahs.

There are two ways to take this. Either Ahmadinejad was nuts, or there is a lack of understanding of the Iranian political system that created the surprise.  Ahmadinejad was a protege of Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, the most orthodox, hardline, and perhaps powerful of the Iranian ayatollahs. So, in passing the orthodoxy test, and then rebelling, Ahmadinejad fooled a lot of smart people.

As for motive, suggestions have been made that Ahmadinejad was trying to preserve a political constituency after his term, or build an alternative  power base. The nature of his religious beliefs does not concern us. What does concern  is why he thought the challenge was a viable strategy, while in our Iran playbook, such a strategy is disallowed.

Theories of political power, as conceived by thinkers of the liberal arts tradition, seem to fall short with Iran. This is an attempt to plug the gap with a little supplementation. It’s a little lengthy. I’ll make reference to modern systems theory, prediction, and the “group mind”. But no math, I promise.

When an alien steps out of his flying saucer, he approaches the nearest Weimaraner, activates his helmet vocoder, and says, “Take me to your leader.” The idea that a society of people has a leader may be the social extension of bilateral symmetry into the social spectrum. You have a left side, a right side, a head that leads, and a tail  of obligations that must be dragged along by both the left and the right. Some species, such as lizards, have developed the ability to shed the tail, which must be envied by politicians.

The words of this are part of the gestalt of government, elaborated by historians, political theorists, and legal scholars. Words are the means of expression, and one has to consider whether they are favored too much. With the rise of the brain sciences,  starting with 19th century introspective psychology, psychoanalysis, experiment, and now, mathematical modeling of neural networks, there has been an evolution in the description of the underpinnings of mind, away from the primacy of words, and towards the modeling of the human brain as a mathematical system, a mesh of billions of elements that transmit, receive, excite, equilibrate, oscillate, and quiesce, according to mathematical descriptions that are only now being divined.

In system theory, there is a process called state reduction that is used to create simplified, usable descriptions of complex systems. It can be used to simulate a system, and to send information about a system somewhere else. We would like to do that with our brains. While animals do it with sounds, postures, and facial expressions, we have the facility of speech. It was the result of hard-pressed evolution trying to keep up with the ever-increasing need of the complex brain to share.  A liberal arts education does not make brain science accessible, except in the form of “physics for poets” courses, which are highly recommended.

Everybody wants to attack a problem from their own particular rut. Historians go fact-heavy, venturing  contemporary  analysis mainly in the form of analogy. Political theorists borrow from the social sciences, but give little weight to the minds of the constituents. Vilfredo Pareto did, but his contribution seems in the process of erasure by the sands of time. Law applies the algorithmic approach, envisioning government as a gigantic state machine, which, if in proper working condition, methodically cranks away until it reaches a (temporarily) final state, such as a policy, law, order, or adjudication.

None of these analytic approaches accurately describe how the system works. The participant may not need one. Only required is  what to do next. How the individual decides may not have expression in words, a situation  likely to be missed by the liberal arts, with which words are the only objective currency.

Recently, it was discovered that the shape of a flock of birds has aerodynamic purpose. They do this without discussion. They don’t know anything about aerodynamics. They may not think about it at all. It is a collective, automatic behavior. The army ant is also interesting in this regard. Put a few dozen on a table, and they organize to run in a circle. In the hundreds, the behavior becomes more complex, with swarms branching at optimized angles. These are mindless behaviors. Having minds, we like to believe that we possess free will.

Next: power structures that defy formal description.

In Shia Islam, it is considered essential for the adherent to choose a mullah to follow. The mullah serves as both an interpreter and spiritual guide. No less an authority than Ayatollah Mohammad Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi has stated that the average Iranian is incapable of religious adherence without such guidance.

As with  Catholicism and orthodox Judaism, this has resulted in elaborate Biblical canons.  In some religions, active manipulation of the symbol systems has ceased, relying on dialogues from long ago. Some religions, notably Judaism, are open to it, but Talmudic writing has dropped off. In Sunni Islam, it is forbidden. In Shi’ism, symbol systems are still actively manipulated with great energy. Religious beliefs are still in the process of synthesis, or what Shiites might prefer to be called interpretation, accomplished by complex symbolic manipulations of a kind distinct from the Western secular tradition. There seems to be a keen aesthetic, both of the writings and the credentials of the writers. Regardless of our sympathy or lack of toward the results, Shiite pursuit of religious scholarship is a highly intellectual affair.

Muqtada al-Sadr is the son of Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, who, quoting Wikipedia, “ at ten, was delivering lectures on Islamic history, and at eleven, he studied logic.”  He was a direct descendant of Muhammad, entitling him to wear the black turban, a blood distinction among ayatollahs. In other words, Muqtada’s pop had a genius I.Q. This is  useful in a field where, merely to be admitted to study, one must know the Koran by heart. The Wiki article states that he is of both Iraqi and Iranian ancestry. This is more important than having Italian roots  in the U.S. It is extremely important.

It appears that, while he has fire in the belly, Muqtada al-Sadr did not inherit his father’s remarkable gifts. This is not to say he’s unintelligent; merely that he is not a mental giant. Starting the Mahdi Army gave him his first opportunity for religious authorship, which came as a statement about the disposition of booty. Fighters were permitted to take whatever they wanted, provided they tithed a fifth of it.

Perhaps he was inspired by the abject poverty of his followers, but it did not last long. As Islam respects property rights, religious authorities, to whom he was obligated by religious and class ties, probably forced a change.

The sparse history of the Mahdi Army is dotted with hostile actions varying from small to large, but with little or no political articulation. Consider the alternative: grandiloquent speeches and development of an independent political philosophy. The absence of it, against a background of almost constant small-arms actions with some escalations, indicates an al-Sadr with little to say,  one who lacks an inner voice. He could have grabbed the mic any time he wanted. According to The Middle East Quarterly, “…the large number of Shi’ites who follow him do so not because of his status as a marja’ or religious authority, but because for them, he is the symbol and the personification of Sadr’s legitimacy. Shi’ite Islam is hierarchical. ”

This goes along with his background as an undistinguished religious scholar, who, between 2007 and 2011, studied in Iran, it is thought, to burnish his religious credentials so as to become an ayatollah. He still isn’t one. The bar is high. Mere executive talent isn’t enough.

In February 2014, in an incredibly flamboyant and surprising gesture, al Sadr resigned from public life in a handwritten note. As with previous communications, it contains no political articulation. Perhaps it’s hard for him to do. But the handwritten note, which astonished so many of his followers, is not organic of himself or his organization. It suggests  the strategy of a more intellectual, cunning thinker, someone to whom the flowing script of Arabic would have more meaning.

Political speech writers are de rigueur in the U.S. Political platforms are influenced by political strategists. There are even some political dynasties. But Muqtada al-Sadr is considered by his followers to be a descendant of Muhammad, and he is bound to a theocratic class, largely based in Iran, that has no comparison with anything in the West.

Touchingly, al-Sadr has stated that he is opposed to Iranian influence in Iraq. This ingenuous stance is very much appreciated here. But he remains very much a facet of Iran’s power projection. Read the section of The Middle East Quarterly article titled “A Hidden Hand?”

Next: how Iran’s political ecosystem facilitates deception.

No successor to Maliki named; fencing the problem offers guidelines for analysis of the problem were described. But since this might seem like something you could throw on a spreadsheet, “It’s a People Game” explained why it is not so.

If we  pretend we have a formal system, a subtopic called “clue analysis” has to be part of it. This will be about gleaning everything you can from what you read and hear. Expect to see many revisions of this.

Since clues often seem like sparkling gems amid the mud of official announcements and newscaster drivel, it is important to keep them in perspective. This is where the conspiracy theorist goes awry; he gives clues an independent life, with too much weight, driving and sustaining a complete theory. Classic examples of these are the JFK “single bullet”, and the World Trade Towers falling straight down. The conspiracy proponents understand physics better than they do people. They are preferentially attracted to things they  understand, because they aren’t trained thinkers.

If you are a trained thinker, you will be attracted to things you don’t understand, without being captured by them. So let’s proceed to what caught my eye, and how it fit with a view of regional political ecosystems that has also  been under construction.

Clues related to these subjects will be discussed throughout the day:

• Muqtada al-Sadr
• Iraqi parliament walkout
• Iranian Political Ecosystem

Both Iraqi and American sources now claim Baghdad is penetrated with sleeper cells.  In retrospect, Tariq al-Hashimi may have been one of them.  Yet the vibe we have been receiving is that al-Maliki is too stiffly partisan to be president of Iraq; hence, someone else must be found willing to work with people who would like to see him dead.

This is an interesting case: propaganda that has no author. It seems  the result of collective wishful thinking, a vibe that went viral.  Even unintentionally, news has a bias.

The methods described in connection with the Iraq problem seem like a prescription that you could give to the most logical thinker in your organization. Maybe you could just closet him with SPSS, an expert system, or an A.I. language like PROLOG, watch the mushrooms grow, and, after a while, come up with a solution that gets you the corner office you’ve been lusting after.

This is really the Holy Grail of prediction, to mechanize judgement. But the most successful attempts at this have been in the area of crowd sourcing, not systematizing what an individual should do.

Ali Abdullah Saleh was president of Yemen. In early 2011, he came under international pressure to vacate the position. The intelligence community became curious when this would happen, so a question was posted to “Forecasting World Events.” Saleh had repeatedly promised to leave, and feinted with statements and trips, always returning to his office. So the FWE question was carefully worded as to the conditions defined as equivalent to vacating the presidency. Dead was one of them; permanently incapacitated another. Another condition (subject to my memory) was signing an abdication in another country.

By complete coincidence, five years prior to this, I was testing camera lenses in my basement. I needed a target with some fine detail. I grabbed a copy of the NY Times, and saw a full page spread halftone of Saleh sitting in a palace chair in an immaculately tailored western suit. Inwardly, I smirked, and said to myself, “This is a guy who cares about his skin.” The picture was taped to a door, and remains there to this day. Every time I was in the basement, I stared at Saleh, and marveled at his suave Western demeanor.

But those  who specialized in studying Saleh knew him as a person of minimal education, who ran one of the largest militia in Yemen. To them, perhaps, Saleh’s immaculate suit was the shallow disguise of a Yemeni tribesman. I weighed the suit more heavily, as a kind of aspiration. Upon reflection, I may have integrated it with his statements about terrorism, and his early desire to ally with the U.S. in combating it. That, too, could be taken with a grain of salt, as a means of protecting tribal dominance, rather than  concern with the world at large.

In June 2011, Saleh was injured in a bomb attack on his palace. Although his injuries were initially described as minor, it emerged that he had shrapnel near the heart. In that time frame, Saleh reiterated that he would step down. But was it different from his other promises and feints?

It clicked for me. FWE had a forum, where I exclaimed, “He has seen his own mortality!”  I dialed my FWE pie chart to near 100% that, by the near-term date choice, he would be out and gone for good. Unfortunately for my FWE accuracy score, he eluded the terms of the question. He went to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. He said he would go to the U.S., but he returned to Yemen. While he formally handed office to his vice-president, rumors of his power, running the country with his militia, continued to swirl. The actual situation was unapparent.

Months later, it became clear that the former vp/now president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, had actually acceded to power, which he holds to this day. The administrators of FWE might now concede I lost on a technicality. But does it advance the science of prediction? Unfortunately, no, because it satisfies neither:

1. The law of large numbers, as with crowd sourcing, or an individual like myself making hundreds of such predictions.

2. A subset of predictors with identifiable characteristics, i.e.,  Myers-Briggs personality profile, or other aspects of a predictor’s background.

A   personal characteristic that might be useful, in aggregate, to satisfy “2” might be the ability to identify a liar, i.e., a disingenuous affect. There are people who are extremely good at this. I may be one of them, but I never trust myself, because it doesn’t seem quite fair.

If you become a predictor, and make a prediction that is justified by fair use of the tricks of the trade, you are bound to encounter a heckler who wil assail the fallibility of each of your datums.

Your datums are things you read, things people said, personality assessments, things that have happened,  things that appear to be happening,  trends, and fact-fences. Taken individually, each of these datums is of low quality. This is to be expected of open sources, save the occasional assassination where the body is clearly on display.

So how do you answer your heckler? The answer lies in the realm of both pure and applied mathematics:

1. The Central Limit Theorem.

2. Techniques of data fusion.

Unless you have a particular interest, there is no need to delve deeper. A confident look, and a “read it and then we’ll talk” should suffice. You’ll probably never hear from the guy.

If you happened to read the last post as soon as I put it up, you might have seen some rapid-fire edits. Besides proof reading, there was, initially, the suggestion that Maliki’s actions might be motivated by something other than stupidity. Then I realized that the wording was suggestive of conspiracy, i.e.,

“Maliki is secretly paid off by the Iranians”, “Maliki siphons Iraqi oil money”, or even, “Maliki wants the dissolution of Iraq.”

These are examples of conspiratorial embellishments, and run contrary to the most useful tool of all analytic thought, Occam’s Razor:

*The most simple explanation is most likely to be true.*

Everything that is happening in Iraq can be explained without resort to hidden conspiracy. On the other hand, there is obvious (not hidden) conspiracy, by the Iranians, and, known by the nature of the politics, of Iraqi politicians. Only the details are unknown, and relatively unimportant in dissecting the problem.

Hamid Karzai has admitted to getting “bags of money” from both Iran and the CIA. In our part of the world, that would point to conspiracy. But there, bags of money are a way of making government function. Perhaps traffic jams in Baghdad are caused by bag men making the rounds. But if everyone is conspiring, it takes the attractiveness out of overarching conspiracy theories.

A delicious paranoic movie, as seen by a conspiracy theorist, is Pascali’s Island. Since it stars Ben Kingsley, you know it’s good. No spoilers here.

Fencing the problem is an important part of the predictor’s toolkit. Sometimes the fence is made of facts; other times, pseudo facts, things that have higher probabilities than the swirling cloud of amorphous possibilities.

Since the Sunnis and Kurds have abandoned parliament, one part of the fence is that they are out of the picture. The other part comes as the answer to the question, “Who is left who cares?”, to which the glaring answer is, Shiite factions, who remain a shifting cloud of alliances that is hard to see into with open sources.

But the swirling cloud has  a useful fence.  Iran has three  distinct presences: the IRG, which supports the “legitimate government” of Iraq,  the Qom religious establishment, and the Mahdi Army. Each is tasked with accessing a different part of the Shiite spectrum.

The roots of the Mahdi Army are the poor underclass of Baghdad, providing an easily manipulable paramilitary tool. The Mahdi army was formerly sponsored by the Qom religious establishment, but appears to have been spun off in February, when “firebrand cleric” Muqtadā al-Ṣadr disowned it in a handwritten note. No amount of cynicism can be excessive here; al-Sadr may have been touchingly concerned about the elderly Sistani’s health, and whether his own contamination by worldly affairs would allow him to ascend the clerical hierarchy.  But with levers of power having shifted in a more muscular direction, al-Sadr is back.

The inertia of coherent groups with shared interests provides some degree of predictability. One has to be careful with individuals. Even those who appear to be rigid can make sudden reversals. Others are perpetual ciphers. The general drive of self-interest always plays a part. But since the prize is not a pot of gold, which can be a solitary enjoyment, but power over others, self-interest is not easily defined either.

The sophistication of the Iranian approach, of appealing to multiple blocs with differently authored approaches, is impressive. The Iranians have been out thinking U.S. policy makers for years. Maliki, who is “not a cleric”, has a hand-tailored Iranian interface designed just for him, the IRG.

Let’s paint a picture, and see how it holds together:

1. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s highest ranking cleric, wants a new government. Since the main problem with the present government is with other factions, this suggests he wants a “big Iraq.” His self interest could be that, while he is a big religious authority in a small country, his influence would be diluted by the large religious establishment of Iran. It would be a simplistic error to assume he is not motivated by good will. But the external result is the same.

2. The rumors that Maliki’s election was the result of Iranian pressure have been persistent. If he is a puppet, there are all degrees of puppetry, ranging from a long term money maker like Charley McCarthy to the the merely idolatrous Castro. Maliki’s policies toward the Sunnis and Kurds, which seem almost purposely designed to make Iraq fall apart, may have been inspired by Iranian influence, or the desire to disengage/marginalize/subjugate the Sunnis. As the saying goes, even paranoids have real enemies.

3. The Mahdi Army, which is clearly an Iranian proxy, has been reactivated, in the sense that the Qom religious establishment has decided to give it a push. While none of the Shiite factions, or any factions in Iraq, adhere to what we call fair play, the Mahdi Army is something like the Paris Mob of the French Revolution.

An interesting analogy with Ukraine presents. Vladimir Putin, an intelligent man, is aware that absorption of a country with hostile elements imports instability. The Iranians, also intelligent, are aware that absorption of the whole of Iraq presents the same problem. It appears they want to peel off the bottom. Given the sophistication of their strategies, they seem likely to succeed. It will have a little wrapping on it to avoid the stigma of annexation.