Every totalitarian state has a distinct character, which may change over time. Nazi Germany was characterized by competitive fiefdoms, with division of domains adroitly juggled by Hitler to prevent combination against him. In this sense, privileged individuals had considerable latitude of personal choice, as do oligarchs. Private lives also existed, with some finding sanctuary in the churches.  See Conversation: Growing Up in Nazi Germany, with Frederic C. Tubach, and Willy Schumann’s Being Present: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany.

In Germany, immediate total control was opposed by a Germany that was one of the centers of western civilization. The compact density and interconnectedness of German society required an approach with concealment as one of the core attributes. And much extant human development in Germany required preservation for the benefit of the new state. Perhaps if it had gone on longer, Nazi Germany would have reached the pervasive control that the Soviets achieved in short order.

Outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the Soviet Union was a vast, primitive place. Serfdom, officially abolished in 1861, was replaced by something like indenture. So there was nothing to keep but the soil to grow the “New Soviet Man.” The organizations of control, of which the KGB was one in succession, have always been instruments of the Party.

After the Bolsheviks consolidated power, and Trotsky was exiled, there was never again a center of power outside the Communist Party. After Stalin consolidated power around 1924, the fiefdoms that existed within the party were weak and fragile. They were limited by the deliberate strategy of the purges, which was to elevate leadership from the party cadres, use them for a few years, and then liquidate them. An interesting research question would be whether Stalin’s purges were motivated more by a psychological disorder, or as a rational strategy to maintain his hold on power. Some Kremlin visitors were informed that it was a conscious strategy with affordable costs. Pavel Sudoplatov, in  Special Tasks, p298- , gives the Doctors’ Plot a chessboard quality that contrasts with the perception in the West of a simple antisemitic pogrom. In Sudoplatov’s account, Stalin used antisemitism as a mere tool to implicate the actual targets of his purge within the Party.

So the Cheka, MGB, NKGB, SMERSH, KGB, etc., were no more than the oppressive instruments of the “will of the Party”, which changed over time. Lenin is generally considered to have been a better human being than Stalin. Nobody knows how many died in the Red Terror, perhaps as many as 1.5 million. but this  was a fraction of the Purges.  But this is enough to divide the character of the Soviet security services into three big periods:

• The “Little Terror”, my term, for the Red Terror, motivated by the practical goal of obliteration of a recalcitrant culture.
• The “Big Terror”, also my term, inclusive of Stalin’s Purges, which was many times worse. To illustrate the character of the times, the MGB had the “informal” autonomous authority to execute ordinary Soviet citizens without even a “make-believe” hearing. Sudoplatov offers a darkly amusing anecdote. This is the source of the image of the “commissar with a pistol”, not James Bond’s SMERSH, which existed for only a few years.
• The “Post Terror” period, which began with Khrushchev and continued until 1991, with implementation of nonlethal methods of social control.

Little, Big, and Post are  terms motivated by the need to simplify, to step back from the point of view of the ideologue, who could write volumes about it.  Social control in today’s Russia borrows elements from the above, used in a very occasional and “judicious” fashion. The occasional nature of it can be a strong argument in Putin’s Apology. You can’t compare twenty million dead with a Kremlin critic, Kara-Murza, who is poisoned twice and then permitted to seek treatment in the west.

Before Glasnost, Russia had one other reformation. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev gave the  “Secret Speech”, “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”. This repudiation of Stalin marked the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw. It had a  limitation inherent in Khrushchev’s former role as  one of Stalin’s implementors. But it was genuine. In our rush to vilification, we might miss that Khrushchev had seen too much killing. Perhaps he didn’t want to go out that way.

With the alternatives of letting people speak their minds (a little), and harsh repression, Khrushchev chose a little conversation. Perhaps if more gentle (meaning nonlethal) methods of control were available, he would have chosen them, or been  pushed to use them by other members of the Politburo. (In deference to his son Sergei, who lives on Long Island, let’s give Nikita the benefit of the doubt.) But in the U.S.S.R. of 1954, nothing was known of alternatives.

Like so many other fine technologies, the answer had to be imported. The import came from East Germany.

Next: The Stasi; Innovations in Modern Social Control.

A continuation of Plan to Defeat ISIS, Part 2, this is prompted by (Reuters) Exclusive: U.S. weighs deploying up to 1,000 ‘reserve’ troops for IS fight, which suggests a new military strategy is in the offing.

The most famous quotation of Carl von Clausewitz is “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” With multiple translations to english, there is question by some scholars as to whether von Clausewitz actually wrote this, or meant what he wrote. In the age of Hegel, some say, it could have been a mere debating point. But you can find it in bold print on page 22 of the “obsolete” translation of Colonel J.J. Graham. This is why General Mattis said, (Face the Nation) “If you cut the State Department’s budget, then you need to buy me more bullets.” And, (CNN) “More than 120 retired generals and admirals signed a letter Monday pushing back on the White House’s proposal to make major cuts to diplomacy and development.”

Even though von Clausewitz never encountered stateless warfare, On War is still the one of the ultimate wellsprings of military thought. Conceived in the age of massed formations, muskets, and cavalry, he was somehow able to distill the principles of warfare in a manner that transfers over centuries. Nevertheless, new principles arise. Military thinkers naturally want to constitute these in a way commensurate with his clarity of thought.

Since the reforms of the “Rumsfeld Doctrine”, the U.S. has shifted away from emphasis on heavy forces, with massive firepower, that require long lead-times to deploy, and massive logistical tails. It has moved sharply in the direction of lightweight forces, capable of almost momentary deployment. This is because of the change of perception of potential threats, which held rigorously until  Ukraine.

But there is a “doctrine gap” between SEAL raids and conventional deployments, meaning, no guiding principle for brief deployments substantial forces. In the U.S., the beginnings and ends of interventions are marked as political events, even if they never actually occur. Every strategic move in Iraq was marked as a political decision. The withdrawal of the last American units from Iraq was marked by a picture.

The gap exists partly because, until recently, there was a technical gap between the capability for commando deployments and the conventional. The Osprey aircraft, other hardware innovations, and basing in Kuwait offer alternatives. The doctrinal gap remains, partly due to  the political process, the shared understanding that war is a serious thing, requiring public deliberation and common assent. The downside is lack of agility against ghost-like opponents, and “telegraphing the punch.” If you’re not into boxing, this means a preparatory arm movement that cues the opponent on when and where a punch is coming.

The extreme of this was in the Vietnam War, when, due to infiltration of the government of South Vietnam by the North, almost every deployment, even by helicopter, was known to the North before it occurred. In Iraq, it is not a problem now, but it will become a problem soon. When the temporarily deferred clash with Iran’s proxies occurs, infiltration of Iraq’s government will have an analogous effect. This is why, in Is Iraq Headed for Another Civil War?,   I wrote,

The Shiite Iraq that follows the passing of Sistani will not be a permissive setting for American operations. Other parts of it, such as the Kurdish area, might be. But the kinds of cultural shift and political combinations that would make a viable rump state are prohibited by the strange-to-us cultural animosities.  Iran, a unified and disciplined state, would  steamroller it.

A different guiding principle is required to operate in the non-permissive Iraq and Syria of the near future. Some recent  strategies of other countries contain innovative elements:

• Russia in Ukraine: a “private brand” military, has had a ghost-like quality. With multiple withdrawals and redeployments, it significantly delayed correct identification by the West, and so, political response.
• Russia in Syria:  a similar pattern, with an over-advertised withdrawal, and understated deployment.
• Russo-Georgian War of 2008: an almost completely transient event, snatching only small bits of territory as a permanent acquisition.
• China in Vietnam: In the 1979  Sino-Vietnamese War, an antiquated Chinese army occupied northern provinces of Vietnam for about a month. China’s military performance was said to be unimpressive. A bunch of provincial towns were destroyed. And then, the necessary message having been sent, China withdrew. It was, from the Chinese point of view, a complete success.
• In the Sino-Indian War of 1962, China seized substantial parts of Ladakh, and gave most of it back. The result was unusually ambiguous.

None of these had geopolitical goals of the type pursued by the U.S. All of the above are characterized by the temporary seizure of territory. They were ephemeral. They offer suggestions as to how the U.S. can project power into a region with weak or nonexistent states, and hostile non-state forces:

• Deploy very, very quickly.
• Accomplish the objective, but without the usual finality or thoroughness.
• Get out before non-state forces can react to the presence.

I call this the “Doctrine of Ephemeral Deployment.” It is an estimate of the purpose of the proposed Kuwait deployment. It is not new. Von Clausewitz thought of it some time between 1816 and 1830.

From Should Fox Apologize to Putin?,

(Reuters) Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described Putin as “a killer” in the interview with Trump as he tried to press the U.S. president to explain more fully why he respected his Russian counterpart. O’Reilly did not say who he thought Putin had killed.

O’Reilly’s assertion is probably an amalgam of feelings, stemming from

• The conduct of the Russian intervention in Syria, and of Russia’s proxy, the government of Bashar Assad.
• The tendency, in Russia, of prying journalists, errant members of the Kremlin’s inner circle, and, to a lesser extent, figures of the political opposition, to end up dead or injured.
• Putin’s career as a KGB officer.

The conduct of Russia in Syria was covered by

2. Putin is ruthless towards external adversaries, or rivals, of Russia, but it is his responsibility, so he thinks, his obligation, to the Russian people.

The”tendency” was addressed with

After I had studied Vladimir Putin for a while, I realized that it is impossible to separate the man from the world in which he is embedded…

meaning, that Russia is a country where there are plenty of people, in government, associated with government, or freelancers, who are willing and able to do the deed. To Putin’s Apology, in any particular case, we could add

• He was sorry that it happened.
• He was glad that it happened.
• He ordered it to happen.

In any particular case, no one knows beyond a doubt which it was. It seems to have been a mix. In the West, the failure to separate one’s self from a “situation” is covered by Aesop’s fable, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” But Kurt Waldheim, 4th Secretary General of the U.N., and 9th President of Austria, when accused as a Nazi, successfully mounted the defense “couldn’t extricate himself”. Perhaps we should extend the courtesy to Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Apology includes the line, of which I myself am skeptical:

“Putin is working for change from the inside.”

It might have once been true. People change. Perhaps, before the NGO’s were thrown out of Russia, before the peace of Europe was broken in the Ukraine, before Sweden felt it necessary to re-institute a military draft. If he wishes, Putin can edit it out.

Perhaps O’Reilly’s feeling is really anchored by Putin’s KGB career. The KGB, in continuity with the organs that preceded it, was the direct instrument of repression of the Soviet state. But the culture of these organs was not continuous; it changed radically between 1917 and 1991.

Putin must have absorbed at least some of the culture of the KGB, with which he spent a major part of his professional life. But what was that culture when he was there?

Next: The culture of the KGB.

Reuters: WikiLeaks says it releases files on CIA cyber spying tools.

When I was a kid, I was a programmer. I wrote one of the first programs with some of the character of a virus. Totally benign, it was intended to add a capability to an early operating system, CP/M (control program/micro), to facilitate remote printing with a Televideo 950 green-screen terminal. This was in the floppy disk era. Since CP/M did not have a methodical way of adding capabilities, an ad hoc approach was devised. This mystified the “gurus” for about three weeks.

In this way, I was socially exposed to the rag-tag band of savants, misfits, and visionaries who laid down the foundations for the world of the 1990’s, when almost everyone became the operators of computers. We are now exiting that era. While formerly, we were custodians of computers, the machines are becoming our custodians. With every new release, the diapers become softer.

Even in those early days, the personalities were divided into constructors and deconstructors. The constructors wrote the databases, calcs, word processors, games, tools, and so forth. The deconstructors exhibited remarkable skill with a tool still in use, the disassembler. This activity takes apart a computer program and, in a crude way, translates it to a human readable code. There are also decompilers, but that’s too much detail.

The two activities, construction and deconstruction, had associated personalities. The “constructors” were methodical, creative, and goal oriented. The “deconstructors” were mischievous, addicted to peak experience and the act of discovery. They were disciplined to hard yet voluntary work, and also risk-takers, since the goal, glory of the secret, was risky to share. Later, this morphed into software piracy. And they tended to work alone, or in groups with the identities of the individuals hidden by aliases.

These are desirable characteristics for spies. They may be common  for some NSA employees who specialize in breaking into systems, whose activities resemble the “deconstructors.” Other NSA employees, the mathematicians, and those who devise complex software, belong to the “constructors”. From my observations of personalities, the deconstructors, of whom Edward Snowden was a member, are more likely to have an Übermensch moral view.

And, to act on it.

Before proceding further, it’s essential to create “Putin’s Apology.” Here “apology” refers not to Webster’s “1.a : an admission of error or discourtesy accompanied by an expression of regret”, but

“2.a :  something that is said or written to defend something that other people criticize :…”

Plato’s The Apology of Socrates is the great example. Socrates’ self defense won history to his side, while condemning himself to drink the hemlock. Traces, but only traces, live on in our society in modern legal defense. While lawyers for both the defense and the prosecution are both “officers of the court”, and bound to uphold the rule of law, not conceal evidence, etc., the adversarial approach frequently trumps it, as in:

• “Do the  best for your client.”
• “How do you know when lawyer is lying? His lips are moving.”
• William Shakespeare‘s Henry VI, Part2, Act IV, Scene 2: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.

This kind of adversarial thinking, in law, politics, and sports, is not specific to us. The Russians have a bad case of it too, shown by the doping scandal.  It is a personal obstacle to writing a good apology for Putin, because it requires that we write to lose an argument.

In what follows, you can assume the personal pronoun “I”, as in Vladimir Putin. It’s omitted; I think it would just be too cute to include.

1. Putin is personally incorruptible and modest. Since we’re just starting out, remember this is part of an apology. It does not take into account future revelations of kompromat. But importantly, you should not substitute some lesser grade of character simply because you don’t like him. If you feel  so inclined, write a separate piece with all the denigration you want, and work back and forth between the two.

Aside: If it seems improbable that Putin could find a virtuous  communist leader to pattern after, consider the following:

• Stalin, who arguably was the greatest mass murderer in history, had a personally modest lifestyle.
• Lavrentiy Beria may have had the aspirations of a reformer, who after Stalin’s demise may have wanted to do a deal with the West. He was a sexual predator, a serial rapist, who kidnapped and killed many young women.
• Hitler, who competes with Stalin for the prize, was fatherly to his bunker staff, and actively promoted animal welfare.
• The early Bolshevik crew, before Stalin, had, in addition to their blood lust, a certain degree of personal virtuousness.
• Nikita Khrushchev, one of the implementors of Stalin’s purges, had a sense of institutional propriety, and towards the end of his public career, attempted to obliterate the institution of Stalinism. His son Sergei, who lives in the U.S., seems to have no difficulty in remembering his father’s works in a positive way.
  
• Leonid Brezhnev had less blood on his hands than the aforementioned. He exhibited  the affectations of a wealthy individual, and was, at least by association, corrupt. LA Times, January 24, 1988|Associated Press: “Soviets Uncover Massive Corruption : Billions Lost in Uzbekistan Case Involving Brezhnev Kin.“

What are the chances that Putin’s private life is the stuff of kompromat? Marvin Shanken’s “A Conversation With Fidel”  for the Cigar Aficionado is telling. On August 26, 1985, Cuba launched a health campaign against smoking. The absolute ruler of Cuba, whose revolution executed perhaps 10,000, explains why he didn’t try to sneak a smoke:

I said, look, in order to smoke, you need some accomplices. You need somebody to buy the cigars for you. You need somebody to hide the ashes that are left around. You need at least three, four, five accomplices who know that you are smoking cigars. They would know that you are doing something like that. They would know that you are smoking behind closed doors, and I wouldn’t want three, four or five people knowing that I was deceiving others. So I chose not to do that.

Even during Beria’s reign of terror, middle-rank Soviet bureaucrats knew of Beria’s depravities. So it is reasonable to include in Putin’s Apology the assertion that Putin’s character is blameless, for two reasons:

• It would be impossible to perfectly conceal improprieties. The butler always knows.
• There are plenty of prior examples among Russian rulers of personal virtuousness regardless of their manners of government.

Aside from that, Putin’s former wife complains that he has a dark, incomprehensible sense of humor. And he likes cats.  Let’s continue:

2. Putin is ruthless towards external adversaries, or rivals, of Russia, but it is his responsibility, so he thinks, his obligation, to the Russian people. Here the relativity of moral values is striking. In the U.S., as multicultural society, we refer frequently to shared values, and infrequently, to “American people.”  In Russia, an ethnocentric society, there is an historical continuation of the moral ethos of the Bolshevism, commonly stated as “The end justifies the means“, although the communists did not invent the phrase, nor were they the first to use it.

In the estimation of the man we deal with, much has been   obscured by the recent epithets.  No suggestion is implied that you should ditch your core values, but Putin’s Apology helps establish a relative framework, useful for analysis.

Before we continue, you may wish to download Putin’s Character and the Intersection With the Ethics of the Russian State from academia.edu.

Many of us, myself included, feel great relief that Fiona Hill, a Putin critic, has been appointed to advise Trump on things Russian. This is not because I entirely agree with her. It is because many of us have been fearful of the possible presence of a persistent, subversive Russian presence in the new administration. The major news outlets have responded to Hill’s appointment by purchasing clip-art from AP and others that show Putin sucking his thumb. The implication of this “new-new journalism” is that, somehow, the press monitors Putin’s thoughts, and snaps a picture at exactly the moment when he is regretting the appointment of Hill.

I agree with Hill on one thing: Putin does not understand us any more than we understand him. In Should Fox Apologize to Putin?, I wrote,

In this milieu, there is a significant minority of completely modern  people who have hybridized themselves with the west. They are just like us, a confusing veneer.

Putin is part of this group, but the traditional Russian ethos dominates his mind. His formative years occurred within the Russian autarchy, which had much continuity of attitude with the communist Russia that was supposed to replace it. Putin, like the Soviet leaders who preceded him, is, partially in his case, a product  of a system that makes a clear view of the West very difficult to achieve. This has resulted in the recent tragedy of military reawakening. Perhaps, if the West had treated Russia more kindly during Perestroika, the tragedy would have been averted. But neither can we blame ourselves for the fact that Vladimir Putin is not the person to drag his people toward a future he incompletely understands.

The above contains my understanding of where Hill and I agree.

But I preceded this with,

After I had studied Vladimir Putin for a while, I realized that it is impossible to separate the man from the world in which he is embedded. It is an ethnocentric world of corrupt institutions and extrajudicial punishments,  coexisting with a western yearning that willed the  city of St. Petersburg into existence.

This is the crux of my disagreement with Hill, who with her coauthor Clifford Gaddy, have created an elaborate psychoanalytic theory of Putin.  To simulate the mind of the adversary is one way of predicting the initiatives and responses of that adversary. A sample chapter (pdf) of Mr. Putin; Operative in the Kremlin, attempts a working model of Putin’s mind, which can be used for that purpose.

One problem I perceive with the psychoanalytic model itself is that it is a model of a mind, not of a mind embedded in society.  Hill’s analysis is referent to Freud and Jung. Mine is referent to Vilfredo Pareto, and his work, The Mind and Society. In my analysis, Putin is inseparably bound into a matrix of unconscious influence that flows both from him, and to him.

I use psychoanalysis in a limited way, trying to understand what the subject might be thinking about the current question.  But Occam’s Razor, the “simplest explanation is most likely to be correct”, is more important. As a therapy,  the patient can tell if psychoanalysis helps, and determine the use. But many therapies, this one included, do not rise to the level of science. Psychoanalysis has many doubters, even when the subject is in the clinic. The distance with which Putin is observed and “experienced” makes him a more difficult object than a patient on the couch.

Next: How our observations and predictions differ in very substantial ways.

CNN’s “Kim Jong Un ‘ordered’ half brother’s killing, South Korean intelligence says”

offers a shiny graphic about nerve agent VX, with gratuitously wrong-by-omission answers to these questions:

• How can VX get into a human body? (water, food, sprayed)
• The symptoms (blah, blah,blah.)

A  more accurate description is provided by CDC’s Facts About VX. Of these signs, CNN has chosen to display only the least alarming of the symptom set. Quoting CDC,

People exposed to a low or moderate dose of VX by inhalation, ingestion (swallowing), or skin absorption may experience some or all of the following symptoms within seconds to hours of exposure:

• Abnormally low or high blood pressure
• Blurred vision
• Chest tightness
• Confusion
• Cough
• Diarrhea
• Drooling and excessive sweating
• Drowsiness
• Eye pain
• Headache
• Increased urination
• Nausea, vomiting, and/or abdominal pain
• Rapid breathing
• Runny nose
• Slow or fast heart rate
• Small, pinpoint pupils
• Watery eyes
• Weakness

CDC is not immune to criticism. A “large dose” is 1/100 of a gram, barely visible to the naked eye. The CNN graphic “drop” is highly misleading. CDC states that VX is the most toxic agent. It is not; Novichok-5 is the most toxic weaponized, and there are even more toxic ones without delivery systems.

Perhaps, in tone, CNN is simply patterning off of CDC, who state,

What the long-term health effects are

Mild or moderately exposed people usually recover completely. Severely exposed people are not likely to survive.

 Review of the U.S. Army’s Health Risk Assessments For Oral Exposure to Six Chemical-Warfare Agents does not contradict this, but it does not offer strong support either. The human evidence presented in another Army paper,  (pdf) LONG-TERM HEALTH EFFECTS OFNERVE AGENTS AND MUSTARD, is merely anecdotal.

The Dugway sheep incident occurred the day after a spray-by-airplane release of VX in Skull Valley, Utah. In the Deseret News article, NERVE GAS LIKELY CAUSED LIFELONG ILLS, Ray Peck recalls what he thinks VX exposure did to his family.

The Army has never concluded that the airborne release of VX caused the death of 3,843 sheep the following day, or the chronic health problems of Peck’s family. The argument about what VX can do in the real world is caught between a lack of fit between science and statistics on one side, and powerful coincidence on the other. But if Peck is not provably right, his experience invalidates the studies. Scientific studies that attempt to simulate real-world scenarios in controlled situations have a special vulnerability to error.

Where public health intersects with CBW hazards, there is a tendency to edit the material to calm the public. Where weapons and war are concerned, CNN favors presentations that increase the alarm level. See CNN, Shame! Raise Your Standards! “Russia unveils ‘Satan 2 Missile”.

These errors are decoupled from any political agenda. Sloppiness, the desire to hook the reader with  “yellow journalism“, and the occasional misplaced sense of paternalism towards the readership are the likely causes. But it denies the readership the chance to inform themselves as well as they are able.

CNN, what would it cost you, in readership, money, or principles to do the job right?

We continue from Part 1.

History is taught as a sequence of cause-and-effect. This is a consequence of a belief in a causal universe, except where religious beliefs supervene. Recently, though, physicists have observed processes where the future appears to affect the past. Doubters may question whether this has any practical effect on our lives. It remains to be determined. But for the predictor, it offers an immediate suggestion. It may be possible to enhance a prediction  by including the possibility of a future event to “pull” current events toward that eventuality.

The conventional cause-and-effect reasoning of the historian does not permit a future “State of Eastern Syria-Western Iraq” to be incorporated into the reasoning process. But with a systematic method of including this possibility, the locomotives of the predictor’s train of reasoning can pull as well as push. The imaginary  state is now no more than the idea of a safe zone.

If General McMaster is to have any latitude in a plan to “defeat ISIS”, a  “Syria Safe Zone” must be the core of it. Besides it, there are no strokes more significant than details of tactical deployment, and how close American soldiers get to the meat grinder.  It is possible that a limited U.S. front line deployment could accomplish a specific task.  Since I do not want to help the enemy, I will not describe it.

Western Mosul is a meatgrinder; a place where the advantages of high tech weapons diminish against the defender. Anyone who has ever played a war game knows that between two qualitatively symmetric forces, the attacker requires a 3:1 numerical advantage over the defender. ISIS and the coalition are not symmetrical forces, and the rule is crude. But it cannot be ignored.

Mosul will soon be done with. Raqqa will follow. The prevalent thought is that these two objectives will mark some kind of an end for ISIS. As a caution, consider this scenario: With Iran’s backing, the Shiites move in on Sunni territory. The Gulf states, Turkey, or both, arm the Sunnis. Volunteers from the Caucasus appear and, after a short period of cooperation, hijack the weapons and raise a black banner. Voila, ISIS again.

A safe zone cannot be  just a humanitarian effort. ISIS seeks the opportunity of political vacuum.  A haven must include some kind of politics that repel ISIS. In Vietnam, which McMaster has studied extensively, the corresponding structure was based on the hamlet. Because the Syria desert is so inhospitable, a safe zone cannot be envisioned as dots of tiny hamlets on a wasteland. It is a huge enterprise.

Western Syria is populated because it has water; not enough of it, but enough to fight over. Eastern Syria and western Iraq are inhospitable deserts. In the  U.S., people live in constant company to infrastructure so invisibly efficient, we forget the necessity. In the east, in colonial times, the abundance of rainfall and fertile ground made it possible for an entire country to exist without it. West of the Rockies, in the area of the Great American Desert east of LA, this was never possible. Human existence, even for brief periods, is not possible without it.

Palm Springs is in the middle of that desert. Suppose we take a walk three miles out of town, fence off a square mile, and give it to a bunch of refugees. Without outside infrastructure, they would die, even though, almost within earshot, golfers tee off in lushly irrigated scenery.

The Syria-Iraq desert is bisected by the Euphrates river, which irrigates land on a belt 4 miles wide on the average. People already live there. But apart from tent cities in the desert, supplied perpetually by relief trucks with bottled water, it is the only prospect for survival.

This has happened before in Syria. According to some Arabists, the ancestors of the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula were originally Syrian farmers. By  population pressure, they were progressively dispossessed, driven towards lands of lesser fertility, until they reached the voids of desert sands. So we must ask the question: Would a safe zone lead to creation of a new “world’s poorest nation”, a kind of Bangladesh of the desert? Might  Assad’s tyranny be preferable? To help your thoughts along, imagine yourself in a tent outside of Palm Springs, with some bottles of water, some “food”, and absolutely no prospects.

The annual flow of the Euphrates averages about 600 cubic meters/second, comparable to the Colorado. But it is poorly used. Because the river slopes only slightly over much of it’s course, about half is lost to evaporation. To manage the river with the scientific precision of the Colorado would require the cooperation of three countries: Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and at least four ethnic groups. Today, they are all prisoners of circumstance and prejudice.

Next: How to Deploy?

The news agencies initially described agent VX as the most poisonous chemical weapon known. They seem to have corrected themselves. The distinction belongs to one or more of the Soviet “Novichok” family, dating to 1987. NTI, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, offers a brief statement in the (pdf) Russia Chemical Stockpile: alleged Undeclared “Novichok Capabilities”. For further confirmation, NCBI states,

The Soviet Union reacted with an extensive program (code name FOLIANT, NOVICHOK) for the development of new, fourth generation chemical weapons, and the result was a technology for binary ammunition with nerve agents exerting enhanced toxicity.

Many of the relics of the Cold War have remained elusive. But a principal of the Novichok program, Vil S. Mirzayanov, wrote a book, State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program. In his blog entry, NOVICHOK CHEMICAL FORMULAS ARE NOT TERRORIST WEAPONS , he explains why he thinks it was OK to include the chemical formulas. I think he is correct. In fact, it is probably helpful for the formulas to be public knowledge.

Soviet assays indicated that at least some members of the Novichok family are 5 to 7 times more potent than VX.  But that is the least important distinction. The Soviets wanted a chemical that would be undetectable by technology deployed by NATO. Unlike VX, Novichok has no antidote. Although the effectiveness of antidotes under field conditions has always been questioned, it gives Novichok a psychological edge.

The degree to which a chemical agent can be weaponized depends on many factors, of which toxicity is probably the least important. VX can be used as an “area denial weapon.” Because it is persistent, it can be used to prevent an enemy from occupying, or even transiting an area. In this use, it is actually effective in the military sense without killing anybody. VX is stable in storage, and, as a binary agent, can be mixed in transit to the target from nontoxic precursor chemicals.

(Aljazeera) and (Reuters) North Korea  used a binary form of VX. Two nontoxic chemicals, applied to the face of Kim Jong Nam by two women, combined on his face and in his eyes  to form VX. One of the women, probably the second attacker, suffered symptoms of VX exposure, because the combination also occurred on her hand.

But for assassination, VX is not optimal. The stability of VX   allowed detection post mortem. Prepackaged, “lab-on-a-test-strip” tests, developed primarily for NATO  exist, as well as documented changes in body chemistry. See  NAP (National Academies Press) Chemical and Biological Terrorism: Research and Development to Improve Civilian Medical Response.

An ideal candidate chemical for assassination would have these properties:

• Instability. Decays too rapidly to test for post-use. This is opposite the requirement for a weapon.
• Lack of off-the-shelf tests.
• Binary. Made of innocuous, common, nontoxic precursor chemicals. The precursors of Novichok are utterly commonplace.
• Unavailability of an antidote.
• A novel mode of toxicity, impairing the view of the toxicologist of exactly what happened to the victim. The mode of the Novichok agents is novel.

The past novelty of ricin (Markov) and polonium (Litvinenko) made them useful. They are now too well known.

In May 2015 Vladimir Kara-Murza was poisoned. He received nonspecific treatment at a Moscow hospital, and survived. The poison was not identified.  In February 2017, he was probably poisoned again. He has been allowed to leave Russia for treatment in the west. If the poison is not persistent in the body, examination of samples by western chemical warfare facilities will avail nothing. He walks with a cane, indicative of nerve damage.

The speculation of this article is that one of the hundred-or-so Novichok agents, but not the weaponizable Novichok-5/A-232, was used to poison Kara-Murza. Where avoidance of detection in the west is paramount, an unstable compound  might be chosen. In Russia, the “ultra toxic” solid state derivatives A-242 and A-262 (Mirzayanov,  State Secrets:…, page 145)  could have the advantage of ease of deployment.

Particularly striking is that in neither instance has Kara-Murza any idea as to how the poison was administered. It was administered specifically to him, with no collateral exposure,  possibly from a distance, via a dart made of a volatile or soluble substance.

ISIS is doomed anyway, but Trump wants to speed the outcome. Iraqi forces sustained (Washington Post) heavy casualties in the taking of eastern Mosul. Only part of this was due to the difficulties of urban warfare where civilians could or would not evacuate. The rest was due to the pain involved in  successful development of the coordination between  the various coalition forces.

General H.R. McMaster, Trump’s new national security advisor, is doubtless cognizant of everything in the discussion that follows. His appointment is in stark contrast to the populist, nationalist, militarist rhetoric issuing from Twitter and official statements. I hope that General McMaster will be unimpeded from  exercise of his own judgment. His preparation for the specific problem of an American intervention includes his Ph.d thesis, from which issued his book,  Dereliction of Duty. It followed with his command of the forces that retook (Washington Post) Tal Afar in 2005. Tal Afar is 40 miles west of Mosul, part of the strategy to cut the lines of ISIS to Syria.

Tal Afar is singular in McMaster’s mind because of his experience of it, and the brief durability of the result of a successful military campaign.  The broader parallels of Vietnam and Iraq are striking:

• An insurgency; grass-roots military movements. In Vietnam, there was one. In the Levant, there are many.
• Inability to isolate the theater from external reinforcement and influence.
• Absence of national sentiment.
• Ethnic discord. In Iraq, this is three-way: Shia, Sunni, and Kurd. Until the otherthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963, there was in Vietnam, along with the Communist insurgency, a Catholic-Buddhist struggle analogous to Saddam Hussein’s suppression of Shia political activity in Iraq.

Quoting WTNH (because it has no ad blocker)

Despite those tensions, Mattis and Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, described an enduring partnership between the U.S. and Iraq.

“I imagine we’ll be in this fight for a while and we’ll stand by each other,” Mattis said.

Townsend, who was standing by Mattis, declined to say how long the U.S. will stay in Iraq. But, he said, “I don’t anticipate that we’ll be asked to leave by the government of Iraq immediately after Mosul.” He added, “I think that the government of Iraq realizes their very complex fight, and they’re going to need the assistance of the coalition even beyond Mosul.”

This sounds very reasonable. But looking past the tranquil, reasonable, pluralistic, conciliatory face of Prim Minister Haider al-Abadi, all the important figures of the Iraq insurgency are still hanging around. Their soldiers have been reprogrammed, repurposed, repackaged, or killed. Except for those killed, they have the shelf life of dry matches, neatly stacked in boxes, ready for arson. Unlike matches, they can even be grown from seed. The product of religious schools receive the inculcation of “separate-but-better”, accentuating the religious divide.  Entering into a weak job market, they are classically vulnerable to radicalization.

The potential arsonists include ISIS sympathizers, who are embraced by coalition military strategy. The masses of Shia poor cannot be so embraced. They are part of Iran’s military strategy.

We cannot omit Kurdish nationalism,  a problem and an opportunity, mainly for manipulation. The Kurds, the groups with the most western outlook, have been in the meat grinder of political maps since around 1870. There can be no peace with or without the Kurds, oxymoron intended.

I would not have expected Mattis to say anything else. But in this region, an article of faith is, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Such friendship is fleeting.

To be continued shortly.