Threats to Russia/ Syria Involvement

Reuters: The U.S. is now a threat to Russia. The Russian document itself says, “The strengthening of Russia happens against the background of new threats to the national security, which has complex and interrelated nature,…” 

Simplicity is beguiling, but the best approach to  interpretation of this complex and interrelated problem is roundabout. Eventually, this leads to Syria.

When Country A assesses the threat posed to it by Country B, the appraisal is always worse than what the presumed aggressor thinks. Unless disarmed by strong cultural bonds, there is always the hypothetical fear, verging on real fear, that one’s frenemy would like to do you in. There is one objective reason, and one subjective, why this is always the case.

  • Objective: Risk of the unknown. Country A does not know the intimate thoughts of Country B. This is akin to the inability to truly know the mind of another, which is why when somebody flips out and murders somebody, his friends are so surprised.
  • Subjective: Every country holds itself in higher regard than other countries do. So even if Country B poses a real threat to Country A, Country B may discount it, as incompatible with the True Virtue of Country B.

This is the U.S. and Russia since Yalta, with either country as A or B.  Let’s not get sidetracked by Stalin’s genocides or Soviet repression.  The actual moral qualities of the two societies are not part of this discussion. The facts of history, and that the Soviets nevertheless considered themselves our moral superiors, highlight the essentialness of a  relative framework.  For most of that time, the mostly identical policy of each side was MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction. This alone brings into question the sanity of human race, though more recently, MAD has been overshadowed by religious madness.

When Country A perceives a threatening action or policy of Country B, there are inevitably several explanations, which are not exclusive of each other:

  • Country B would like to do in Country A.
  • Country B would like to diminish Country A.
  • Country A has a paranoia.
  • It’s incidental to a policy with another motivation.

Since these factors occur in any strength of combination, op-eds that make the choice typically reveal more of the mind of the writer than the actual situation. In a piece for Reuters, John Lloyd, referring to Putin, writes “But tactics get you so far. He can certainly tweak the American nose, painfully. But what’s the strategy? “ The literary trope of giving the U.S. a nose is loaded with meaning that may be carelessly swallowed without tasting.

It’s not controversial to think that Putin would like to diminish the U.S. role in the world. Rivalry and apprehension have been the dominant sentiments of most of the post-war period. With Perestroika, they faded. They were primed for reappearance by the 2007-08 financial crisis, which extinguished the West as a beacon to Putin, the current author of modern Russia.

The Russians saw Western conspiracy in Euromaidan, which the West regard as an authentic popular movement. To the Russian inner circle, popular movements are anathema, justifying nothing. And so the sentiments came back to life in Russia. As the saying goes, it takes two to tangle. The Russian reaction was military, first with the annexation of Crimea, followed by thinly concealed efforts to peel off eastern Ukraine, mainly by private armies supported by Russia, but also with direct Russian involvement.

To the Russians, the first aggression was covert Western instigation. To the West, the first aggression was something we haven’t seen before, a “private brand” version of the Russian military. Past custom made “who started it” an important current and historical question, the thing everybody argued about incessantly. This time, it has faded. Buried by the modern op-ed blizzard, the fade makes this recapitulation actually useful and interesting.

It actually goes back even further. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russians expected a warm embrace. Russia is for the most part the estranged relative of Western civilization. But Russia was spurned, and unable to accept the reasons. In  rule of law, commitment to democracy, and business practices, Russia was and is a big, dark, scary place. And although a multicultural country, it has a strong tinge of ethnocracy, giving herself the umbrella for Slavs beyond the borders of the state. The UN/NATO resolution of the Kosovo conflict, a product of Western multiculturalism, was interpreted as an ethnic war on Slavs.

And who can forget the Bush Administration’s Caspian Oil Pipeline? This is brought up strictly as a foreign policy gambit, without any suggestion of conflict of interest or impropriety in the Bush Administration. Bush and Cheney, both oilmen, understood that of all fungible commodities, oil is the most intertwined with foreign policy. They could not have excused themselves from playing the then-relevant version of the Great Game, which was to pipe oil around Russia, instead of through it. And Vladimir Putin, inspite of hotdogs at the Bush Ranch, could not have excused himself from noticing it. In American slang, he might have though Bush was trying to cut Russia off at the knees.

Russia is immeasurably better than it was, but not good enough for the West. But does it have to be? After the 2007 financial crisis, China’s version of Plato’s Republic replaced the West as the dream in the gleam of the Russian eye. This is why Putin mints billionaires, as a recapitulation of our own Robber Baron period. I doubt it will work, but it’s an improvement on the Ukraine Model, which should be called “Sticky Fingers.”

Socially, this is analogous to the unattractive bride and the exploitative suitor, doing what comes so naturally they don’t know they’re doing it.

To be continued shortly.

 

Portrait of a Spaceman; Predictions for 2016

Portrait of a SpacemanPortrait of a Spaceman.

(Click for a larger view. 24×36, oil on canvas.)

The past month, there have been few easily picked cherries for open source analysis. If you must read down, I have a short list of succinct predictions. Much of the geopolitical commentary of the open media is at odds with my analysis, but it does not sum to an urgent conclusion. I’ll write on this in coming days.

So this is an opportunity to offer visual contemplation on the continuing plight of Humankind, who come in various varieties. One of these is Spaceman.

The metaphysics/physics behind it is this. Spaceman’s head reaches for Cosmic Consciousness of a spiral galaxy. But sadly, he is being sucked into a black hole.  As he approaches the event horizon, the gravitational field varies strongly with distance, the so called “tidal forces” causing the elongation and dissolution of his lower body.  At the event horizon, the very atoms are torn asunder and with it, his memories of Earth, visible in the steam-punky porthole.

Perhaps, as Spaceman contemplates his predicament, his memories of Earth romanticize the current reality.

The painting is an invitation for you to replace the generalized likeness of Spaceman with your own. Do you identify with Spaceman? There are other types of human beings.

Predictions for 2016
  • Hillary Clinton will win the election.
  • Economic  recession in the U.S. will be identified, by the traditional standard of two successive quarters of contraction,  in  late 2016 or 2017.
  • Mosul will be taken on schedule. The Obama Administration is now fully engaged with the problem of ISIS.
  • The Afghanistan situation will continue to deteriorate.
  • As ISIS disintegrates as a quasi state, the energies it absorbed will be subsumed by other organizations. Some, such as Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, already exist. Others will spring into existence.
  • Conflicts in the Middle East that previously occupied our attention will acquire renewed energy.

But if you’re Spaceman, you’re above all this. Find your happiness wherever it may be.

 

 

Defacto Partition in Syria?

Reuters: “Putin says to keep cooperating with U.S.-led coalition over Syria” Quoting,

"We are talking about a designation of the territories against which we can conduct strikes, and where it is better to refrain from strikes, about the exchange of information on various issues, and the coordination of our actions on, so to speak, the battlefield," Putin said.

On bilateral cooperation with France, he said the aim was to "establish constructive work by our military specialists to avoid duplication and avoid strikes on those territories and groups which are themselves ready to fight terrorism."

This is consonant with the conclusion of Russia Offers to Help Syrian Rebels; U.S. Policy; Towards a Syrian Peace:

Perhaps limited tactical cooperation, formulated in tandem with mutually agreed territorial declarations, would be a good start towards a Syrian peace.

Putin’s statement, consonant with defacto partition, may be no more than  recognition of Turkish special interest in Turkoman tribal areas adjacent to Turkey’s border. Or it may be the nascence of a fluid principle. To the devoted open-sourcer, it is something to watch for.

Putin’s statement on the jet shoot-down differs  from  dire CNN hype (see “Spider causes man to trash flat” for the mental level),

"And we proceed from the position that there will be no repeat of this, otherwise we'll have no need of cooperation with anybody, any coalition, any country."

In the language of diplomacy, this is de-escalation. It  is consonant with the conclusion of the open source prediction of Turkey shoots down Russian warplane:

“But the open source prediction is that little more will come from this, other than the possible loss of a few more jets on each side, and redeployment of Patriot batteries to Turkey.”

And even that may be an exaggeration.

 

Turkey shoots down Russian warplane

This open source deduction is based upon the simultaneity  of  two reports:

(Reuters) Turkish warplanes shot down jet near Syrian border: CNN Turk

and

(CNN) Report: Warplane crashes near Syria-Turkey border

While there is little value in a “scoop” of a few hours, it offers the open sourcer an opportunity to study the reactions of Russia and Turkey, as the fact of the encounter wends its way through the complicated apparatus of

  • diplomacy
  • propaganda
  • posturing
  • escalation or de-escalation

On October 6, Turkey reported that a group of F-16 fighters were subject to fire-control radar lockons.  See also The Aviationist. This means that Turkish fighters, designated as targets by Russian computers, were “painted” with radar beams, the last step before firing antiaircraft missiles with passive radar  trackers that home on the reflections.  According to The Aviationist, this was not the first time.

The Ukraine incursion marked a new Russian policy of active intimidation, intended to impede NATO members, and friendly countries such as Sweden, from formation of a coherent alliance response. The Russians may have judged that effort successful. And if it worked against the heavyweights of the Western Alliance, why wouldn’t it work against a marginal power such as Turkey?

Turkish foreign policy has been notable for regional passivity. The radar lockons were intended to prevent the emergence of an active principle in Turkish foreign policy towards Syria. As jets have a large turning radius, the Russians thought the lockons would also provide a few more miles of airspace for maneuver.

The Russians were wrong. But the open source prediction is that little more will come from this, other than the possible loss of a few more jets on each side, and redeployment of Patriot batteries to Turkey.

 

 

Chuck Hagel says Focus on ISIS

Chuck Hagel says focus on ISIS. First, a few paragraphs on an alternative mode of analysis that might be provocative to foreign policy decision makers.

Sociobiology offers an understanding of the ISIS phenomenon in a way not afforded by traditional religion, or philosophy. The conception of life as “divine spark” brought with it theodicy, the question of why there is evil in the world. This obscures another possibility, that the roots of ISIS are common to human nature, though normally suppressed by an ecosystem of ideas acting as life forms. This was explored in Ideas as Life Forms.

Thinking in terms of good and evil obscures the dynamics that the life form concept exposes. Good and evil are static definitions. While one can grow at the expense of the other, the science of dynamical systems was unanticipated by our traditions, except in the lurid illuminations of eschatology. For practical purposes, even without abandoning your principles, you might consider using sociobiology to strategize about ISIS. Stranger bedfellows of thought have been embraced in the human mind.

Sociobiology is both immature and subject to the distorting influences of prejudice and social pressure, as well as the well known and utterly notorious failure of experimental psychology to produce replicable results. Most studies in psychology are later found, by the standards of other sciences, to be wrong. The comparative strength of sociobiology is in experimental results with lower organisms, and the general hypothesis of applicability, with varying strength, to humans. The current use of sociobiology is the generation of something more than hypotheses and less than facts, namely, plausible explanations.

The Japanese have an expression for an aspect of human nature, the inner “anger insect” that, according to the culture, the holder must suppress. It is a remarkably simple statement about something which western culture embroiders with a rich but obscuring tapestry of morality and philosophy about free choice. But the unbridled egotism of every infant gives a clear view of the insect. The idea that it remains a potential in the adult is not really acknowledged in the West. According to western religions, various sacrements nullify it as a moral issue.

But the recent spate of mass murders by young men in their twenties make the insect a practical issue. According to tradtional thought, the sacrements were foregone. But an example of bacteria, promoted forward in time by sociobiology, suggests that ideas with competitive advantage in propagation are the most durable things around. “Quorum sensing” is one of them. Prior, bacteria were divided between those which are pathogenic, causing disease, and nonpathogenic, which do not. There followed context dependent pathogenicity. But the discovery that bacteria communicate volubly by chemical means was followed in short order that they are capable of mob violence.

With bacteria, mob violence is the decision by a group of bacteria, based upon their number and concentration, that they can take over and destroy the host. It is innate in many species of bacteria that are normal constituents of the human biome. Bacteria living comfortably and harmlessly in the nose, skin, or intestine, cultured externally to sufficiently high concentrations, become deadly. This is a form of the opportunistic pathogen. But the new idea, compatible with sociobiology, is that this is thought without a thinker.  But since   the physical basis of the brain is chemical, it should not seem as strange as it does that bacterial thought is mediated by exchange of chemical signals.

When slaughter by a male in his twenties seems to inspire similar crimes, we call it copycat. When a bunch of murderous males in their twenties communicate via social media, we call it legitimization. When a cohesive group forms of murderous males in their twenties, we call it a cult. The three words are unified by quorum sensing, which in humans takes the form of a primitive group mind, the collective behavior of the “inner insect.”

Contrasting with the popular view of the “war on terror” as a long war, Hagel expresses urgency, which might be an acknowledgement that unlike the West’s timeless battle between Good and Evil, idea based life form are time dependent. Comparison with the exponential growth of bacteria would be simplistic, but power laws, sums of X to the nth power, are convenient approximations of growth. And any growth leads to the point of the quorum, achieved when ISIS became pathogenic to Iraq.

Hagel wants to establish priorities that

  • Are at odds with U.S. policy towards the Assad regime, which seems based on misbegotten hope for early reconstruction of the rule of law.
  • Would be highly irritating to Turkey, a member of NATO, whose concern about dismemberment by Kurds is real.
  • Interfere with the “no boots on the ground” policy of disengagement.
  • Provoke concern about creating a stage for Russia to resume the U.S./Soviet version of the Middle East Great Game.

The idea of ISIS has not been understood as a dynamical process, so it has been everybody’s lesser problem. That ISIS could behave as a population sensing quorum, acquiring something that years ago might have been called critical mass, is novel. But the growth of ISIS popularity in American social media cannot be ignored.

Hagel’s priorities, disrespecting policy, would inevitably change the map. Perhaps he understands the danger of a runaway dynamical process. His innovation draws comparison to the misbegotten drive of American neoconservatives to forge a new Iraqi nation from the ground up. That mistake may be a significant cause of the current caution, but there are differences.

  • The neoconservative policy  in Iraq was created in isolation from the actual theater, mainly as a recombinant synthesis of conservative American politics.
  • The origin of Hagel’s initiative is a combination of reactive and proactive, the ratios of which are known only to those who were in the room. Reactive has a negative connotation, because it means you didn’t see it coming. With proactive comes the danger of the imagined threat. But on a case-by-case basis, either can beat policy, which simply means that all the thinking has been done already.

Law acquires reverence in the minds of lawyers. Without law, what would there be? With sentiment mixed with cynicism, the alternative, no law, inspires horror in the legal mind. To the legal mind, an alternative explanation for the current situation is the absence of law. This is partly valid, but lacks the predictive value of sociobiology. Obama and Kerry are lawyers. Alternatives to current policy encounter obstacles analogous to laws, treaties, alliances, and vacant political structures. It is very difficult for a lawyer of high moral caliber to abandon respect for these structures, no matter how vacant. That some of these could be reconstructed in a later time is too much of a leap.

Let the following not be construed as a high-five for conservative free enterprise. Hagel’s career was business. As a successful CEO, Hagel’s environment did not have the cushion of infinite failure permitted of U.S. foreign policy under both parties. Unless Hagel is a universal problem solver, his particular background facilitated an approach to this problem, which retrospection suggests is superior.

There are no universal backgrounds. Each decision maker has a background that implies a context for problem solving and a chance for excellence in one area. None have excelled in all the areas: domestic, foreign, economy, social improvement, justice, and so forth. Democracy, the safeguard of liberty, has nothing to say about how the actual process of decision making, by people in a room, could be improved.

We are left with the question: How can a president be more than the individual self?

French Tragedy and Bulk Data Collection

In May, I wrote Senate Allowed Spy Program to Lapse — Playing With Lives. With this tragedy, some may wish to ponder again.

Based upon past terrorism cases,  the argument has been made that bulk data collection is ineffective. Historical analysis is not without merit, but historical prediction is challenged by the changing landscape:

  • The software tools used by the NSA, the fusion of A.I. and Big Data, are constantly evolving, reducing the acknowledged problem of analyst overload.
  • As terrorist communication techniques and technologies evolve, cells become more resistant to low-tech discovery. This pushes the probabilities of detection towards Big Data sifting.
  • A primary activity of NSA warrantless wiretapping was to build, without looking at contents of communications, database representations of “who-knows-who”. Since encryption technology has advanced beyond DES, it becomes increasingly questionable whether the successors can be broken by brute-force or even lots of plain text. This makes “who-knows-who” more important.

An  opinion of whether the potential of bulk data collection to save lives is worth the challenge to civil liberties is usually couched as pure ideology.  But it may be influenced by the degree of empathy with the geographic areas of greatest risk, the “blue” states of the Eastern Megalopolis, and California.

Historically, the U.S. has compromised civil liberties in times of war.  Perception of a state of visceral war, one with a significant body count, fluctuates with current events, and fades with memory.

The choice between compromise of civil liberties, and the probabilities of future mass casualties, masquerades as logical. With which will you have the fewest future regrets?

 

Egypt Russian Airliner Crash Caused by an On-Board Bomb

The open-source prediction is that the plane was brought down by an on board bomb. As a prediction, it is almost too late to be interesting. The Brits say yes; Americans maybe; the Russians and Egyptians say, too early to tell.

But it’s not too late to examine the question for didactic purposes.  A shoulder fired missile, a.k.a. MANPAD,  cannot reach the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner.  Let’s fence it with facts which exclude mechanical failure:

  • The airliner was an Airbus A321, of which there have been only two other hull losses, both due to pilot error. One hit a mountain in a bad-weather approach to Islamabad. Another hit a runway utility vehicle at Tainan airport Taiwan.
  • The weather was fine, with none of the risk factors of Air France Flight 447, which was downed by a combination of pilot error, instrument malfunction,  and the notoriously violent thunderstorm supercells of the Intertropical Convergence Zone.
  • Hence, the possibility of internal mechanical failure causing the breakup of the aircraft, while not excluded, is exceedingly small.

In open source analysis, the ratio of an outcome probability to alternatives is the relevant factor, not the absolute probability. In the case of TWA Flight 800, the chance of mechanical failure was also exceedingly small, but unlike the current case, vastly greater than competing theories, mostly  conspiratorial in nature.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which under Mohamed Morsi ruled Egypt between 2011 and 2013, has had many phases, or colors. With origins as a typical terrorist, or revolutionary organization, phases of moderation, or attempted political legitimacy, were punctuated by occasional violence, and many cycles of acceptance and repression, particularly under Anwar Sadat. Uncertainty about how coherently bound the Brotherhood was to a common platform at any particular time  was characteristic of external observers, and possibly of the Brotherhood itself.

What happens when you hit a splintery rock with a hammer, shattering it, sending political shards in all directions? Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hit the Muslim Brotherhood with a hammer, destroying whatever coherence bound Brotherhood members to a political ethic. Those who found themselves not in jail, and whose inner tendencies  were previously moderated by the pull of central Brotherhood leadership, became ISIS sympathizers.

This is not saying much about a country where an unwary foreign tourist at Cairo Airport may need  to be ransomed from a restroom, or buy a snatched passport back from a professional passport snatcher. So it is easy for ISIS to use disaffected members of the Brotherhood to reach inside Egyptian official institutions to place a bomb on an airplane. Apparently, Sharma-El-Sheikh Airport is a friendlier place, where for a small sum a traveler may buy a way around security, a kind of “frequent bomber program.”

So probabilities related to airplanes in general are minimal. An actor has been identified. Thus far, this is the easiest kind of open-source question to resolve, as close to proof as statistics can provide. Only the differing statements of the four “authorities” stand in the way of the conclusion:

  • The Egyptians don’t want to admit the level of institutional compromise implied by the bomb diagnosis. For them, the best outcome, with the least impact on tourism, would be mechanical failure.
  • The Russians, who already send 3M tourists per year to Egypt, would like even more comradely relations. Egypt was a Soviet client of longstanding; a resumption would be a major coup for those who dream of the Soviet reach of old. It’s amusing to think they may hang the Russian airline to get the conclusion they want.
  • The Americans are just slightly piqued that the Brits found out first. To understand in fullness the special relationship, read every book by John le Carré.

Congratulations, Brits! You’ve done more with less.

 

Special Forces deployed to Syria

Peter Van Buren (Reuters) and Fred Kagan (CNN) offer negative opinions of the recent decision to deploy 50 Special Forces to Syria.

These are well constructed articles, designed to be satisfying reads complete with a reader’s belch at the end. Unless you have a preexisting  opinion other than general unhappiness, you will enjoy these articles, with the feeling that you have been properly educated. This, of course, is what opinion writers strive for. Solutions are beyond their grasp. Peter Van Buren has even made publication capital out of his mistakes with the book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.

The White House announcement was deliberately ambiguous with respect to deployment details and mission. It is not in the interest of the U.S. for this blog to remove that ambiguity. But for those who hoped for a more proactive mission description,  “adviser” admits the flexibility to be a powerful force multiplier.

The number, 50, is criticized as too small, too tentative, and indicative of the weakness of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. Here I must disclose that I am very partial to Barack Obama as a person. The decision to seek the presidency is almost a sign of psychosis, supported by the revelations of Ronald Kessler’s In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect. But Barack Obama is the kind of guy I would have a (nonalcoholic) beer with.

One part of Obama’s formative experience was as a community organizer. That kind of experience sharply draws the distinction between the average American, who is not rich and possibly struggling to survive, and the class and kind of people who put the U.S in Vietnam. Then and today, the people who devise foreign policy are at least somewhat removed from the struggle to survive.

But the argument is that they see further. Obama’s choice is to be very conservative as to how much. Perhaps, when deciding when to put lives at risk, he sees himself as the direct proxy of the average American. But the retrospective of U.S. policy in Syria shows that foreign policy requires the office holder  to be more than one’s self. This apparent impossibility is resolved by  the occasional magic of the select group, multiplying individual powers instead of succumbing to group-think policy inertia. Rare but possible, we have seen it happen.

The number, 50, is a legitimate number for an advance team, for exploring working relationships with poorly known opposites. Eager to publish,  op-ed writers tend to prejudge. We cannot tell if the 50 are the spearhead of a new Syria policy, invested not just with boots on the ground, but with new ideas as well, such as partitioning Syria to separate combatants saturated in murderous hatred. This has been explored in recent posts on this blog.

We cannot tell also whether, in possible disagreement with Russia, Obama is willing to engage in brinksmanship. In the practical description of nationalism, the nation is the largest unit governed by  moral and legal norms. Brinksmanship challenges the instincts and decency of a domestic  presidency.

 

Russia Offers to Help Syrian Rebels; U.S. Policy; Towards a Syrian Peace

Russia has made the astonishing offer of air support to the Free Syrian Army. A Yahoo link is intriguing, if accurate: “Russia said Saturday it was ready to provide air support for Western-backed moderate rebels battling both jihadists and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad [italics mine] as Moscow presses on with its diplomatic offensive over the conflict.

Since their first bombing runs were directed at the FSA units pressuring the Damascus-Aleppo road, one could reasonably doubt Russian sincerity. And their “candidness reservoir” was utterly exhausted by the monotonous opacity of their Ukraine representations. In diplomacy, one can lie fifty percent of the time. Any more gets obnoxious. So there is almost every reason to dismiss the Russian overture as a chance to pick up targeting coordinates for the rest of the Free Syrian Army.

Let’s generate an excuse for those strikes related to securing the Damascus-Aleppo road. The Russians realized that if the road were cut, the Assad regime would become little more than the city government of Damascus.  Aleppo would be gone, and Latakia, the historic redoubt of the Alawites, would fall soon thereafter. And with that consequence, the rebel inclination to negotiate would vanish, replaced by a starve-them-out resolve. In the current mindset of U.S. diplomacy, weighted down by the moral guilt of decades of expediencies, the Russian bombing has one interpretation, as moral offense to U.S. policy. Russians don’t think that way. They conceive of a Greater Good, formulated from the Russian point of view, and apply whatever expediencies are required by the current exigencies. (The letter “e” is a very helpful vowel.)

But now that the Russians have been on the ground in Syria for a while, it seems they are rediscovering the observation of someone who interviewed Bashar al-Assad early in the conflict [citation missing.] Even at that early stage, Assad felt trapped between his own people and the rebellion, remarking, in fact, that his own people might kill him. This is entirely believable, because unlike the regime of Saddam Hussein, Assad’s government is composed of a close-knit group of Latakian Alawites. Community consensus  could move quite powerfully against Assad, if there were a preferable alternative. Assad’s hard line gives them no need to seek one.

Assad has to deal with community attitudes, which according to sociobiology have ranges in every attitude as a consequence of gene pool diversity. Regardless of how dire the Alawite situation becomes, a certain number, among whom Assad’s assassins have latent existence, adhere to the hardest, most aggressive line. From this group also come the most effective fighters.

When Syria was a whole, coherently functioning police state with a repressive mukhābarāt, the street myth about Assad was that he was actually a “good guy”, with progressive attitudes blocked by bad elements. There has never been any hard evidence that Assad is or was actually a “good guy.” It is interesting to note, however, that in the early stages of the uprising, Assad took a number of steps, interpreted as token, toward reform. This weakly supports the idea that the basic source of Russian frustration is grassroots Alawite sentiment, based upon justifiable fear of slaughter.

The statement (Reuters) by Sergei Lavrov that the Kremlin wanted “Syria to prepare for parliamentary and presidential elections“ is diplomatic boilerplate, the kind that tires the eyes and requires the open source hound’s immediate note, “find some meaning.” To calibrate, we need look no further than Iraq. During his presidency of Iraq between 1979 and 2003, Saddam enforced a secular state, of Sunni bias, with brutality of epic proportions. When by design of American neoconservatives, the social order was destroyed and replaced by a representational democracy, an insurgency developed that resulted ten years later in collapse of the state. And the ethnicity of insurgency was not  the formerly oppressed. It came from the former ruling Sunnis, incapable of grasping that they were a minority in Iraq, to reclaim a glory that mere facts could not disabuse. This counter-intuitive example is paled by Syrian malice.

In Syria, the killing is all too recent and personal for the success of an elected government. As diplomatic boilerplate, the concept is  useful, because it covers a hole you can drive a truck through. Lavrov cannot possibly believe in elections. His most believable recent statement, if true, is the muttered “fucking morons” about the Saudis. Sergei, thank you for your candor. For once, you weren’t talking like the lawyer joke (see #7).

The offer of air support to the FSA [paraphrased] “if we knew where they are”,  indicates Russian intelligence limitations. Russian SIGINT (signal intelligence) is capable against unencrypted radio. But aerial reconaissance has apparently been unable to determine the locations of the twelve TOW anti-tank missile launchers positioned just east of the Damascus-Aleppo road.  As a less effective measure, the Russians bombed the headquarters of the group responsible for most TOW attacks. American intelligence, based on advanced physical device technology, is much more capable.

What would the Russians do with FSA coordinates if they had them? The lack of candor since the 2007-08 turn away from the West means the Russian offer to the FSA can be only a suggestion of possible meaning. Such suggestions have been used, most recently, to manipulate E.U. response to the Ukraine crisis. But the offer cannot simply be ignored. It is so pregnant with possibility that if nothing else, it could inspire U.S. diplomacy towards a common goal, not yet formulated by either Russia or the U.S. Perhaps it’s best thought of as a diplomatic “chum pot”, the cage of bait towed behind a game boat to attract fish.

In this highly speculative fashion, with potential for future reality, the Russian request for coordinates could be a request for territorial declaration, the basis for future land swaps, leading to partition. If this seems to good to be true, the Russians may consider the following as facts:

  • Russian intervention cannot stabilize the military situation beyond the near term.
  • The idea of elections, “diplomatic boilerplate”, is a farce, except within domains already established by partition.
  • With expanded interface to the Alawite hardcore edge, the Russians now realize it cannot be tempered by merely losing a war. Territorial declaration, facts on the ground, could do this. Assad himself has his back against the wall. And without tempering, the Russians cannot save the Alawites from themselves.
  • The FSA, as odious as David Stockman says they are, have the potential to be one of the territory-fillers, so desperately needed in the region, to eliminate the vacuum in which ISIS thrives.

What would be the consequence of a fundamental change in the ground situation, so that destroying or degrading the FSA made Assad’s Syria again viable? The Russians would then bomb the FSA. This is a consequence of raison d’etat as the cornerstone of Russian foreign policy. But fact of ISIS as the the most urgent danger makes this currently impossible. It deprives the Russians of most manipulations.

The above is a hypothesis about Russian thinking. It is not factually supported by recent Russian actions in Syria, or by the  style of Russian diplomatic communication. The lives of the FSA do not belong to the U.S., and the disclosure of their positions to the Russians is not morally ours to make. But back-channel diplomacy, going beyond Ash Carter’s statement, is opportune. Perhaps limited tactical cooperation, formulated in tandem with mutually agreed territorial declarations, would be a good start towards a Syrian peace.

The NY Times Jonathan Mahler Bin Laden Article

Johnathan Mahler has infected the New York Times Magazine with a conspiracy-driven article about the death of Osama bin Laden, modeled along the lines of Seymour Hersh’s book. It is almost inconceivable to find myself on the side of CNN, in opposition to the New York Times. Like Peter Bergen, I revere the reputation of the NYT. But reputation is not the same as the current state. Ominous signs of decay have preceded this, in the forms of

  • Shallow focus
  • Lack of attention to detail
  • Assignment of articles to unqualified authors
  • Failing editorial oversight

But all these pale in comparison to the abandonment of Occam’s Razor  to embrace the terrible trap of imagined conspiracy.  We expect that second rate minds are vulnerable to the trap. We expect the NYT to enfold a concentrate of the first-rate. But times have changed. The paper is under financial pressure.  Perhaps the major stockholders demand sleaze. Perhaps the  decay is an attempt to adapt to an audience of third-rate minds. But it is the death of presumptive confidence that a Times publication is probably correct.

Now more than ever, the intelligent reader is forced to compare multiple news sources of poor reliability/responsibility/ethic in order to arrive at an estimation of the truth.  Now open-source analysis is required of every reader.

One of the purposes of this blog is to make open source analysis a transferable skill. If it is not immediately obvious that the Johnathan Mahler/Seymour Hersh scheme of things is a fraud on the truth,  you should dig into the back articles of this blog for detailed discussions of technique.

But in any case, keep Occam’s Razor always within reach.

 

Intel9's world view

Intel9