Do Troop Levels Matter In Iraq?

A while back I wrote about why every responsible American should support the war in Iraq: lower domestic political support means that the Bush Administration would need to draw down the military and rely more on the air campaign. Air bombing, while leading to fewer American casualties, would result in more Iraqi civilian casualties and increase Iraqi political factionalization.

What I am going to argue here is that it not only matters that we don't reduce the current amount of American troops in Iraq, it also matters that we vastly increase the amount of our armed forces stationed and patrolling in Iraq.

The intuitive response would be: (a) our troops are fueling the insurgency which is directed against our occupation, and (b) more troops would intensify the insurgency and thereby increase American and Iraqi casualties. This response, however, only addresses half the problem.

There are two conflicts brewing in Iraq today: an inter-ethnic civil war and an insurgency. Let us look briefly at both to understand their roots.

Ethnicity and the American occupation are the bases for the two distinct, but interrelated conflicts, for two simple reasons: (1) ethnicity and anti-Americanism are the two forces in Iraq capable of mobilizing the support of the civilian population and (2) Iraq lacks the bundle of political and economic institutions capable of delivering goods and services reliably enough to counter-mobilize the population.

Religious cleavages converge with ethnic ties and loyalties through which elites distribute and maintain patronage. The elites have solidified this patronage into formal political power in the presence of political parties in the government and juridical privilege in the Iraqi Constitution. These ethnic-religious tensions matter because almost everyone in Iraqi supports this social structure. The populace reinforces it through voting and through participating in client networks. The elites have built patronage relations along these religious and ethnic dimensions. The tacit bargain between the elites and the populace is that in exchange for the populace generating an ethnic nationalism affiliated with types of Islamic piety, the elites will make claims to the international community, the failing Iraqi state, and to other political collectivities in the name of a sovereign self-governing people. The Kurds are unique in this formulation because unlike the Sunni or the Shi'ia they do not imbricate movements and expression of piety into their nationalist claims. Conflicting nationalist claims about how the institutions of the state will govern, in whose name, over which territories, and by what authority push the political collectivities in Iraq toward a civil war designed to decide how power will be both shared and constituted.

If weak state institutions incapable of adjudicating and containing the collective demands for justice, rights, and safety have led to the fracturing of Iraqi society along ethnic lines and have created the conditions of possible civil war, then the failures of the state institutions to either deliver goods and services or provide a focal point for state-centered identities and client-networks inflamed anti-Americanism. With the toppling of the regime and the occupation of Iraq, the populace made claims for the basic goods and services--food, health, water, jobs, and electricity--supposed to be provided to them by their regime and found institutional capacity to deliver wanting. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and the war enthusiasts--I hesitate to call them war architects or planners as that implies forethought--in the Bush Administration, believe that a small army would be sufficient to topple the government of Saddam and release the Iraqis into their own freedom. The demonstrated ineptitude of the American occupation, with its stereotypically high-handed comments by the SecDef in response to the collapse of law and order that "freedom was messy" as well as the oversoon announcements of "Mission Accomplished" with two thumbs up, created an unmet demand among the Iraqi populace in urban centers against their American liberators. The influx of foreign fighters, with their slogans and insurgent tactics, provided a replace for state-centered populism: anti-occupation anti-Americanism.

To the Bush Administration's credit, it did realize that the vacuum of authority and deliveries left by the dismantled dictator-state would need to be filled by state institutions if the United States was going to accomplish its mission. To this end it built the skeletons of a neoliberal state--already a slim set of institutional arrangements and understandings devoted mostly to creating the conditions for market capitalism--and tried to conjure a constitutional order through an interim government, a convention, and elections. However, by this time, the elites for whom the anti-American insurgency was not the only way to order domestic support had begun to bend the dynamics of a parliamentary system to their own needs, and drive a government fighting an insurgency into promoting ethnic war. Ironically, the very institutions that were supposed to help the Iraqis out in the untidy den of freedom in that way became the very institutions through which pious ethnic elites would hold them hostage.

More troops would quell the slide to civil war by sitting on top of the bubbling ethnic tensions and physically separating/ policing those combatants determined to see the war through. The United States could operate as the muscle of peace by providing for the real security needs of all the populations in whose names claims of sovereignty are being made. Moreover, the Army could once again act the guarantors of the delivery of goods and services, dismantling the fiefdoms of misery and re-integrating entire urban centers back into the jurisdiction of state institutions.

More troops would not quash the insurgency military but would address the political and economic factors converging in support of it. By holding the Iraqi state together through a massive occupation, the United States military could dis-aggregate the bundles of security and political interests currently bundled together as "politics" in the nascent Iraqi parliament. Furthermore, it would give the state institutions time to grow in capacity; with more capacity the Iraqi state could do what most other states do: exchange goods and service for national allegiance.

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:56 PM | |

 
Is A Little Knowledge A Bad Thing? Stratfor Shoots Itself in the Foot

This is a reprint of the Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - April 4, 2006. I criticize the article below. Whereas it does a good job of proving that immigration is a net good for America, it gets worse as it goes along.

Borderlands and Immigrants
By George Friedman

The United States has returned to its recurring debate over
immigration. This edition of the debate, focused intensely on the
question of illegal immigration from Mexico, is phrased in a very
traditional way. One side argues that illegal migration from Mexico
threatens both American economic interests and security. The other
side argues that the United States historically has thrived on
immigration, and that this wave of migration is no different.

As is frequently the case, the policy debate fails to take fundamental
geopolitical realities into account.

To begin with, it is absolutely true that the United States has always
been an immigrant society. Even the first settlers in the United
States -- the American Indian tribes -- were migrants. Certainly,
since the first settlements were established, successive waves of
immigration have both driven the American economy and terrified those
who were already living in the country. When the Scots-Irish began
arriving in the late 1700s, the English settlers of all social classes
thought that their arrival would place enormous pressure on existing
economic processes, as well as bring crime and immorality to the
United States.

The Scots-Irish were dramatically different culturally, and their
arrival certainly generated stress. However, they proved crucial for
populating the continent west of the Alleghenies. The Scots-Irish
solved a demographic problem that was at the core of the United
States: Given its population at that time, there simply were not
enough Americans to expand settlements west of the mountains -- and
this posed a security threat. If the U.S. population remained
clustered in a long, thin line along the Atlantic sea board, with poor
lines of communication running north-south, the country would be
vulnerable to European, and especially British, attack. The United
States had to expand westward, and it lacked the population to do so.
The Americans needed the Scots-Irish.

Successive waves of immigrants came to the United States over the next
200 years. In each case, they came looking for economic opportunity.
In each case, there was massive anxiety that the arrival of these
migrants would crowd the job market, driving down wages, and that the
heterogeneous cultures would create massive social stress. The Irish
immigration of the 1840s, the migrations from eastern and southern
Europe in the 1880s -- all triggered the same concerns. Nevertheless,
without those waves of immigration, the United States would not have
been able to populate the continent, to industrialize or to field the
mass armies of the 20th century that established the nation as a
global power.


Population Density and Economic Returns

Logic would have it that immigration should undermine the economic
well-being of those who already live in the United States. But this
logic assumes that there is a zero-sum game. That may be true in
Europe or Asia. It has not been true in the United States. The key is
population density: The density of the United States, excluding
Alaska, is 34 people per square kilometer. By comparison, the
population density in the United Kingdom is 247 per square kilometer,
231 in Germany and 337 in Japan. The European Union, taken as a whole,
has a population density of 115. If the United States were to equal
the United Kingdom in terms of density, it would have a population of
about 2 billion people.

Even accepting the premise that some parts of the United States are
uninhabitable and that the United Kingdom is over-inhabited, the point
is that the United States' population is still small relative to
available land. That means that it has not come even close to
diminishing economic returns. To the extent to which the
population-to-land ratio determines productivity -- and this, in our
view, is the critical variable -- the United States still can utilize
population increases. At a time when population growth from native
births is quite low, this means that the United States still can
metabolize immigrants. It is, therefore, no accident that over the
past 40 years, the United States has absorbed a massive influx of
Asian immigrants who have been net producers over time. It's a big
country, and much of it is barely inhabited.

On this level, the immigration issue poses no significant questions.
It is a replay of a debate that has been ongoing since the founding of
the country. Those who have predicted social and economic disaster as
a result of immigration have been consistently wrong. Those who have
predicted growing prosperity have been right. Those who have said that
the national character of the United States would change dramatically
have been somewhat right; core values have remained in place, but the
Anglo-Protestant ethnicity represented at the founding has certainly
been transformed. How one feels about this transformation depends on
ideology and taste. But the simple fact is this: The United States not
only would not have become a trans-continental power without
immigration; it would not have industrialized. Masses of immigrants
formed the armies of workers that drove industrialism and made the
United States into a significant world power. No immigration, no
United States.


Geography: The Difference With Mexico

Now, it would seem at first glance that the current surge of Mexican
migration should be understood in this context and, as such, simply
welcomed. If immigration is good, then why wouldn't immigration from
Mexico be good? Certainly, there is no cultural argument against it;
if the United States could assimilate Ukrainian Jews, Sicilians and
Pakistanis, there is no self-evident reason why it could not absorb
Mexicans. The argument against the Mexican migration would seem on its
face to be simply a repeat of old, failed arguments against past
migrations.

But Mexican migration should not be viewed in the same way as other
migrations. When a Ukrainian Jew or a Sicilian or an Indian came to
the United States, their arrival represented a sharp geographical
event; whatever memories they might have of their birthplace, whatever
cultural values they might bring with them, the geographical milieu
was being abandoned. And with that, so were the geopolitical
consequences of their migration. Sicilians might remember Sicily, they
might harbor a cultural commitment to its values and they might even
have a sense of residual loyalty to Sicily or to Italy -- but Italy
was thousands of miles away. The Italian government could neither
control nor exploit the migrant's presence in the United States.
Simply put, these immigrants did not represent a geopolitical threat;
even if they did not assimilate to American culture -- remaining
huddled together in their "little Italys" -- they did not threaten the
United States in any way. Their strength was in the country they had
left, and that country was far away. That is why, in the end, these
immigrants assimilated, or their children did. Without assimilation,
they were adrift.

The Mexican situation is different. When a Mexican comes to the United
States, there is frequently no geographical split. There is
geographical continuity. His roots are just across the land border.
Therefore, the entire immigration dynamic shifts. An Italian, a Jew,
an Indian can return to his home country, but only with great effort
and disruption. A Mexican can and does return with considerable ease.
He can, if he chooses, live his life in a perpetual ambiguity.


The Borderland Battleground

This has nothing to do with Mexicans as a people, but rather with a
geographical concept called "borderlands." Traveling through Europe,
one will find many borderlands. Alsace-Lorraine is a borderland
between Germany and France; the inhabitants are both French and
German, and in some ways neither. It also is possible to find
Hungarians -- living Hungarian lives -- deep inside Slovakia and
Romania.

Borderlands can be found throughout the world. They are the places
where the borders have shifted, leaving members of one nation stranded
on the other side of the frontier. In many cases, these people now
hold the citizenship of the countries in which they reside (according
to recognized borders), but they think and speak in the language on
the other side of the border. The border moved, but their homes
didn't. There has been no decisive geographical event; they have not
left their homeland. Only the legal abstraction of a border, and the
non-abstract presence of a conquering army, has changed their reality.

Borderlands sometimes are political flashpoints, when the relative
power of the two countries is shifting and one is reclaiming its old
territory, as Germany did in 1940, or France in 1918. Sometimes the
regions are quiet; the borders that have been imposed remain
inviolable, due to the continued power of the conqueror. Sometimes,
populations move back and forth in the borderland, as politics and
economics shift. Borderlands are everywhere. They are the
archaeological remains of history, except that these remains have a
tendency to come back to life.

The U.S.-Mexican frontier is a borderland. The United States, to all
intents and purposes, conquered the region in the period between the
Texan revolution (1835-36) and the Mexican-American war (1846-48). As
a result of the war, the border moved and areas that had been Mexican
territory became part of the United States. There was little ethnic
cleansing. American citizens settled into the territory in increasing
numbers over time, but the extant Mexican culture remained in place.
The border was a political dividing line but was never a physical
division; the area north of the border retained a certain Mexican
presence, while the area south of the border became heavily influenced
by American culture. The economic patterns that tied the area north of
the Rio Grande to the area south of it did not disappear. At times
they atrophied; at times they intensified; but the links were always
there, and neither Washington nor Mexico City objected. It was the
natural characteristic of the borderland.

It was not inevitable that the borderland would be held by the United
States. Anyone looking at North America in 1800 might have bet that
Mexico, not the United States, would be the dominant power of the
continent. Why that didn't turn out to be the case is a long story,
but by 1846, the Mexicans had lost direct control of the borderland.
They have not regained it since. But that does not mean that the
borderland is unambiguously American -- and it does not mean that,
over the next couple of hundred years, should Washington's power
weaken and Mexico City's increase, the borders might not shift once
again. How many times, after all, have the Franco-German borders
shifted? For the moment, however, Washington is enormously more
powerful than Mexico City, so the borders will stay where they are.


The Heart of the Matter

We are in a period, as happens with borderlands, when major population
shifts are under way. This should not be understood as immigration. Or
more precisely, these shifts should not be understood as immigration
in the same sense that we talk about immigration from, say, Brazil,
where the geographical relationship between migrant and home country
is ruptured. The immigration from Mexico to the United States is a
regional migration within a borderland between two powers -- powers
that have drawn a border based on military and political history, and
in which two very different populations intermingle. Right now, the
United States is economically dynamic relative to Mexico. Therefore,
Mexicans tend to migrate northward, across the political border,
within the geographical definition of the borderland. The map declares
a border. Culture and history, however, take a different view.

The immigration debate in the U.S. Congress, which conflates Asian
immigrations with Mexican immigrations, is mixing apples and oranges.
Chinese immigration is part of the process of populating the United
States -- a process that has been occurring since the founding of the
Republic. Mexican immigration is, to borrow a term from physics, the
Brownian motion of the borderland. This process is nearly as old as
the Republic, but there is a crucial difference: It is not about
populating the continent nearly as much as it is about the dynamics of
the borderland.

One way to lose control of a borderland is by losing control of its
population. In general, most Mexicans cross the border for strictly
economic reasons. Some wish to settle in the United States, some wish
to assimilate. Others intend to be here temporarily. Some intend to
cross the border for economic reasons -- to work -- and remain
Mexicans in the full sense of the word. Now, so long as this migration
remains economic and cultural, there is little concern for the United
States. But when this last class of migrants crosses the border with
political aspirations, such as the recovery of lost Mexican
territories from the United States, that is the danger point.

Americans went to Texas in the 1820s. They entered the borderland.
They then decided to make a political claim against Mexico, demanding
a redefinition of the formal borders between Mexico and the United
States. In other words, they came to make money and stayed to make a
revolution. There is little evidence -- flag-waving notwithstanding --
that there is any practical move afoot now to reverse the American
conquest of Mexican territories. Nevertheless, that is the danger with
all borderlands: that those on the "wrong" side of the border will
take action to move the border back.

For the United States, this makes the question of Mexican immigration
within the borderland different from that of Mexican immigration to
places well removed from it. In fact, it makes the issue of Mexican
migration different from all other immigrations to the United States.
The current congressional debate is about "immigration" as a whole,
but that makes little sense. It needs to be about three different
questions:


1. Immigration from other parts of the world to the United States

2. Immigration from Mexico to areas well removed from the southern
border region

3. Immigration from Mexico to areas within the borderlands that were
created by the U.S. conquests


Treating these three issues as if they were the same thing confuses
matters. The issue is not immigration in general, nor even Mexican
immigration. It is about the borderland and its future. The question
of legal and illegal immigration and various solutions to the problems
must be addressed in this context.

=================================================================

Distribution and Reprints

This report may be distributed or republished with attribution to
Strategic Forecasting, Inc. at www.stratfor.com. For media requests,
partnership opportunities, or commercial distribution or
republication, please contact pr@stratfor.com.

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:09 PM | |

 
Is A Little Knowledge A Bad Thing? The Case Against Stratfor

This piece of garbage is without question the most poorly reasoned scientistic claptrap I've seen this year. It's fake social science and is representative of much of the crap I've seen from Stratford. This article sucked for four reasons:

(1) Startfor: "The Mexican situation is different. When a Mexican comes to the United States, there is frequently no geographical split. There is
geographical continuity. His roots are just across the land border.
Therefore, the entire immigration dynamic shifts. An Italian, a Jew,
an Indian can return to his home country, but only with great effort
and disruption. A Mexican can and does return with considerable ease.
He can, if he chooses, live his life in a perpetual ambiguity."

A problematic conception of identity underpins this analysis. Stratfor is implicitly suggesting two specious lines of reasoning: (a) immigration represents a pure transition from one sociopolitical context to another and (b) the governable/manageable, "good" immigrants are those who only have one national allegiance.

However, we know intuitively that transferring from one cultural horizon to another is never a pure shift. Who we are is the intersection of the cultural, social, and economic factors into which we born and in which we were socialized. If Jolene was born in England as a Catholic, impoverished doorknob maker, who she is is the intersection of what those identities mean in England. When she moves to America, the cultural context shifts and the fact that she is lesbian and Pakistani might become the salient identities. She, however, always remains a person who was shaped by that British background and whose identity was forged within those social relations; how she came to know herself is only in the context of those past lived experiences. Her experiences in America add to the past experiences of who she understands herself to be, but they do not replace them.

Moreover, personal ambiguity about your relationship to the dominant social and political order is not a problem. Immigrants are not the only persons in America who have to negotiate their identities in a way that produces ambivalence about who they are and what role they occupy in society. All politicized and criminalized identities must cope with their simultaneous inclusion in the market society and their rejection by (parts of) the political and social order: the handicapped, the homosexual, women, blacks, the homeless, the felon, the religious, and the ex-con to name a few. Personal ambiguity is a defining feature of many people in this Republic; a stable, uncomplicated, and unproblematic identity is a privilege of the few.

"The Mexican", an ominous category reminiscent of the depictions of the Gypsies stealing our precious property or the Jews devouring Protestant babies, is not a uniquely dissastified actor whose existence is one of ambivalence toward the United States. Patriotism, and support for America, is never an uncomplicated story for anyone with a politicized identity.

(2) Stratfor: "a geographical concept called "borderlands." Traveling through Europe,one will find many borderlands. Alsace-Lorraine is a borderland
between Germany and France; the inhabitants are both French and
German, and in some ways neither."

Just as they muddle how identities actually work in political societies, so Stratfor obscure the intensely *political* nature of the "geographic" concept of the "borderlands." They pretend that the analytic of the borderlands is "geographic" because it is about a spatial relation between state entities: "a borderland between Germany and France." However, the real thrust of their argument is about the *political* identities of the populations inhabiting that spatial entity: "the inhabitants are both French and German, and in some way neither." As seen by their fear of Mexican ambiguity, this article is about the political identification of "the Mexican." As you will notice if you read their poor article, for them the debate over Mexican immigration is not about whether immigrants are good or bad for America, is about whether America will become the one, true love of the politically adulterous "Mexican."

Their invocation of Alsace-Lorraine is instructive here: that territory started at least two of the wars between the Great Powers: the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War of 1914. Ominous, indeed.

(3) Stratfor: "Borderlands can be found throughout the world. They are the places where the borders have shifted, leaving members of one nation stranded
on the other side of the frontier. In many cases, these people now
hold the citizenship of the countries in which they reside (according
to recognized borders), but they think and speak in the language on
the other side of the border."

Unless you weren't scared already, Stratfor warns us of the all the flash-points of the world where the inhabitants are in one country but are loyal to another. The immigrants' treason runs deeper than a lack of patriotism because they even think like the enemy: "they think and speak in the language on the other side of the border." The relationship of a person to a political regime remains as long as they think and speak like them; the article uses the language of being "an abandoned nation" in forced exile.

Citizenship in a new country is not sufficient, they argue, to create loyal patriots. The population of that territory is always waiting for the opportunity to rejoin their lost nation. However, they have not provided one shred of evidence that the populations in that territory conceive of themselves in strongly nationalist terms. They merely insinuate that the people in the territory might feel political ambiguous--who wouldn't--and are thus a liability.

(4) Stratfor: "One way to lose control of a borderland is by losing control of its population. In general, most Mexicans cross the border for strictly
economic reasons. Some wish to settle in the United States, some wish
to assimilate. Others intend to be here temporarily. Some intend to
cross the border for economic reasons -- to work -- and remain
Mexicans in the full sense of the word. Now, so long as this migration
remains economic and cultural, there is little concern for the United
States. But when this last class of migrants crosses the border with
political aspirations, such as the recovery of lost Mexican
territories from the United States, that is the danger point."

In this final quote the true point of the article emerges: the political regime must brainwash, in their language "control", the actual beliefs of the populations involved. You can't just live in America, you have to think America, and talk American for us to trust you. Even then if you have "political aspirations", a notoriously vague concept, the United States is threatened with losing its territory.

Is there are real threat of "the Mexican" taking away United States' territory? This question can only be answered by a recourse to social science and not be recourse to vague fears of disloyal, distrust, and disunion. Under what conditions does a population rebel and seek to join a neighboring state? Your basic intuitions should tell you, if you know any history at all, that populations only seek exit from a regime when the regime is either (a) killing them and (b) the political institutions have weakened to the point where it is more advantageous for political elites to secede than the political contend. Plainly, only if the United States' political institutions were crumbling, or if we were mass murdering immigrants, would any group think of seceding from the United States. In that situation, we have a lot more to worry about than the disloyalty of "the Mexican"; we might, in that situation, want to fear for own on lives.

Posted by John Stevenson at 8:00 PM | |

 
Spring Break is over and the term has restarted. I'll be back to posting then sometime next week.

I hope to see you all soon.

Posted by John Stevenson at 6:37 AM | |