Rebooting the Dictator Software

By Stirling Newberry
Created Nov 18 2006 - 12:00pm

A ray of reality hits the Captain's Quarters [1] as the hard right wing
blogger opines that abandoning "Democracy" - or such that passes for it in
the minds of people like Bush and Cheney - is abandoning the long term
strategy in Iraq.

No, you oaf, Democracy was never the outcome for this debacle,
neo-conservatism was the supply side economics of the Bush executive, the
nonsense spewed to get people to eat the low mileage recycled dog food of a
policy that a few people wanted to drop on the country.

Iraq was always headed for de facto partition, and it has always been headed
for a reboot of the dictator software. There never was any Democracy coming.
The ponyhawks are beginning to realize this. Too late of course, they
realize that it is a disaster [2]. Thank Tony for saying the obvious far too
late.

Let's begin from the beginning. One cannot look at the invasion of Iraq in
isolation. Instead, it must be seen as part of an interlocking series of
policies which include the massive revenue reductions passed by George W.
Bush. Iraq was the means to float the economy even as we were busy digging
our way to China in federal budget deficit. This is why we had to invade
Iraq on the cheap - there wasn't any more money to do it right. The entire
background chatter of going in all Powellian was never in the cards, because
there wasn't the money for it. Not in 1991, and not today.

In fact, Iraq is the brittle point that the entire generational policy of
borrow and squander economics has been tripping over again and again. In
Bush Sr's day, we could not overthrow Saddam because we were too far in hoc
from all the Reagan-Bush deficit spending. Today we couldn't spend the money
to do nation building in Iraq, because we were busy bailing out everyone who
lost a ton of money in the stock market.

The goal was to have big tax breaks for big Bush donors. But how to generate
economic activity, if the money we were supposed to be using for a stimulus
package was, instead, being sunk into Klimt paintings? The obvious answer
was a war. But it had to be a war that would generate both jobs and oil.
Greedy eyes turned towards Iraq, and saw a place that could be a lot like
Texas - no water, lots of oil.

The neo-conservatives were rather late on to this particular bus, but they
were, as the old expression goes, useful idiots. By prattling about
Democracy they made it look as if this was an argument between
unreconstructed pale-conservative imperialism, and a kinder gentler
imperialism. In fact, there was no debate in the end, since Democracy was
the one thing that we did not work very hard to create. Instead, it was
about created that unfrettered free market that people like Milton Freidman
were so in love with. For all the paeans to the dead Nobel Memorial Prize
winner, I can only say that the people writing them haven't spent enough
time looking that the results of his anti-government crusade closely enough.

Democracy in Iraq, like the idea that we could "cut taxes, raise defense
spending and balance the budget" was always an absurdity. Particularly since
it involved the imposition of a rather vanilla flavored version of
parliamentary Democracy which has no roots in Iraq. It isn't that the people
in Iraq - one can't say "Iraqis" because there is no such thing at this
point - can't engage in self-government, but they can't do so with the
crushing weight of keeping the Bushconomy afloat.

Since both parts - invasion and revenue reduction - had to not only happen,
but happen on schedule - this placed very tight limits on what kind of
invasion and occupation we could have. Specifically it had to be one which
did not involve most of the international community, one that did not
involve large numbers of troops, and one that had most of the money for
reconstruction siphoned off. [3]

In short, it looks a lot like Ken Lay and Tom DeLay's version of Texas. The
place where things like this happen [4].

- - -

That Iraq and deficits were, always, part of the same policy. The war was
the shot of cocaine that was mixed with the heroine of revenue reductions,
allowing a wage deflationary-resource inflationary policy. I've been saying
this for sometime, but it bears repeating: this is one coherent policy. The
Bush team acted like the people who did a hostile take over of a
corporation, they had a plan, they put that plan in place with dictatorial
obsession, and the remainder of their tenure has been to ride it out,
begging the investors for enough time. The HP-Compaq merger is a small deal
compared to Bush's plan to slash the price of money for the wealthy, and
make up for it by dramatically raising the price the US charges the rest of
the world for the Pax Americana.

It hasn't worked, but it is an insane solution to a very real problem. A
strong government with oil doesn't buy enough outside goods to make up for
the inflationary rates at which we buy oil. To have rapid global economic
growth means convincing OPEC to pump oil at the top end of their productive
abilities, and convince the world to buy marginal barrels of oil that are
hard to produce and do not have high productive return. It also means having
a high risk premium built in for speculation, because a world awash in
dollars as investment demand - which is what people who have everything buy.

The paradox of the bushconomy is that with both the United States and OPEC -
effectively the world's two central banks - have had the pedal to the floor.
This has produced, globally, extremely fast nominal GDP growth. Most of this
growth had been concentrated in three areas: resources, offshoring and
finance to control the instabilities and risks of resources and offshoring.
The big beneficiaries then have been neo-mercantilist states, and the people
who invest in them. The result has been an equalization of prices in places
such as China's coastal region - one pays world prices for an apartment in
Shanghai, or a meal in QingDao.

By itself this process is not objectionable, as people who were outside of
the mechanized economy before are being brought into the mechanized economy
now. And the mechanized economy is where it is at for standard of living. It
is important to remember that there have been four waves of technological
transformation in global economies: the wind/water wave, where materials
science, mathematicized engineering and experimentation and the inventions
they allow transform the agrarian system allowing a much larger urban
population, but without generally improving the standard of agrarian living
itself. This wave appeared first in the Islamic Caliphates and China, and to
a lesser extent in India, but it is the European world that was able to
ruthless exploit this wave, in no small part because it was able to reach
the second wave first.

That wave can be called "dry combustion". The coal age. The first coal age
invention appears relatively early - namely, gunpowder, which is, afterall
charcol, saltpetre and sulphur melded together using water and drying. The
coal age creates a spectacular increase in standards of living, more over it
creates a standing military advantage for the nations that master it
sufficient to easily subjugate and occupy - at least relative to the
ordinary mortality rates of that time - at reasonable costs in blood and
treasure.

With this wave, the European continent conquered the globe, and developed a
culture which was capable of dealing with the internal contradictions.
However, it has two intrinsic weaknesses. The first was that its menial
labor had to be present on the spot. This is because two of its stables -
the horse for medium sized transport and the moving of coal - required
menial labor in large quanitities, to shovel coal, manure and move the small
objects associated with horse and coal economies. The presence of the
factotum - the person who carries things - extended into the personal lives
of that time. Once upon a time, every gentleman had "a man" who carried
things for him.

This created two tensions. First, the "agony of modernization", as the
people at the bottom of the industrial heap suffered greatly, and were
deprived of the autonomy of country life. They worked harder, and got less.
Second, they were, literally, a stone's throw away from the people who had
more, and through out the period, they would often throw those stones. While
the ability of an industrialized military to put down such revolts remained
true through most of the 19th century, it was often a very near thing. Stone
throwing revolutions rocked Europe in 1789, 1830, 1840, 1871 - and in
smaller actions.

In short, the coal age, while it created almost fantastical amounts of
wealth, also created almost fantastical amounts of poverty in the same
locations as the wealth. This friction was the heat that produced the flame
of revolutionary marxism, as well as a series of populist movements. On the
other side, agrarian societies with agarian aristocracies resisted the
change from an autonomous control of land, to a more unstable control of
money. The American South was only one of the examples, equally telling was
the resistence of Russia to modernization.

I go over this background again because our own wave of industrialization is
based on digitization. Digitization is far more influential in the spread of
information than the actual control of production. Computers make cars more
efficient, but they do not make something that generically replaces the car,
the way the car replaced the horse. They can substitute for the car, as the
telephone could substitute for the horse or the train, but only in specific
circumstances. Cybersex just isn't the same thing as being there in the
flesh.

Looking at the previous waves of communication revolution, one finds an
interesting pattern - here we are looking at writing, literacy, the printing
press, the telegraph, the telephone/recording and broadcast introductions.
Communication, by itself, offers two forces at riptides with each other. On
one hand the enable the centralization of power to a degree impossible
before. Book keeping, record keeping, written orders and bureaucracy allow
the commands of a few to be magnified tremendously, and allow accountability
for their being carried out. They also, however, allow the creation of
counter order.

Consider if you will the early 1500's. The technologies that had been
created allowed a small number of people to have access to spices and other
imported goods, but generally the standard of production had not changed,
and would not change until the mill and ethnoculture later on, and that
increased production would lead to more people, not better standards of
living. But it allowed both the creation of more powerful states - now
called nation-states - and the creation of international movements,
including, most importantly, Protestantism. At the same time that Pope Leo
is expanding the papacy and bringing in vast sums of money to expand Rome,
Martin Luther is creating a counter order that would overthrow the century
long hegemony of Rome.

Our own period is much in the same position - digital communications is
allowing both globalization, and the creation of social counter-order
capable of overthrowing the very global elites that it makes possible. What
digitization does not do is dramatically increase production above
trendline.

Which returns us to Iraq. The communications revolution that digital
technology hath wrought is parallelled by a material science revolution. The
two often go hand in hand because communication allows artifacts to be moved
farther, and research to be shared more broadly. This increases the rate at
which new materials with new properties are put into play. These have
combined to create the US military advantage in invasions. Tanks with better
armor, infantry with better armor, better range on attacks means that, in a
battle field setting, the American military can kill before it can be
killed. The ability to pick apart enemies at range, made the invasion
relatively easy. Those who we could not kill, we bribed.

However, in an occupation setting, while communications are important,
production is as important. This is why the occupation has been doomed
almost from the start - the ability to create a top heavy military and top
heavy society are not particularly useful in an attempt to Democratize.
Instead, the natural configuration of a top heavy society is, a dictator.
The natural configuration for a system which allows smaller national units
to interface with the outside world is to have centrifugal forces tear the
polity apart.

Thus the natural direction after invasion was the natural direction of the
post Soviet period in general, with the USSR, Yugoslavia and the Congo as
primary examples of the collapse of a dictatorship over a poly-national
country. Insert a small, as required by finance, invasion style army, and
there is no force powerful enough to stop these two natural tendencies.
Particularly since US policy during the Cold Peace of 1991-2003 was to
encourage rebellion against Saddam.

What would have counter-acted this centrifugal force would have been the
ability to raise standards of living dramatically. This is precisely what
the US could not do. The Iraqis already had access to the mechanized and
electrified economy, and most of the medical benefits of the 20th century.
The digital economy is very good at getting people to buy entertainment. But
American entertainment is not of much use in Iraq, and it certainly isn't
going to hold a candle to the national sport of Iraq, sectarian violence.

Let me put this back together more slowly:

1. Iraq was part of a coherent policy of dramatically reducing taxes on the
very wealthy, and using war to bring in cheap oil and create jobs that would
cover lack of stimulus from the tax package. We can see how the war was the
economic stimulus by the speed at which the US economy began its rebound
after the invasion.

2. The communications and materials revolution allows for both greater
centralization of power, and greater counter-centralization. It does not
dramatically improve standards of living over the previous wave of
industrialization.

3. Thus the introduction of a light invasion force, without the ability to
dramatically improve living standards, unleashed the counter-centralizing
tendencies, allowing for the creation of multiple insurgencies and their
growth into a civil war.

4. Democracy, even in the Texified form that was proposed, was never an
option. The magic free market fundamentalism - essentially "take government
away and everything goes incredibly well" - never stood a chance. It is
superstitous nonsense to begin with, and implemented by low quality
intellects to compound the problem.

- - -

Now for the ugly conclusion. Consider that right now there is almost
jubliation in the press over the return of people from the Bush the eldar
administration - a failed one term adminstration which bollixed Iraq and the
break up of the USSR, failed to deal with the transition away from high
octane Reagan deficits, and allowed the largest banking collapse since the
Great Depression in the collapse of the S&L scandal. And the Bush the young
make these people look good.

There is no money for a "heavy footprint" occupation. The best that can be
done is scrounging up between 20K and 40K additional troops and throwing
them at Baghdad to suppress the rebellion there temporarily, and allow the
military pork to flow for a couple of more years before withdrawal and tax
increases are put back into place. Basically, those who have looted the US
Treasury want to make a clean get away with the money.

To do this they are going to have to accept the creation of a strong man in
Iraq, and allow him to pump the oil, with no questions asked.

It is obvious, almost to the point of agony, to point out that the same
people who cheered us into war are still our commentators and pundits, that
the same lack of awareness of basic economic, political and military facts
which led people to believe that there would be flowers and kisses in the
occupation are still the dominant voices in our national media. It is also
obvious to the point of agony that having rushed behind Bush fils' get rich
quick scheme, they are now hoping that the Bush family fixer will be able to
help them keep that which they have ill gotten.

And people wonder why the economy doesn't feel very good, and wages are
going nowhere. Perhaps because the American elites are committed to making
sure that all the wrong things have been tried before the right one is even
considered.

What is also on display is the infantilization of elites. Bush and Blair
both blame nefarious forces for the defeat:

Mr Blair said: "It has, but you see, what I say to people is, 'why is it
difficult in Iraq?' It's not difficult because of some accident in planning,
it's difficult because there's a deliberate strategy - al-Qaida with Sunni
insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shia militias on the
other - to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is
displaced by the will of the minority for war."

Read that again. Realize how mind numbling stupid it is. Planning is
supposed to take into account reasonable difficulties. To say that it is not
a failure of planning to fail to take into account the inevitable creation
of resistence to invasion, occupation and looting of a country, is beyond
imbecilic. And it is imbeciles all the way down the depth chart - because
each level was 200%% behind the plan and would not allow any dissent or
questions to get in the way of what was a monsterously stupid plan to do
monsterously criminal things.

What exactly is Blair complaining about? That forces in Iraq are displacing
the majority will for peace with the minority will for war? That is
precisely what he and Bush did - used deception and deliberate planning to
thwart the will of the majority for peace, and imposed the minority desire
for war. In short, he is complaining that others are doing as he has done,
and as Bush is continuing to do. The word hypocrisy only applies to people
who are sufficiently self-aware to understand that they hold two
incompatible views. Blair, clearly, does not have the level of
self-awareness to be a hypocrite then, and falls somewhere farther down the
evolutionary ladder than a dog, because even a dog knows when it is
defecating in the wrong place.

Democracy is founded on the rule of law. It seems hard for people to grasp
that an illegal invasion for unethical purposes justified by immoral
behavior will not lead to the basic rule of law required for Democracy. Let
me spell this out: gross failures to respect the law and the facts on the
ground do not lead to Democracy, which is, above all, an attempt to apply
the rule of law flexibly to the facts on the ground.

_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson