The Opinionated Bastard

Friction: The rubbing of one object against another.

Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction that is inconceivable unless one has experienced war. -- Karl Von Clausewitz

I am a systems engineer. That means that ultimately, I work with large, complex systems, systems that generally interact with other large, complex systems in order to create an even larger system.

In other words, rather then work on a specific cog, I work on the collection of cogs, wheels and gears that make up the final machine. In the digital age, that means understanding computers, network protocols, the wiring of networks, software components, and how all of those can interact in new and interesting ways.

Or, more typically, how they don't interact. It is quite possible for each of the pieces of a system to be in perfect working order, yet for the system as a whole to not be working. It is also possible for one small piece to fail, yet produce a symptom in a supposedly unrelated system.

Consider a car. It has a cooling system consisting of a water pump, coolant, a thermostat, and a radiator. It has a lubrication system consisting of oil and an oil filter. As your oil gets older, it lubricates less well. This causes more friction in the engine, which produces heat, which degrades the coolant. So even though the lubrication system and the coolant system are not physically connected, a problem in one generates issues in another. That interaction I think of as friction because even though I have never been a general, the logistical problems of a general like Clausewitz I imagine are much like the problems involved in getting any large system installed and running smoothly. Also, friction is literally the mechanism involved in a car engine.

So as a system engineer, I'm quite used to this sort of friction. I never expect the behavior of the system to be the same as the behavior of the components, because it never is. The more components you add to a system, the more quirks and personality you add as well. It is no accident that people start ascribing personality traits to large machines; it is often the best way to describe their behavior. “It's feeling a bit tetchy today” someone might remark.

There are many names for this sort of viewpoint: “big picture”, “holistic”, “view from 10,000 feet”, but they all boil down to the fact that to understand the behavior of the system you need to look at the system as a whole. While the behavior of the individual components may give you some insight, quirks of their individual behavior can show up in the system as major features.

A gear alone doesn't need grease. Two gears floating in space don't need grease. Two gears rubbing together require grease in order to function; two components imply a third component to smooth the interface between them. In fact, in our simple system of two gears, its the wear of one gear upon another that is that the major headache for the systems engineer, not the gears themselves.

Contrast this with the view that a system is only a collection of parts, and will function the same way assembled or disassembled, and any problem with the system must be due to a malfunctioning part. So if there is a problem with the system, you can fix it by going through the parts one by one, resolving any issues. When you're done, the system will function again. This is the reductionist viewpoint.

In my work, both of these points of view have their place, and I can switch between one and another at will. The reductionist viewpoint is the most tempting, because its much easier to think about the system in pieces then it is to think about it as a whole. Testing all the individual pieces may be tedious, but its easy to follow so you always have a place to start. The system viewpoint doesn't always give you an obvious starting point when diagnosing a problem. Yet for some problems, the system path is the only way to the solution: gears floating in space don't wear down.

The whole is larger then the sum of its parts.

Which brings us to foreign policy. Like it or not, the world has become a complex system of interacting, interrelating countries. The reductionist view of the world no longer holds, if it ever did. While some consider this “globalization” a great evil, it is really an old story: the actions of one government have always affected the economies and policies of other governments, at least since the days of the Romans, and probably since the days of the ancient Egyptians.

Unlike simple mechanical systems, systems with people are much more complex but with one curious trait: if you add two mediocre people together who complement each other, you often get two superior people. This is one of the reasons free trade works so well, both countries get richer as each country works towards their strengths.

So these interactions can be positive, or they can be negative; like when Bush raised steel tariffs in the US, causing industries using steel to suffer more in lost revenue then the value of the entire US steel industry. In our complex world, the amount of friction between countries is higher then ever.

For policymakers this presents a difficult challenge. No longer can we really divide policy between “foreign” and “domestic”. They are all one, so that reductionist viewpoint, that events in Timor have no effect on the US is no longer true. Events in Timor have an effect on the US just as events in the US have an effect on Timor. And that is just Timor, a country I chose precisely because it is relatively obscure, yet strangely influential. Isolationism has been dead since World War II.

The amount of friction in the world is high.

So we must use the system viewpoint in our domestic and foreign policy. That viewpoint is terrifyingly complex. There isn't a person alive who can keep track of all of our domestic and foreign policies, much less figure out how they may interact. It is tempting to fall back to the reductionist viewpoint, to consider each country independently, ignoring how they interrelate. To have 180 foreign policies, instead of 1...

Yet it is the reductionist viewpoint that has caused all of the problems we see today. Taken one at a time, the realpolitik of the Cold War said it was OK if this country was a dictatorship, perhaps that was even preferable because we would have more “control”. This realpolitik was horribly, horribly wrong.

With the system viewpoint and the benefit of hindsight, we realize that between us and the Soviets, every single country in the Middle East was a dictatorship. We saw what a terrible decision this was on 9/11. These dictatorships are sand in the gears of the world, and they must be cleaned out.

This is why I've been so happy with President Bush's foreign policy, and why I get so frustrated with his critics. President Bush has made three key foreign policy decisions:

1. That 9/11 had to do with Terrorism, not Al Queda.
2. That Terrorism had to do with the lack of Freedom and Justice in the Arab World.
3. That any sort of nuclear talks about Korea were meaningless without the Chinese.

President Bush made these decisions not by looking at each country in particular, but by looking at our foreign policy as a system. Striking at one Terrorist organization like Al Queda was pointless because another one would just spring up to replace it. What the US needed to do was strike at the fundamental cause of Terrorism. Looking at the world, what was obvious was that all the sources of terrorism were also repressed countries.

This led him to one of the key direction changes in American Foreign Policy.

• Henceforth, the US would try as hard as possible to promote democracy in as many countries as possible.

If you like, you can read about the President's plan in detail here. It is riveting reading for anyone who is familiar with the realpolitik of our old foreign policy:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential oftheir people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages.

Most people don't realize this was a big change from our previous foreign policy (as cynically described by me):

• The US will try as hard as possible to promote democracy in Eastern Europe, while keeping as many countries as possible out of Soviet hands by whatever means necessary.

Though Condi puts it a little nicer:

For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,“ Rice said. ”Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.“

In our defense, there was a war on, the Cold War, and we needed to win it. Countries like Iran, El Salvador, etc. were a sideshow compared to East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, etc.. So even though I'm being cynical that was a perfectly reasonable goal, up until about midway through the Clinton presidency.

That is we never realized we needed to change the goal in Clinton's second term. We just left foreign policy alone, so that it took a Republican President to proclaim the virtues of liberalism. Read the above paragraph, but imagine FDR or Woodrow Wilson writing it. It's like a blast from the Democratic past.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, yeah, yeah, we're going to promote democracy. Whatever.

Well, you can actually go to the State Department website and track their progress. We're actually doing it. Every year, people in the State Department have to come up with goals to meet elements of the strategic plan. You can see how they've been doing on the State Department's website. Here is the link for the latest report on how they've been doing on spreading Democracy and Human Rights.

According to this page, in 2002, before President Bush proclaimed the strategic plan, 16 countries improved their human rights while in 17 they got worse. That's a net progress of -1 country, so the world as a whole got less free, but remember, this is before President Bush changed the goal. In 2003, with our new foreign policy, 29 countries improved their human rights, and 11 countries got worse. That means that the world got more free because things got better in 18 countries. This isn't according to the State Departments assesment either, they're basing this assessment on a NGO called Freedom House. According to the Freedom House's latest assessment, between 2004 and 2005, 25 countries improved while 10 declined, a net gain of 15 countries. The way I read this is that countries have actually been somewhat willing to respond to our pressure to improve political and human rights, but that prior to 2002, we didn't really seem to care. That's why this is such an interesting change in our foreign policy direction.

So not only is the State Department making a concerted effort to promote democracy, but one of the things I've been worried about is that we've been too cozy with Pakistan and Musharraf. Well on this page you can see how we've been working to establish democratic rule in Pakistan. We have a long term plan with Pakistan. It can't become a Jeffersonian Democracy overnight, you start with local groups like a Rotary, PTA, etc. and build up to free elections. You can also see how we've been encouraging freedom of the press in the Middle East. Since 2002, 3 countries in the Middle East have taken steps towards liberalizing their press.

So the Bush State Department has been actively working towards promoting democracy, something that US hasn't tried to do worldwide since 1945. One of my big beefs with John Kerry and the rest of the Democratic party was that they refused to commit to promoting democracy. They acted like it was some radical idea of Bush's, when historically, it has been the prerogative of liberalism. What has the Democratic party come to? During the last election, they seemed to want to go back to the bad old days of realpolitik.

But promoting democracy works. From the Freedom House website:

Freedom House survey data also shed some light on the debate about the relationship between the lack of political rights and civil liberties and the growing threat of international terrorism. According to a Freedom House analysis of global terrorist attacks of a five year period from 1999-2003, 70 percent of all attributable deaths by terrorism were perpetrated by terrorists and terrorist movements originating in Not Free countries. By contrast, only 8 percent of global fatalities from terrorism were perpetrated by terrorists and groupings with origins in the free world. ”This suggests that the expansion of democracy and freedom is an important component in the international effort to rid the world of the terrorist scourge,“ said Adrian Karatnycky, principal analyst of Freedom in the World.

Freedom works. It is the grease between the gears of the world. Democracies are more robust, tougher, more prosperous, and as we see above, more peaceful with the rest of the world.

Of course, any debate these days about our foreign policy becomes mired in Iraq. What about Iraq I hear you say? What does all this blathering on about friction have to do with Iraq?

Well, in a way, this whole essay so far has really been about Iraq. I've noticed something about the Iraq debate. The people for the Iraq war are for it for several reasons, while the people against the Iraq war tend to declaim it for one single reason. I think that's the essence of the Iraq debate; its really an argument between people who look at the big picture and people who look at the details. We need both types of people, but the Iraq war is particularly hard for the big picture types to succinctly explain to the detail types.

That is, the decision to invade, occupy, and remake Iraq was predicated on a lot of small decisions that added up to one large decision. As such, it is hard to explain to someone who wants a single overriding reason for the decision to go to war.

But I'll try. To start with, let's look at the following map:

Something should be immediately apparent from this map. Iraq is right smack in the center of the Middle East. It shares a border with six of the countries in the Middle East.

Lets put our system hat on, and look at that map again. From this map we realize that Iraq, for good or for ill, is the keystone to the Middle East. By placing a democratic country in the midst of the Middle East we have direct-border influence over the 3 most oppressive regimes in the Middle East, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. This has already paid results: Iran, coming in at #2 in the axis of Evil, already has large numbers of religious pilgrims crossing over to Iraq and back again. Pilgrims that have commented on how polite US troops have been compared to their own religious police...

In other words, by placing a robust democracy square in the ”bullseye“ of the Middle East, the United States will continually put all sorts of pressure on the surrounding countries to truly become democratic. Meanwhile, we have removed a deadly enemy/threat to stability from the very heart of the Middle East.

Some people argued that invading Iraq would create a flypaper for terrorists, who would be drawn to Iraq where we would kill them. I thought that was an interesting theory, but didn't put much credence in it until I read the following quote:

The war in Iraq has minimized the threat to Europe [emphasis added] because everyone who's Jihad-inclined wants to go fight over there. So even though some of these… the guys suspected of involvement in the train bombings have reportedly gone over to lodge themselves in Iraq. So there are these radicals sort of coming out of Europe and actually going to a different theater altogether.

Iraq was also the second weakest link in the Middle East after Afghanistan in that the majority of the populace would welcome a foreign invader (or at least tolerate) given how much they hated their own government.

So that's the geographic and strategic reasons for invading Iraq. To bring back my metaphor Iraq was the central ”gear“ in the system; a chipped tooth, sandy, rust-encrusted gear. By replacing it with a shiny new, greasy, titanium democratic gear, we're hoping improve the behavior of the whole system.

The historical reason for invading Iraq is that Iraq has been one of the best examples of exactly where our foreign policy has gone wrong for quite some time. I covered this a while back but to some extent, Saddam was a problem of our own creation. In 1982, Reagan had to make a decision. It was becoming readily apparent that Iraq (pop 23M) was going to lose the Iran-Iraq war to Iran (pop 69M). I don't begrudge him the choice between the two. Which is better: One crazy dictator, or a committee of eight crazy theocrats?

Even from the system viewpoint, its hard to see what Reagan could have done. If he had let Iraq, a Soviet client at the time, fall into Iranian hands it would have been an utter disaster. Hindsight shows that what we did wasn't much better though. Or perhaps it was, the Iranians are pretty crazy. Perhaps the blame lies on Bush1 for not being more clear with Saddam on what behavior from him was acceptable.

Of course there is the WMD issue. Now some people say the threat was exaggerated, some argue it wasn't, some argue Bush knew Saddam didn't have anything, some argue that Bush believe the intelligence. The reality is probably a bit scarier: We had no idea one way or another. At some point President Bush probably looked at a map like this:

Hat Tip: StrategyPage

And no doubt, it totally freaked him out. With Saddam's existing missiles, (that is, without WMD), Iraq could strike at will throughout the Middle East (like say, Jerusalem or Riyadh). Saddam could also cause problems throughout the Middle East with troops, smuggling operations, terrorism, etc. Come to think of it, he had already been doing that. It was for this reason that every single country in the Middle East privately asked the President to do ”something“ about Iraq.

So I don't consider this the ”WMD“ reason, I consider this the ”Fear“ reason for invading Iraq. The center of the Middle East had some weird stuff going on, and we weren't sure what. Nor could we really reassure any of the countries surrounding Iraq that Saddam wouldn't do anything ”crazy“, because experience had shown that he would, because he did, and was doing so. So I expect that a lot of the conversations between the Arab nations and President Bush went something like this:

You created this asshole, you should do something about him.

Of course, this ignores the part those nations had in creating Saddam as a problem when they wanted protection against revolutionary Iran, and then again when they prevented the US from deposing him in 1992. There are few innocents on the world's stage.

Fear brings us to the next Iraq related issue, Iran. Here's another map:

(Map courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission.)

As you can see from this map, if the US has control, or at least influence in the following countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan, Iran is nearly completely surrounded.

Guess which country from that list we didn't have influence with in 2002? Iraq. So given that we had some intelligence linking Iran to 9/11, but that Iran represented the other country in the Middle East where we've had the most blowback from our foreign policy, invading them directly would be a hard sell. So, and this is pure speculation on my part, I wonder if our motivation for entering Iraq wasn't in order to ”surround“ Iran. (As an aside, there has been some speculation that Bin Laden is in Iran 1 2 3 )

The Porter Goss interview (3 above) is very interesting. This part:

WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play.

It might just be me, but the phrase sanctuaries in sovereign states reads like Osama is in Iran to me. I suppose he could be in North Korea, but he could have walked to Iran from Afghanistan...

So given these five reasons for invading Iraq: historical, geographical, strategic, Fear, and Iran, I think we can piece together the Presidents thinking. From a system viewpoint, having Iraq being the way it was is like replacing a quart of oil in your car with a quart of sand. Its better not to put the sand in there in the first place, but once its in there, you need to get it out, no matter the cost.

Of course, with a car engine, the effect of sand in an engine is well, obvious. With Foreign Policy, its not so clear. With 20/20 hindsight, it seems like the War in Iraq has had the following effects:

• It has hurt our relations with the Europeans, or at least it seems that way publicly. Privately, its hard to tell, because the Europeans have loved making the US the bad guy for things they secretly supported. For all the rhetoric about the war from the Germans, they made arrangements to guard US military bases in Germany in order to free up American soldiers for the war.
• It has dealt a dramatic shock to the Middle East, enough of one that many of the local governments are seriously considering liberalization. This is something that none of the more detail-oriented pundits would have dreamed of suggesting before. From a system point of view, this was perhaps inevitable.
• It has begun putting increasing pressure on Iran to become fully democratic.
• It brought Libya back from crazy-land.
• It brought all the nuts in Arab-land to a single country, Iraq, where we could kill them at our leisure.
• It possibly created more nuts in Arab-land for us to kill.
• It proved that the so-called ”Arab street“ was a paper tiger.
• It scared Arafat to death, literally. (Just kidding, though I'm glad he's dead.)
• It's removed Saddam as a threat, and Iraq as a threat to the US. This is not a small thing.
• It gave Osama one less place to hide. (Perhaps only Iran is left?)

So all in all, the Iraq War was a tough decision. How it will play out still remains to be seen. But I think I've shown that our foreign policy is a complicated beast. No doubt NAFTA affects Iraq and Iraq affects NAFTA. While they Europeans didn't like our invading Iraq, it seems they've benefitted the most.

Ultimately I think that in the long term, invading Iraq replaces a huge source of friction in the system of the world with a larger quantity of grease. While the benefits are not readily apparent to the US/Iraq relationship, with the system view we can see how the positive effects of the war will be wide ranging:

• A truly democratic Middle East.
• Stable Oil Prices leading to stable world economies.
• Peace with Israel and Palestine.
• Reduced threat of terrorism.
• Peace in the Middle East.

So when you review our foreign policy decisions from now on, ask one simple question:

• How does this change the friction of the world?