Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

This is about the recent Knox News Sentinel column. I am not sure where the best place to post it is.

The United Nations estimates that, thanks to our economic sanctions, we sentenced 50,000 Iraqis to death annually throughout the 1990s, mostly kids and old people. That's half a million in a decade, not counting all the citizens Saddam kept killing. Our best estimates say fewer than 50,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003. Continue containing Saddam in the meantime, and over 100,000 additional Iraqis would have died - thanks to our realism.

But then I realized he must be referring to the UNAMI estimate based on Iraqi health ministry data. Paragraph 10 is the 50,000 estimate TPMB refers to I presume. This doesn’t include an additional 6,000 dead in July and August, a not insignificant 10% jump in the span of two months. Notice the first footnote in the second link (page three) says there was no data collected from Al-Anbar in July, indicative of widespread under reporting.

And I thought to myself “TPMB is a smart person, he can’t possibly be making such a ridiculous comparison, could he?!”

You’re comparing apples to hand grenades. These deaths reported by UNAMI are exclusively violent deaths. The 50k/year from sanctions was due to economic instability and lack of supply. Do you really think that in a country experiencing a violent insurgency that causes a reported death toll about a third of that size purely from violence is somehow more economically coherent and able to care for the frail old and young then a cohesive state with little violence? You don’t think the prevalence of violence, street gangs, kidnapping, torture, and targeted assassinations interferes with the ability to form sigma six supply chains?

The only source that actually attempts to measure comparable numbers is The Lancet’s study. It explicitly compares the death rate from all sources before and after the invasion. It estimates that about 100,000 more people died in the 18 months following the invasion then would have over a comparable period before the invasion, and not all the excess is due to violence.

Tom,

It is interesting how forces try to knock their opponents down a generation or two. For instance, in Iraq our 4GW enemies met our 3GW forces, and transitioned us from 3GW (Blitzkrieg... WW2) to 2GW (ugly clear-and-hold WW1) tactics. Constant surveillance may be a way for a powerful force to automate the degradation of its enemies from 5GW (SecretWar) to 4GW (NetWar) forces.

A very good example of a 5GW is found in C.S. Lewis' "That Hideous Strength." The inner cabal of N.I.C.E hides itself from view by using the media to tactically incite the Left and the Right to do its work. However, N.I.C.E's secrecy was its fatal flaw, as the 5GW force is simply destroyed by opposing 4GWarriors once its membership is revealed.

Thanks for joining the 5GW discussion! :-)

I wonder where this trend will lead? Politicians who don't bother with scripting? Or politicians who are so docile and robotic, they don't need scripting?

The example sounds more like 4GW to me:

1) One side is using free media (YouTube) cheaply and easily...
2) To send messages to possible voters - "the other guy is not worthy of your vote"
3) To send message to the media (who can repeat them) that “the other guy is joke or a bad candidate who should be put down...oh and please use our clip for free to make your job easier”
4) to supporters of the other guy...”do you really want to waste you time working for this guy...is he really worthy of your vote?”

Also, the Nascar/Yellow-flag notion...I am just being stupid...but I can't find a link. Could the link be reposted here in the comments? Thanks!

purpleslog: no link because it's in the book

TheJew:

The Lancet study was so flawed that it was basically disavowed by more NGOs and PVOs and other researchers than can be named--not to mention all the usual government suspects. It basically assumed that if you can't count the people, they must be dead, when what typically happens to a great scale during war is that people move in response to violence and the ability to report whereabouts plummets.

People aren't starving or lacking access to medicines in Iraq right now, but in the 1990s there was plenty of of state-sponsored violence, kidnapping, torture, and targeted assassinations. In fact, Saddam engaged in widespread mass murder in both the south and north to purge suspect populations (Kurds, Shiia) until the no-flies stemmed the worst aspects of that.

It's not comparing apples to grenades. it's comparing the non-transparency of mass death under Saddam to the transparency of widespread civil strife today.

Dr. Barnett and Purpleslog,

I'm going to both agree with you and disagree with you at the same time.

It (though I can't seem to find it now) has been discussed elsewhere (I think Coming Anarchy) that a 5GW campaign may include instances where forces of other generations are used because they, in their focus, are optimized for the task involved. I'm fairly certain that this was discussed as the 5GW organization dealing with 4GW forces as proxies but I think the point is still valid that when you want to tighten a bolt you use a wrench because that is what wrenches are for.
In this particular instance if a 5GW effector's intent is to attack the will of a politician to continue running then 4GW is optimized for doing just that.

This attack may be (arguably) 4GW, or merely a standard political smear, but 5GW as I see it is more about the process than the individual attacks. As part of a 5GW campaign while this video is running on YouTube the 5GW effector is bringing pressure to bear from other directions and using routes as horizontal in scope as possible. To put it differently 5GW is not about one, silver-bullet, attack, but a whole array operations that in combination lead to a particular goal.

Indeed, the 5GW organization may not even be directly responsible for the filming of the video itself, but it may be organized to sieze the opportunity and see that the video is distributed as widely as possible and in a context that serves the needs of the 5GW campaign and to reinforce its other operations.

"I know everyone (including me in my NASCAR "yellow flag" notion) wonders about the war-without-knowledge scenario where the enemy wages but we're unaware anything's even going on."

In this last case the 5GW organization remains hidden because it operates by proxy and through indirect influence. It may even be possible that the 5GW influence is not detected even after the fact because its operations, in isolation, didn't have much of an effect, but, in total, are greater than the sum of their parts.

Thanks, Sean. I'll take a peak into my copies.

The Lancet study was so flawed that it was basically disavowed by more NGOs and PVOs and other researchers than can be named.

It basically assumed that if you can't count the people, they must be dead,

I’ll save a more complete rebuttal of Kaplan’s um, thing, for a blog post.

The fact that we have to dig back to the aftermath of the '91 war for examples of mass killing under Saddam supports my point that the invasion was not cost neutral in terms of human lives. If he hadn’t been removed there is little chance that he would all of a sudden start authorizing mass killings after a decade of being deterred.