Austin Bay Blog

This week’s Creators Syndicate column, via StrategyPage.

A teaser:

Perhaps we are entering new historical terrain, where the commanding general’s pivotal strategic gambit is a media event.

And media event it is. With its certain long-term global import and short-term political impact, Petraeus’ report meets a hustling television exec’s primal requirement: drama.

In a recent post on the blog I listed som semi-quantifiable metrics — but note this:

But the gist of his message will be what military veterans call GUTINT — gut intelligence.

This week’s New York Times Tuesday Science section had an article on intuition – “gut reaction.” No, it’s not quite the same as GUTINT, but it is a good read.

Sample graf:

Dr. (Gerd) Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, is known in social science circles for his breakthrough studies on the nature of intuitive thinking. Before his research, this was a topic often dismissed as crazed superstition. Dr. Gigerenzer, 59, was able to show how aspects of intuition work and how ordinary people successfully use it in modern life.

And now he has written his own book, “Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious,” which he hopes will sell as well as “Blink.” “I liked Gladwell’s book,” Dr. Gigerenzer said during a visit to New York City last month. “He’s popularized the issue, including my research.”

Q: O.K., let’s start with basics: what is a gut feeling?

A: It’s a judgment that is fast. It comes quickly into a person’s consciousness. The person doesn’t know why they have this feeling. Yet, this is strong enough to make an individual act on it. What a gut instinct is not is a calculation. You do not fully know where it comes from.

My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term “heuristics.” These take advantage of certain capacities of the brain that have come down to us through time, experience and evolution. Gut instincts often rely on simple cues in the environment. In most situations, when people use their instincts, they are heeding these cues and ignoring other unnecessary information.

The article discusses “investing by gut.”

Gigerenzer’s thesis: “When a person relies on their gut feelings and uses the instinctual rule of thumb “go with your first best feeling and ignore everything else,” it can permit them to outperform the most complex calculations.”

Read the discussion comaring rational analysis and “gut” intuition.

In a column several months ago I reviewed the situation in Kosovo.

StrategyPage has run a series of updates — here’s the most recent.

Today Reuters has a report surveys the continuining troubles, as well as impending diplomatic moves.

Key points from the Reuters report:

A break-out this month of seven inmates ranked as dangerous from a top-security prison added to Western concerns that the province’s penitentiary is unfit for purpose. The U.N. mission in charge of Kosovo has demanded an independent inquiry.

The discovery of 92 kilos of TNT explosive near the border with Montenegro last week underlined that Kosovo remains a potential powder keg brimming with illegal arms.

Concern is rising among the province’s 100,000 minority Serbs, many of whom doubt NATO and international law enforcers can adequately assure their safety.

In north Kosovo, Milorad Radivojivic saw his Serb village of Svinjare destroyed by an Albanian mob in March 2004 during violence sparked in the nearby town of Mitrovica that led to 19 deaths across the province and caught KFOR napping.

Now the 61-year-old engineer produces from his shirt pocket a handwritten list of the 13 times his re-built house has been burgled or vandalized since, incidents which he says show Serbs can never live safely under Albanian rule in Kosovo.

Read the entire report.

As the article notes, the EU says it will take over security and development in Kosovo, after Kosovo’s “final status” is determined.

This StrategyPage post from July 19, 2007, looks at the implication of the “simmering tensions” the Reuters story addresses.

Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan has decided to challenge Kemal Ataturk’s system. Turkey’s parliament just voted to elect Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as president. Erdogan and Gul were both members of the moderately-Islamist Welfare Party (which was banned in the late 1990s).

Via Bloomberg:

Turkey’s military, which has ousted four governments since 1960, has clashed with Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the separation of mosque and state. The generals blocked Gul’s first run for president in April, forcing an early general election, when they warned that he might undermine the secular order established in Turkey eight decades ago after the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

`People are worried that Erdogan’s government is getting control of all levers of power,” Ilter Turkmen, who served as foreign minister after a military coup in 1980, said in an interview. “I am worried that there will now be continuous tension between the army and the government, and the military could make Gul’s life miserable…

And another key graf:

The head of the army, General Yasar Buyukanit, repeated the military’s warning to the government on secularism in a statement yesterday to mark Victory Day on Aug. 30. The military is determined to stop “sneaky plans aimed at removing the republic’s achievements,” Buyukanit said.

Buyukanit leads the second-largest standing army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization after the U.S. military. The army says secularism must be preserved in order to keep Turkey on its European path and away from the influence of Islamic states in the neighboring Middle East.

The Turkish military is tasked with protecting secular democracy –that’s its constitutional role. Republican Turkey’s founding father, Kemal Ataturk, designed it that way.

The Bloomberg article adds this about the “tightrope” Gul will have to walk:

The military will expect Gul, who has led Turkey’s membership talks with the European Union as foreign minister, to honor pledges made over the past two weeks to protect Turkey’s secular ideology and remain above party politics. Those promises won him support from Turkey’s biggest business groups and unions.

Toppling the democratically elected government would be a terrible mistake. Likewise, damaging Turkey’s economy and democratic institutions on behalf of a narrow “religious-ideological agenda” would be an even larger mistake. Turkey must navigate this secular-religious waltz — if it succeeds it will continue to be an example for other predominantly Muslim nations.

The US and Washington awaits General Petraeus’ report. A few days ago I sketched out 13 “measures of effectiveness” General Petraeus might consider.

Today Iraq’s leaders announced that they had “reached consensus” on key measures (benchmarks) they regard as “vital” to national reconciliation.

The Reuters story notes this is good news for Iraqis — good political news. It is good political news. I doubt this will deflect the latest defeatist meme, ie, “the military war is going well but we’re losing the political war.”

From Reuters:

Iraq’s top Shi’ite, Sunni Arab and Kurdish political leaders announced on Sunday they had reached consensus on some key measures seen as vital to fostering national reconciliation.

The agreement by the five leaders was the most significant political development in Iraq for months and was immediately welcomed by the United States, which hopes such moves will ease sectarian violence that has killed tens of thousands…

Prime Minister Maliki participated in the discussions. The other participants were “President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; Sunni Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi; Shi’ite Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, and Masoud Barzani, president of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.”

Reuters says the leaders agreed the following were necessary to achieve reconciliation:

…legislation that would ease curbs on former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party joining the civil service and military.

Consensus was also reached on a law governing provincial powers as well as setting up a mechanism to release some detainees held without charge…

…the leaders also endorsed a draft oil law, which has already been agreed by the cabinet but has not yet gone to parliament.

Read the entire report.

Nouri al-Maliki is tired ot Hillary CLinton’s and Carl Levin’s arrogance and imperialism.

Via the AP:

Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister today lashed out at American critics who have called for his ouster, saying Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Carl Levin need to “come to their senses.”

Nouri al-Maliki, who is fighting to hold his government together, issued a series of stinging ripostes against a variety of foreign officials who recently have spoken negatively about his leadership. But those directed at Democrats Clinton, of New York, and Levin, of Michigan, were most strident.

“There are American officials who consider Iraq as if it were one of their villages, for example Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin. They should come to their senses,” al-Maliki said at a news conference.

I don’t think Clinton and Levin expected this.

Clinton and Levin will continue to be posturing frumps as long as they must placate the DailyKos and moveon.org. For both of them partisanship comes first. Unfortunately, that’s the mark of politicians, not statesmen.

I see that former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi is positioning himself to replace Maliki. Allawi is also a Shia Arab. Maliki continues to wrestle with the political and security problem posted by Muktada Sadr and his Mahdi Militia. The Mahdi Militia must be destroyed. It appears the coalition and Maliki’s government are trying to do destroy it in small, politically digestible chunks. That’s the Baghdad Clock under which Maliki operates — ponderously slow, politically digestible, painfully incremental. Levin’s and Clinton’s Washington Clock is set to the 2008 election.

This week’s Creators Syndicate column (via StrategyPage) discusses a hurricane crisis response exercise I observed last June.

Where will a hurricane go? The answer is “We’ll know when it gets there.” That isn’t the kind of answer the media’s instant experts want to hear, but it’s the truth. Likewise, damage is inevitable. Occasionally, a disaster will occur, no matter what pre-strike steps we take (that’s why they’re called natural disasters). Evacuation will limit loss of life, but we have casualties during evacuations as well (auto accidents, for example). As long as we build expensive homes and hotels in coastal areas, hurricanes will cause extensive property damage.

However, better training and better planning make a huge difference. The “Hurricane Debbie” exercise I discuss in the column provides some background. (The exercise was conducted at several locations, with local, state of Texas, and federal participants. The sites were connected by phone and computer. I visited the site that had FEMA reps, some National Guard, and a US military liaison and coordinating team.)

This point is worth noting: one participant told me that these kinds of exercises have been going on for years. Turf wars and egos always thwart cooperation, but these kinds of exercises do build very useful personal networks among police, National Guardsmen, and other “crisis responders.” Those connections pay off in a crisis.

I didn’t work this point into the column, but getting digital data links down to local police and EMS is a goal. “Situational awareness” saves lives.

I’ve run this list past a couple of other veterans of Iraq. Yes, it’s a sketch. Yes, several of the categories must be broken down into very small pieces and those pieces accurately assessed (ie, the security of neighborhoods, the competence of police precincts, etc).

Recognize this problem: if you tell the enemy what you are measuring, it becomes very easy for him to frustrate the “measurement process” and your success in achieving your goal — at least to frustrate them perceptually. The best example (or perhaps “worst example” is more appropriate) is the conclusion that Babil is secure. The leader of an Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia cadre sees that conclusion in a newspaper headline so he sends several suicide bombers to Babil. One gets through and kills twenty Iraqis. What’s the media tout? Petraeus was wrong?

Still, GEN Petraeus will release an interim assessment in mid-September. He will base that on “measures of effectiveness.”

This list is a “rough draft” of “rough metrics” but I am certain it includes in some shape or form a few of the “metrics” the September report will consider. Call it a Baker’s Dozen – not to be confused with James Baker and the Iraq Study Group. Some of them obbiously incorporate both qualitative judgments and quantitative measures.

1) Number of trained and equipped Iraqi troops and their level of training

(2) Number of qualified Iraqi senior and mid-level military officers (key measure: can they plan and lead their own ops?)

(3) Number and locale of police precincts judged competent and minimally corrupt (and don’t mention Chicago to me — I know minimally corrupt applies to places in the US — like every Texas border town)

(4) Number of “extremist violence” related incidents (incline, steady, or decline) and location of incidents

(5) An assessment of the “demonstrated commitment” of key sheiks and local leaders in terms of cooperating with security forces and development teams – perhaps analyzed on a neighborhood by neighborhood level.

(6) Control of Iran and Syrian borders (what does this mean? Good question — better surveillance of the borders, more border forts, more reliable border cops, dimunition in flow of supplies for sectarian militias and terrorist groups…etc)

(7) Estimate of “robustness” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia cells. (If we have killed a lot of these sociopaths, have the sociopaths we’ve killed been replaced?)

(8) Quality of Iraqi government action against Shia death squads (including Mahdi Militia) [NOTE: maybe quality is a hedge word, but you get the point.]

(9) Competence of key ministry officials and senior department heads — Interior and Defense — as well as an estimate of their commitment to a free, federal Iraq, [This leads to an assessment of provincial and national leaders commitment…)

(10) “Infrastructure protection” trend lines — are power lines, pipelines, key installations being protected?

(11) Trend line of development. At the local level: have the revitalized PRTs begun to do their jobs? At the national level: What’s happening to Iraq’s GDP?

(12) A neighborhood by neighborhood evaluation of the “new security plan” — which on the ground was about securing neighborhoods and stopping the “cycle of violence” (ie, Sunni terrorists kick it off, Shia death quads enter, the locals are caught in between…)

(13) An estimate of the quality of intelligence (better, same, worse) provided by Iraqi police, military, and citizens. If the intel from a neighborhood, town, or province has improved, this potentially is an indcator of increasing faith in the government’s capacity to defend vulnerable civilians. (Intel obviously affects several other metrics…few of these metrics are discrete.)

Anyone doubt that this vicious mass murder was committed by someone other than Al Qaeda?

At least 175 Yazidis were killed when three homicidal maniacs drove fuel tankers into residential compounds.

The lede:

At least 175 people were killed when three suicide bombers driving fuel tankers attacked residential compounds home to the ancient minority Yazidi sect in northern Iraq on Tuesday, an Iraqi army captain said.

Captain Mohammad al-Jaad said at least another 200 people were wounded in the bombings in the Kahtaniya, al-Jazeera and Tal Uzair areas near the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, close to the Syrian border…

The Yazidis are sometimes called “original Kurds.” Their religion is pre-Islamic. This post on StrategyPage has background on the Yazidis.

Why attack the Yazidis? Because they are there and vulnerable. The terrorists have chosen civilians –the softest targets. They are trying to provoke violent counter-attacks against Sunni Muslims.

Well, he didn’t. But Syria is (once again) openly struggling with radical Islamists — a struggle involving death and destruction.

For years the Assad regime has had trouble if Islamist militants. They also make tactical and operational alliances with the radicals.

But this Reuters report is still very interesting.

The lede:

Syria is facing a violent campaign by Islamist militants and six border soldiers died in attacks launched from inside Iraq, a senior Syrian security official said on Thursday.

This is the first time Syria has publicly disclosed details of the fight against militants, which has intensified this year.

“We are conducting operations against terrorist cells and we have taken martyrs,” Mohammad Mansoura, head of the Political Security branch of Syria’s intelligence apparatus, told a closed door session of an international security conference on Iraq.

“Raids have yielded arsenals of weapons including suicide explosive belts. Our border forces have come under 100 attacks from inside Iraq. Six soldiers died and 17 were injured,” he said in a speech obtained by Reuters in a translated copy.

This crops up on the second page of the Reuters report:

Officials from Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Britain and the United States ended closed talks aimed at coming up with security cooperation measures to help stop the violence in Iraq and attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces.

The conference concluded with a call to set up intelligence hotlines with Baghdad and take practical measures to stabilize Iraq, delegates said.

A copy of the classified recommendations seen by Reuters called on border experts from Iraq’s neighbors to meet in a month to prevent the flow of fighters and weapons into Iraq.

Read the entire report.