I don't call you crack smoking stupid because you want to legalize drugs do I?
If I wasn't crack smoking stupid, I would probably assume you just did. Hey brother, I said legalize it, I didn't say I smoked it! I have a two beer limit and even that is on rare occassion.

YOU posted by John Robb about Market Oriented Guerrillas and to make some points about how there are such organizations but they are not true insurgencies, but they will use their tactics, but it is all about the money to them. Many of your later posts just support this in my opinion, look at points 1,2,3 to start.
Unfortunately this thread is becoming one of the more popular ones I created, unfortunate in that I have become the council's whopping boy, probably started by PCE himself Bob's World, which in fact is a 20th Century World that he knows well. I want to kick his ideological soapbox out from underneath him, and bring you back from the dark side airborne. I can't do it in one post, so I'll practice the subtle art of subversion. You know the subtle art of surreptitiously eroding people's beliefs systems and turning them against their governments (or other people or organizations). I'll give Bob credit, not only for his excellent article, but he indirectly addresses subversion when he speaks of ideology, but there are other ways to accomplish subversion than attempting to mobilize a population using a population using ideology. The true war being waged in the shadows is often the decisive war, not the maneuver war, so understanding subversive activities is critical to defeating the threat. If you take Bob's approach, you focus on the population and do what exactly? If their grievance is that the government can't protect them, then there are appropriate responses to that, responses we generally have failed to make (we've started trying in Iraq, but my experience was that the war in the shadows was still going on under our noses in many places, so the legal system was corrupted, business contracts were controlled by the insurgents, and politicians were coerced or bought). If the grievance is that the criminal economic system provides more than any legal economic system authorized, do you give in, or crush the criminals and the society dependent upon them? It is a much tougher problem set, and I'm not sure how the PCE approach plays out in this case. I'm sorry, but growing wheat isn't going to fetch as much money as poppy.

By the DoD definition of insurgency you're right, "most" criminal organizations are not insurgencies because they are not attempting to over throw the constituted government. Pardon my french, but the DoD defnition sucks. It only fits Bob's view of the world, but not the reality of today's world. Through subversion criminal organizations have taken control of areas (rarely the entire country), and they have in fact become the government in those areas. By the DoD definition it isn't an insurgency, but this isn't your grandfather's mafia either. Many of today's organized criminal groups present a serious challenge to many governments for control, and like insurgents they use a combination of armed conflict (thugs on steriods) and subversion. Intimitation of government officials, buying government officials, initimitating civilians, etc. are all forms of subversion, because they prove to those under this influence that the government doesn't have the power to protect them, or the money speaks louder than any State based ideology.

The argument that this is nothing new is weak and dismissive, much like the emerging threat of Islamic Extremists was largely dismissed in the 90s as nothing really new. You can look at it like a disease, such as drug resistant tuberculosis. Its been around a long time, and when we may attention to it and take the proper actions we control it. When we ignore it, it has a chance to morph into a tougher strain, which once again requires an urgent response to get it under control. The longer we wait, the more dangerous the problem becomes and harder it will be to get it back in the box.

This problem got much worse after the Cold War for a number of reasons well known to this council, and I would argue it got worse after 9/11 when we took our eye off the ball and shifted more focus to terrorism. The sky isn't falling, because the problem is still manageable if we act quickly, firmly and collectively with the international community.