Operationalizing The Jones Model through COG

[Dayuhan]

You always twist my message into one of "pro manipulation", and seem to think all is calm in the Middle East. You need to study the news coming out of there more closely. Suppressed insurgencies in states with controlled media don't necessarily scream in the headlines. You have to read the signs. The Saudis have been suppressing all of their Shiite populace and large portions of their Sunni populace since inception; and in the past 60 years they have manipulated our fear of oil disruption to suit their royal needs.

As I said before, I see a strong suggestion in your model, sometimes openly stated, that manipulation is desirable as long as we think that manipulation is in support of the populace... given our inability to know what the populace thinks or wants, that seems a very shaky idea to me.

I didn't say that all is calm in the Middle East. I do not see a broad pattern of resistance against (generally nonexistent) US influence, and I do not see a broad pattern of resistance to autocratic governance structures. I see a large number of countries, each trying to balance competing imperatives from various segments of its populace. Some do it well, some do it less well. It is rarely so simple as "unified populace rebels against despotic bad governance".

The whole issue of suppressed insurgency is I think debatable: an insurgency with real popular support is not so easy to suppress. I get the feeling that you're looking at governments that by your standards deserve an insurgency, and assuming that if there isn't one it must be suppressed.

Governance is not Poor in the Middle East in many of our allied countries because I say so, but because the young men flocking to join AQ and local insurgent movements affiliated with AQ say so. And even larger cross sections of these same societies cutting checks and providing moral support say so as well. The people have no voice, but they are voting with their actions.

Please note that AQ has only succeeded in generating substantial support in cases where resistance to foreign intervention is involved: against the Soviets in Afghanistan, against the US in Iraq and Afghanistan. AQ's efforts to generate insurgency against governments in Muslim states have generally fallen pretty flat: AQ does not speak for the populace of Saudi Arabia, or any other populace. This suggests that the narrative driving AQ's recruitment and fund-raising is not "overthrow the despotic governance of your country and replace it with our even more despotic governance" but rather "expel the infidel from the land of the faithful". Many in the ME are perfectly happy to support AQ when they are battling foreign invaders in distant lands. When there's a prospect of AQ imposing their own brand of despotism at home, the reaction is very different. You're right, they are voting with their actions. They're voting against foreign engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are voting for themselves, not on behalf of a populace. Jumping from there to the idea that they are voting against bad governance in their own countries is an assumption with very shaky support.

I see the following weaknesses in the Jones Model:

1. There seems to be an assumption that all violence against a state is a backlash against despotic bad governance. That may be the case in some places, but it is not necessarily the case in all. In some cases violence against government can be a consequence of good governance: reforms or modernization that are desired by a majority can invoke a violent backlash from a disaffected minority.

We have to be very careful about assuming that terrorist violence is the outcome of popular resistance to despotic governance. Because terrorism lends itself to application by small groups of radicals with little popular support, it is often used by such groups. If Timothy McVeigh had the capacity to raise an insurgency or to draw a million supporters to march on Washington, he'd have done it. He didn't have that kind of support, so he blew up a building. That didn't make him a spokesperson for an insurgent populace, it made him a fringe nutter with a bomb.

We have to be very careful about assuming that violence is a popular backlash against bad governance. When we deal with a government that we are predisposed to dislike, we need to be triply careful about assuming that our prejudices are shared by the populace. We can't eliminate our prejudices, but if we're aware of them we can prevent them from controlling us.

2. You seem to use "bad governance" and "despotism" almost interchangeably. I don't see that bad governance is necessarily despotic: it may simply be inept or impotent. Insurgency can result from a popular backlash against a despotic government; it can just as easily result from conflict between different populaces with radically different ideas of what governance should be, and from government's inability to effectively manage divergent goals.

3. I see a tendency to assume that all governments can govern well if only they choose to, and thus that external pressure can force governments to choose to govern well. I think this fails to consider the process by which governance grows. When we see a government that governs well and suits the populaces it governs, it doesn't mean that this governance was well installed by some deus ex machina process, or that those who govern simply chose to govern well. It means that this government evolved to suit the conditions in which it governs. The process of this evolution often - in fact almost always - involves conflict and disagreement. It typically involves violence at some stage. It is not a process that can be jump-started or short-circuited by a foreign power telling the locals how to govern themselves or how to please their populace. They have to work it out themselves. The process is likely to be messy, just as it was for the US. What we see as an insurgency against a despotic government is likely one step along that evolutionary path. Messing with it, whether out of self-interest or imagined altruism, is generally going to make it worse.