Martin Amis:

Al Qaedaism is an epiphenomenon -- a secondary effect. It is the dark child of globalization. It is the mimic of modernity: devolved, decentralized, privatized, outsourced and networked. According to Mr. Bobbitt, rather more doubtfully, Al Qaeda not only reflects the market state: it is a market state ("a virtual market state"). Globalization created great wealth and also great vulnerability; it created a space, or a dimension. Thus the epiphenomenon is not about religion; it is about human opportunism and the will to power.

Terrorism's New Structure

Fusion cell teams have helped collect and analyze intelligence not only against AQI and Sunni insurgents but also against Shiite militias and foreign fighters, say U.S. military officials.

Headquartered in an old concrete hangar on the Balad Air Base, which once housed Saddam Hussein's fighter aircraft, about 45 miles north of Baghdad, the Joint Task Force in Iraq runs fusion cells in the north, west and south and in Baghdad, U.S. officials said.

The headquarters bustles like the New York Stock Exchange, with long-haired computer experts working alongside wizened intelligence agents and crisply clad military officers, say officials who have worked there or visited.

"The capabilities for high-end special joint operations that exist now only existed in Hollywood in 2001," said David Kilcullen, a terrorism expert and adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Data gathered in a raid at midnight -- collected by helmet-mounted cameras that can scan rooms, people, documents and cellphone entries and relay the pictures back to headquarters -- often lead to a second or third raid before dawn, according to U.S. officials.

"To me, it's not just war-fighting now but in the future," Mullen said. "It's been the synergy, it's been the integration that has had such an impact."

U.S. Teams Weaken Insurgency In Iraq

The Big Picture:

Over five years since it began, the war in Iraq continues, but with some recent notable progress. On Monday this week, American forces formally returned responsibility for the security of Anbar Province, at one time, the center of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi Army and police force. Violence in the region has decreased dramatically - attacks down by 90% over the past two years. The continuing relative peace and order in the region remains a fragile scenario, with many former insurgents now acting as police, or as gunmen allied with American-backed "Awakening Councils". Here are some scenes from around Iraq (and a couple from here in the U.S.) over the past several months.

Scenes from Iraq

Tony Wood, in the LRB:

What explains the Georgian willingness to go on the offensive this August? The spring and summer had seen increased tension in both regions: in April, a Russian plane shot down a Georgian drone over Abkhazia; in late June, bombs exploded in the Abkhazian town of Gagra and its capital, Sukhumi, and there were exchanges of fire between South Ossetian and Georgian troops throughout June and July. But the August assault on the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, wasn’t a knee-jerk response to Russian prodding. On 7 August Saakashvili publicly announced himself ready to negotiate with South Ossetia, before ordering the shelling of Tskhinvali that same evening. Noting that there were undoubtedly provocations from Russia, the Economist nonetheless quoted a Saakashvili ally as saying: ‘He wanted to fight.’

Saakashvili seems to have reasoned that, given Georgia’s good standing with the West, Russia would not respond with force to an attempt to retake what is still internationally recognised as Georgian territory. Further, in the wars of the early 1990s, though Russia had armed both the Abkhaz and Ossetians, it had not officially dispatched its own troops to fight the Georgians. Saakashvili perhaps also thought that, if Russia did retaliate, Nato or at least the US would ride in to his rescue. These were all dreadful miscalculations.

What Condoleezza Said

George Friedman offers his analysis in The New York Review of Books.

The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted.

The Russians knew that the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior US leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk. The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance. For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, it does not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.

Therefore, the United States has a problem—either it must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran—and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow's interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).

In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner.

Georgia and the Balance of Power

It's not surprising that the Defense Department has reacted negatively to soldier blogging. The military is a strenuously hierarchical institution, with finely graded ranks and carefully managed authority. Social networks create new openings for soldiers to step outside that hierarchy, even while deployed, and share their perspective to large and strategically important audiences. That gives military planners pause. Yet isn't it axiomatic that soldiers are entitled to exercise the freedoms they are willing to die for? It was that principle, coupled with antiwar activism, that drove America's last successful popular effort to amend the Constitution, to grant suffrage at the age of enlistment. Today's soldiers have much more modest requests. They want to network with new people, commune with friends and family, and share their stories with anyone out there who wants to listen. Pentagon leaders should be first in line.

Web War

I recall many young men who gained standing by an essay of not more than thirty pages. They won recognition by clear thought and a sharply defined thesis. Today they launch forth in a three hundred page pamphlet that tires the reader with its massive collection of facts. ... No one seems willing to stop short of the German standard by which prestige is gained through bulky volumes that fill yards of library shelves. ... A three hundred page thesis not only does not fit a man to be an economist: it really incapacitates him for work.

To think clearly is to be altruistic. Honors and rewards come only to those who by pen or speech pass along to the public the books and essays it will not read. ... In reality our books are of less consequence than caps and gowns, and I doubt not that universities would profit if they used the money now spent on printing useless books and journals in giving more color and grace to public anniversaries.

I hold that the better the economist the clearer, shorter, and more precise are his utterances ... A book is merely the trail along which its author has gone in his search for clear expression and sharp analysis. This is of great importance to the author, but of little consequence to the reader

Some curmudgeonly remarks about economists and other academicians

The partition of Georgia may cause a long-term confrontation between Russia and the West, with echoes of the cold war. Too bad, Mr Medvedev said this week: “Nothing scares us, including the prospect of a cold war…we have lived in different situations and we will survive.” (“If it’s only cold, that’s not a problem,” Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister retorted.) Russia’s elite is convinced that the West is weak and will swallow Russia’s decision. “When you cross the road you have to check for dangers,” declares Mr Zatulin. “The West can apply psychological pressure. But Europe cannot afford to turn down our gas and America needs our help with Afghanistan and Iran.”

Put out even more flags

Joseph Stiglitz:

Some looking at the U.S. economy's decreasing reliance on manufacturing and increasing dependence on the service sector (including financial services) have long worried that the whole thing was a house of cards. After all, aren't "hard objects"--the food we eat, the houses we live in, the cars and airplanes that we use to transport us from one place to another, the gas and oil that provides heat and energy--the "core" of the economy? And if so, shouldn't they represent a larger fraction of our national output?

The simple answer is no.

The current woes in America's financial system are not an isolated accident--a rare, once-in-a-century event. Indeed, there have been more than one hundred financial crises worldwide in the last 30 years or so ... In the late '90s, for instance, so much capital was allocated to fiber optics that, by the time of the crash, it was estimated that 97 percent of fiber optics had seen no light.

In short, the problem with the U.S. economy is not that we have allocated too many resources to the "soft" areas and too few to the "hard." It is not necessarily that we have allocated too many resources to the financial sector and rewarded it too generously--though a strong argument could be put forward to that effect. It is that too little effort was devoted to managing real risks that are important--enabling ordinary Americans to stay in their homes in the face of economic vicissitudes--and that too much effort went into creating financial products that enhanced risk. Too much energy has been spent trying to make an easy buck; too much effort has been devoted to increasing profits and not enough to increasing real wealth, whether that wealth comes from manufacturing or new ideas. We have learned a painful lesson, both in the 1930s and today: The invisible hand often seems invisible because it's not there. At best, it's more than a little palsied. At worst, the pursuit of self-interest--corporate greed--can lead to the kind of predicament confronting the country today.

Falling Down

George Soros:

The public is asking for an answer to two questions. The principal question is whether the sharp oil price increase is a speculative bubble or simply reflects fundamental factors such as rapidly rising demand from developing nations and an increasingly limited supply, caused by the dwindling availability of easily extractable oil reserves. The second question is related to the first. If the oil price increase is at least partly a result of speculation, what kind of regulation will best mitigate the harmful consequences of this increase and avoid excessive price fluctuations in the future?

Every sequence of boom and bust, or bubble, begins with some fundamental change, such as the spread of the Internet, and is followed by a misinterpretation of the new trend in prices that results from the change. Initially that misinterpretation reinforces both the trend and the misinterpretation itself; but eventually the gap between reality and the market's interpretation of reality becomes too wide to be sustainable.

It should be emphasized that curbing speculation in oil futures would be at best a temporary remedy. It could serve a useful purpose at a time when the parabolic rise in oil prices reinforces the prospects of a recession but it would not address the fundamental problems of peak oil, global warming, and dependence on politically unstable or hostile countries for our energy supplies. Those problems can be solved only by developing carbon-free sources of energy. The imminent onset of a recession, by reducing the demand for oil in the developed countries, is likely to bring some relief from higher oil prices, but that relief will be temporary. It should not divert our attention from the pressing need for developing alternative energy sources, and that will entail higher prices, at least in the early stages.

In the absence of alternative sources, the price of oil is liable to rise indefinitely. Only if we are willing to live with higher prices in order to develop alternative fuels can we hope to see an eventual reversal in the long-term uptrend in oil prices. In contrast to oil and other fossil fuels whose costs of production are bound to rise, the alternative fuels will become cheaper as we discover cheaper and more efficient technologies to exploit them, and will eventually bring down the price of fossil fuels as well.

The Perilous Price of Oil