Who defends everything, defends nothing

The big international news of the day is the investigation into the crash of Germanwings flight 4U 9525 into the French Alps this Tuesday past. Current evidence from the voice recorder and the profile of the flight supports the idea that the co-pilot locked the pilot out and then deliberately plowed the plane into the mountainside.  It is a reflection of our times that there is a fair bit said about the co-pilot’s religion or lack of it, and we all know what religion it is they’re tiptoeing around.

We may never know why this guy murdered everyone on board, but that’s life sometimes.  We have a whole bunch of murderous buggers whose intent is clearly announced to us, and there should not be a lot of debate about what we need to do about that.  Certainly debate about “how”, but nobody who can be bothered to know what is going on can honestly suggest that there is any other (useful) solution to these Da’esh etc. Salafists than a bullet in the head apiece.

And yet what have we in Canada’s House of Commons? (Legislative branch of Canada’s govt’t in case you didn’t know) There we see members of the opposition parties splitting hairs about whether Canada has “UN authorization” to bomb Da’esh targets over the now-notional Iraq/Syria border.

The Prime Minister has mocked them pretty effectively (says I; and they say Harper doesn’t have a sense of humour) but the mendacious and clueless tripe being spewed by Mulcair (who’s smart enough to know better) and Trudeau (who, well, doesn’t appear to be) won’t cut much ice with the general public.  Most people see enough of what’s happening over there to know that something has to be done about it.

The idea that this seems to be moving toward is a (cursory) examination of why we would intervene here as opposed to any number of other places.  One comment I saw was about how it must be oil since people are constantly being slaughtered in Africa and we don’t get involved there.  Yes, we get some oil from the general region, but we will not roll in there and pump the place dry due to our military action.  If everything was “about oil” we wouldn’t have an embargo against Iran, and in any event we could get by without ME oil.  If we did, however, the same people bleating here would be braying that we’re extracting our “dirty” oil sands (and building pipelines for it) to replace the light, cleaner stuff our east coast refineries get from Saudi and Algeria. 

As for Africa, there is plenty of stuff we’d like from Africa, far rarer than oil.  Economic motivations are insufficient for Canada to commit armed force; that much we just won’t do.  Millions of people are slaughtered in Africa (by other Africans), but they aren’t proclaiming a world-wide empire and declaring war on us (Boko Haram’s declaration for IS aside) so no, we don’t have pressing interest in their insoluble problems.

One reason, sufficient in itself I’d say, is that we simply can’t help out everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we should sit idly by and do nothing.  Rwanda should be enough evidence to the chattering classes that having the UN’s approval for being somewhere is not equivalent with doing what needs to be done; the opposite is more likely as far as I’m concerned.

We could do much more for the Kurds et al than we are, and our troops would think it worth doing.  This won’t happen, but a Battlegroup such as we had in Kandahar would make a massive difference in stabilizing that area.  We’d lose some people, but soldiers are paid for those sorts of risks, and in this case it’s not a lost cause (as opposed to Afghanistan), at least as long as you circumscribe the mission appropriately.  More of our boots (and tracks) on the ground would make short work of any IS forces who tried to come at us (or got in our way) while the nastiest city fighting could be left to the indigenous troops; it’s their fight at the end of the day.  This provides worthwhile and much appreciated support while not putting our troops and equipment through a meat grinder like Mosul or Tikrit.

We could probably do other things too.  We could help the French (more than we already have) in the Sahel, we could sort out South Sudan (maybe) or, my own pet project; a change of regime in Zimbabwe.  Bad things are happening to one degree or another in all of these places and many more, but intervention in any of them is neither easily practical nor sufficiently critical to our National Interest (remember that, anyone?) to justify us being there. 

So, where’s the line for intervention?  What are the criteria?  This is an art, not a science, so it’s not easy to quantify these things; what’s worth fighting for, more importantly what worth dying for, is extremely subjective.  In the case of Kurdistan, there are people there who a) want our help, b) need our help, and even more importantly c) will appreciate it.  I’ve said all of this before, but it’s worth saying again.  It occurs to me to put it into a rough equation for determining where we should help out (where L=locals):

 
[(LWant + LNeed + LAttitude + Probabillity of Mission Success) x National Interest] > [Risk + Expense] = Intervention  

 An algorithm/flow chart would do this better, but you get the idea.  Weighting of factors is fraught, but if I were to apply this to our post-2002 involvement in Afghanistan, it would not have passed, mainly due to the PoMS and NI factors being essentially nil.  If anyone with more math than me wants to refine this, go for it.  It won't change anything, but I think it visualizes the thought/risk analysis process pretty well.  I'd be interested to see a representation of the thought process of people who know what I know yet still think we shouldn't be helping in Iraq/Syria, especially in light of the assembled coalition.  Doubt I could make sense of it though. 

What would Nixon do?

Obama has come out and said that the USA will go after Daesh (formerly ISIL; this name pisses them off so I'll use it) on either side of the now nominal Iraq/Syria border. That this would ever have been an issue would be mind-boggling if I actually had any faith in those in power displaying any kind of common sense, but alas it was expected.

As the US and allied Arab states launch air strikes on Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria and Iraq, questions arise as to the basis of such military action according to international law.

The legal evaluation differs where operations against IS in Iraq on the one hand and in Syria on the other are concerned.

No questions in my mind. A border is an arbitrary line on a map which only means something if it's enforced. In this context "enforced" means one state controls the actions of parties within their boundaries to the extent that they don't affect parties outside those boundaries. The rump Syrian state doesn't control most of the country at this point, and Daesh roams at will accross the borders Sykes and Picot drew up in the aftermath of the Ottoman empire's collapse in 1918.

Whether you choose to treat Daesh as a rogue state or transnational terrorist group (Iran for example fits both models), if you want to defeat them you have to defeat ALL of them. First rule of fighting any insurgency, or anyone for that matter, is don't leave them a sanctuary. Taking Vietnam as an example, the political constraints against hitting NVA and Viet Cong bases in Cambodia and Laos hobbled the American military. It was only when Nixon took the gloves off in 1970 that these sanctuaries were attacked and disrupted. Even Nixon only gave North Vietnam a taste of what the US could do if it wanted to (even leaving nukes out of the equation), but it was enough to bring the Communists to the bargaining table.

It's an imperfect comparison of course, but the essential lesson of ignoring borders if people are hiding behind them to kill you remains. This brings me back to Nixon.

Looking at it as objectively as I can, I don't think that Nixon was the terrible president he is made out to be. His stepped up attacks on North Vietnam were long overdue, and were designed to get the US out of the war, preferably by winning it. Nixon also thawed things out with China, and as it was said at the time, he was (probably) the only US leader who could do that.

That opinion wasn't the result of Nixon being a nice guy, it was because he had impeccable credentials as an anti-communist, and being ready to smash them if need be is the way you get a reputation like that. It was in fact a conscious "policy" decision, the "madman theory". Putin is running a variant of this right now, and you'll notice that we are reacting to him.

Whether you want to talk about credibility, deterrence, initiative, momentum, the OpFor has most of that and Obama (by extension the USA and the "West") none. That "red lines” fiasco in Syria over chemical weapons (where, again, Putin ate Obama's lunch) was the last straw for any anyone to take Obama seriously, and even his response to this Daesh situation right now is halting, half-assed and indecisive.

Madman theory only really works against parties who have something to lose and is essentially deterrence. Nuking Raqqa (in Syria, self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State) right now would set the tone and establish your "street cred" as truly balls-to-the-wall crazy, but it would cause a lot of other problems. Short of that, I hear that Arab airforces are involved in hiting Daesh now, and have already (Egypt and UAE) been hitting Salafists in Libya. The weak link in all of this is ground troops.

And now this:

Turkey is bracing itself for an unprecedented refugee crisis after as many as 200,000 ethnic Kurds fled across the frontier from Syria in just two days to escape a fresh advance by Islamist extremists.

The influx came after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) captured dozens of Kurdish villages in northern Syria and threatened the border city of Kobane, which was left deserted after most of its inhabitants evacuated in panic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again here: the only answer to this situation is to push back, secure areas of "friendly" populations while arming the able-bodied among them to defend themselves. This is what's sort-of happening in Iraqi Kurdistan, and it's time for Turkey to get off the fence and start throwing their weight around. I understand that there are Kurdish "issues' in Turkey, but Daesh is a bigger problem which will come for Turkey (and Jordan, and Lebanon, etc.) if they are not smashed into the ground. You'll never get them all, but individual wasps only hurt, while a swarm can kill.

I don't know who the USA needs in charge to handle this effectively, but we've got what we've got so fingers crossed that they take some sensible (and sufficiently kinetic) action.

 

Poles getting the shaft?

I just have to wonder if the Poles would have this (realistic) attitude had Mitt Romney won the last US election:

Poland's Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called his country's ties with the US "worthless", a Polish news magazine says, giving excerpts of a secretly recorded conversation.

Mr Sikorski called Poland's stance towards the US "downright harmful because it creates a false sense of security", according to the new leak.

He has not denied using such language.

According to the excerpts, Mr Sikorski told former Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski that "the Polish-US alliance isn't worth anything".

Using vulgar language, he compared Polish subservience to the US to giving oral sex. He also warned that such a stance would cause "conflict with the Germans, Russians".  

Poland of course has centuries of experience on the shit-end of the Russian stick and will be grateful for any meaningful support against that threat.  It is a sign of the dire state of US policy toward Russia (and NATO; hell. everywhere) that the Polish Foreign Minister holds this opinion, but twice-bitten, thrice shy.

I don't believe that Russia needs to be "contained", as they are no longer a threat to whatever Western Civilization is.  It could be in fact argued that they are a bulwark against what it's turning into, but I won't go down that rabbit hole.  Russia is a regional power with certain prerogatives and the Americans are hypocritical to treat them any other way.  That said, invading your neighbours to consolidate the "volk" and/or reconstitute your Cold War-era glacis of western-border satellite states is not on, but the two things need to be kept in their lanes.

Back to the central point, the Poles are on the front line of any Russian revanchment of the USSR and history suggests (screams, really) that this needs to be taken seriously.  I have talked before about having "lines" and any members of NATO are behind ours.  In this context it includes former Warsaw Pact countries and SSRs (Poland, the Baltic States, Czech Republic, Roumania, Bulgaria) who are most exposed to, and painfully familiar with, anything Russia might do.

The Poles' concern is a practical one hinging more on deterrence than anything else, and it wouldn't have come up during W's time in the White House.  As Mr Sikorsky notes, the current US policy/posture has virtually zero deterrence value while aggravating the Russians and Germans simultaneously.  The Germans need Russian gas too badly to kick up much of a fuss about anything not on their doorstep and "demonizing" Putin and the entire country over the latest activity in Ukraine isn't useful to getting relations back on track.

There is a lack of subtlety in North American diplomacy vis a vis Russia and I admit the situation is tricky.  The carrot and the stick both need to be used judiciously, and that means letting your allies KNOW that you have their back while at the same time letting the other side know (when appropriate) that there are benefits for "good" behaviour.

Russia is NOT a threat to us as world communism was.  They are a regional issue, and our friends there require assurance that we take it seriously, which involves concrete action and appropriate language.  It also might require a Striker Brigade moved to Poland.  Canada is doing what it can (short of pulling the stops out for a war) but the US is the big dog in the ring.  When your allies have lost faith in your willingness to back them up you can imagine what the opposition must think.  In any event, Poland learned the value of Western promises in 1939 when action was (is?) at best too little, too late. 

Proxy confidence building

At the time of my last post, there were two main paths events were likely to follow.  The first was Ukraine and NATO would remain completely supine and allow Putin to do what he wants, and under conditions existing at the time I weighted this course of (in)action at >50%.  The other option was the girding of loins, etc. to put troops in harm's way and tell the Russians that they have gone as far as they are going to go.  I wasn't confident this would happen, mostly due to irresolute Western leadership, and things haven't improved there as much as I'd like, but sometimes it doesn't take much to change conditions significantly.

Ukraine’s military launched assaults to retake rebel-held eastern towns on Thursday in which up to five people were reported killed, a move Russian President Vladimir Putin warned would have “consequences”. …
In Slavyansk, a flashpoint east Ukrainian town held by rebels since mid-April, armoured military vehicles drove past an abandoned roadblock in flames to take up position, AFP reporters saw.
Shots were heard as a helicopter flew overhead, and the pro-Kremlin rebels ordered all civilians out of the town hall to take up defensive positions inside.
“During the clashes, up to five terrorists were eliminated,” and three checkpoints destroyed, the interior ministry said in a statement. Regional medical authorities confirmed one death and one person wounded.
Earlier Thursday, Ukrainian special forces seized back control of the town hall in the southeastern port city of Mariupol with no casualties, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said. Separatist sources confirmed the loss of the building in the port city, whose population is 500,000.

The moral support which makes this possible is redeployment of NATO forces to Poland and the Baltic states.  The Americans didn't land the entire 101st in Estonia or anything, but like in Georgia in 2008, a tripwire of NATO troops tells the Russians that the rules have changed.  There were some Americans who were dismissive of the half-dozen CF-18s Canada deployed to Poland, but it's important to note two things.  First and foremost, the Poles were NOT dismissive of our small contribution. Second, even six obsolescent fighter bombers (and the Americans sent more) with modern smart munitions and the determination to use them are not to be lightly dismissed.

Would Canada commit those planes and crews to a shooting war?  Over Ukraine itself most likely not, but over an invasion/infringement of a NATO ally, most definitely, and that's what's important here.  The Poles in particular have both the experience to know what Russia is capable of and the determination to not let it happen again, so they're the right group to reinforce.  The Balts have motivation to keep the Russians out too, so they need and are getting some help.

Canada has played a leadership role in all of this, and we are putting what "money" we have where our mouth is, both with the (small) military contribution and now election monitors for the upcoming election in Ukraine.  There is some evidence that even the chary Europeans see the election verification as something sufficiently unprovocative to get behind.  At this point it must be obvious to everyone in NATO (looking at you, Germany) that they still need to be able to project military power, even if it's just next door or your own border, but again I await developments as do we all..

Vimy Ridge and the perils of a land war in Eurasia

9 April marks the anniversary of the 1917 attack by the Canadian Corps on the German position atop Vimy Ridge in France.  This is held up as the battle which forged Canada as an independent nation, and that is certainly arguable.  What is also arguable is whether or not it was worth it.  Pierre Burton (spoiler alert) is of the opinion it was not, and the scale of the carnage makes this view compelling.

3598 soldiers of the Canadian Corps were killed and another c. 7000 wounded in a battle which was 90% over in one day, finished in three. For this reason (and that we did what the French and British armies had failed to do) Vimy should also be remembered in the hope that we can avoid it happening again.

Canada lost over 66.000 men in WWI and 45,000 in WWII, so some lessons were learnt, albeit at the expense of the Soviet soldiers who died in heaps fighting the bulk of German forces on the Eastern Front.  My take-away from all of this is "stay out of Europe", and current events are reinforcing that view.

Speaking of the Eastern Front, the Russian shenanigans are in play again in Eastern Ukraine, specifically the Donetsk/Kharkov area.  Hearkening back to my last post, my notional Putin Risk Matrix is looking more like Risk, the game.  An exaggeration of course, but the current government building take-overs and calls for referendums in Donetsk, etc. is exactly the same play as Crimea and shows no signs that the West's stern finger-wagging is in any way a deterrent.

I've heard some vague reports of Ukraine mobilizing some forces to take out the agitators occupying those facilities, and if so it's about time.  I'll not hold my breath, but it could happen.  My point here is that things could get messy, and in this case no-one outside of Ukraine cares enough (proven by lack of concrete, effective action) to start a war over it being carved up. As lethal as modern warfare can be, the Vimy casualties are comparable to US losses in Iraq over an eight year period, so whatever could happen in Ukraine (militarily) won't be WW magnitude.  That said, our tolerance for losses is not what it once (sort of) was so our bar for expenditure of blood is much lower. 

Prediction?  I'll go out on a limb based on available info and say there's another putsch in Donetsk.  Again, no warranty on that opinion is expressed or implied.  I will put money on no Western troops confronting the Russians over this, and hope that I'm right.  That's not because I wish any ill to the Ukrainians, but because if their cause isn't worth enough for them to bleed for it, our people shouldn't either.

  

Peninsular Peril

The votes have been cast (by those who didn't boycott the referendum) and Crimea has seceded from Ukraine and wants to go back to Russia. I regard this as a done deal as will any realistic observer, despite the protestations of illegitimacy from Western leaders.

That most people living there would prefer to go with Russia is obvious, even if the fact that Putin continues to gather Russians continues to elude people looking for motivation. It is known that Putin continues to use the immediate recognition of Kosovo after we'd bombed the Serbs out of there as licence to annex his own "self-determining" majority areas back to the Rodina, but not acknowledged by most of the media, let alone Western politicians.

So what? Sure, some people will be unhappy, and Ukraine is out some income from Sevastopol rental to the Russians, but what does that mean to anyone else? Ukraine has had a sequence of corrupt governments since independence from the USSR and I sure as shit don't want to get dragged into another war in Europe. Certainly not over an Anschluss like this, and I see the geopolitical cost to North America to be nil from the Crimea changing hands. The damage from puffing up and making vague threats of sanctions against Russia is potentially great.

A lot of people really didn't like G.W. Bush, but most of them were either lefties for whom realpolitik-clueless Obama can do no wrong, or people GW decided to take some action against, like, say, the late Saddam Hussein. One thing which definitively separates Bush II and Obama is that nobody who counts takes the latter seriously. Even in a no-win situation like the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008, Bush made a point of having American assets in the capital (Tbilisi) to present the Russians with an unspoken "red line". It must be noticed that as sub-optimal as things may have turned out for Georgia, the Russians took the hint and pulled most of the way back.

The lost Georgian territory is a lesson to them not to poke the bear, no matter if you're provoked. The lesson to us is (again) Talk - Action = Zero, Action - Talk = >Zero. I don't know what "we" would do if Russia had another crack at Georgia right now, but somebody had better be taking some proactive steps to dissuade Putin from cooking something up in Eastern Ukraine to take that also. After that? Belarus? The Baltic States?

The Balts have less to fear, and more potential European support than Ukraine due to ethnic/national/cultural connections to Europe vice Russia. I may have read The Clash of Civilizations too much, but birds of a feather do flock together and it makes sense to me to draw our lines along those natural fault lines.

I keep talking about action, so what should be done? In practice I don't see a lot of potential for the sort of thing that I think would send the right message, but if Europe still had any armies, it'd be a good time to start scheduling boots-on-the-ground joint exercises with what's left of Ukraine and put some bases in the Baltic States. Physical assets, preferably those which can shoot back, will do the job. Putin doesn't want a war as it's not in his interest to lose more than he'd gain. He will walk into as many places with a Russian majority population as he is permitted to, sanctions be damned.

Whatever. For my money, the next flashpoint is Donetsk, but it's not exactly crystal ball territory to come up with that. This is NOT a fait accompli but if Putin pushes for it he has enough support on the ground to pull it off in some fashion if there is no physical response from "our side". As long as Obama/Kerry are running the US show and the Europeans are beholden to Russia for their heating fuel, it's Putin's geographical and demographic prize to gain, and Ukraine's to lose.

But the cat came back...

It's been over a year since I last posted anything here. I felt I had nothing left to say about what was happening in the world, but recent events have caused me to re-evaluate that.

The immediate catalyst for this is the current stand-off in the Ukraine, Crimea specifically at this point, and the kaleidoscope of ideas about what should or should not be done. I have some definite ideas, and they are along the lines of, well, drawing some lines.Brzezinski's article of 3 March 14 is in the ball park, and his background is such that he's familiar with how Moscow does business, pay no attention to the President he worked for.

Obama has made a complete mockery of himself world-wide with his "Red lines" and lack of response to them being trampled, and what Putin is doing right now is in full knowledge that the US (and consequently the EU) will do nothing concrete to stop him.

The problem actually goes all the way back to the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO into former Warsaw pact countries. Poland, Czech Republic and the Baltic States are hostile to Russia and a natural fit to NATO updated for Russia vs USSR. Likewise Romania and Bulgaria were never part of Russia but subject to the latter's pressure, therefore good candidates.

There is a bigger question here though; what is NATO's raison d'être in a post-Cold War world? Let's start with the name: North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This suggests a geographical connection and a group of like-minded countries. Those are two separate criteria; I consider Australia and New Zealand to be like-minded countries but the geographical connection isn't there. There is another concept at work too though: the Sphere of Influence.

The US had a shit-fit in 1962 about the USSR putting nukes in Cuba, immediately in America's back yard. It is instructive that the solution to that stand-off involved the US removing the equivalent (already placed) missiles from Turkey, an analogous geographical threat to the USSR. In the labour relations field this is called "Interest-based Bargaining" and it works with human nature. The hypocrisy of the USA in this case is not to be overlooked, but all's fair in love and Containment.

Containment was the strategy of The West vs. the USSR/World Communism. My off-the-cuff assessment of Containment's contribution is that it was plausible in concept but flawed in execution. What success it had was basically attritional (Vietnam and Afghanistan the most significant episodes) with eventual economic exhaustion of the USSR from trying to out-produce us in war materiel. It is widely overlooked these days, but "collapse by arms race" was the basic Reagan strategy against the "evil empire". Gorbachev formally ended the "Red Menace" of World Revolution, thus obviating the need for Containment, or so you'd think. Inertia however is Newton's First Law for a reason, and huge organizations and the mindsets behind them are as subject to it as much as any minor planet zipping around the solar system. Flash forward to 2008...

Putin called NATO/G.W. Bush's bluff in Georgia then, partly to reabsorb South Ossetia, more to serve notice that Georgia was in Russia's sphere and NATO could sod off. This isn't a Human Rights blog so I won't argue rights and wrongs in a moral sense which are subjective in any event. We don't tend to think that way since we are so certain that we are morally superior, but moral superiority doesn't protect you from jackbooted thugs, and that's the real-world issue.

What then is my real-world prescription for the Ukraine thing? Draw some lines and then put troops on them. Ukraine is a Frankenstein nation which could be simply and logically partitioned into East (Russia) and West (Europe) with the consent of most people on the ground. West Ukraine could then join NATO if that seemed the thing to do, but it's an economic basket-case with a per-capita GDP somewhere around that of Egypt so I'm not sure the EU wants it, but not my problem. Not ideal in a lot of ways, as there are resources and industry involved as well as people, but you have to pick your battles.

The talk right now on our side is economic sanctions, but that's not the language Putin is using right now so it's not certain the point will be made. This does have similarities with the Sudetenland in 1938, and the remedy is the same: military force. The Czechs could have held the Germans off with any military backing at all from France, but the iron to do so was lacking. The level of war-weariness in France at that time far exceeded anything in the US and Europe right now, but the present level of hand-wringing will be as (in)effective as that of '38.

If the US is serious, it should land some Marines in the Ukrainian controlled parts of Crimea and dare the Russians to try something. Putin is, contrary to wishful thinking in the liberal media, an entirely rational actor and is unlikely to bite off more than he can swallow. The Crimea is bite-sized right now, the rest of the East is still too big. That can change in either direction based on the response from Ukraine and Europe/the US; making Crimea too prickly to swallow or folding completely and allowing the Russians to walk uncontested into majority Russian areas of east Ukraine.

Putin doesn't want a war, but he'll absorb as many Russians outside Russia's current borders as he can without a big fight. That's Putin's strategic objective and it would do well to remember it in order to interpret his actions. He (and most Russians) doesn’t want to be like "us" and it's pretty chauvinistic to presume that they should. Seeing what blowhard self-referential pretentious busybodies “we” are these days I can't say I blame them.

Risk Management and Civilization

The title link is to the oil spill from a pipeline in Alberta in the last week. There is the usual bashing of "Harper" and "Big Oil" but as it came the same week as the following I saw some blog synchronicity:

Japan must restart two nuclear reactors to protect the country's economy and livelihoods, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has said in a televised broadcast.

Measures to ensure the safety of two reactors at western Japan's Ohi nuclear plant have been undertaken, he said.

Since last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan's 50 reactors have been shut down for routine maintenance.

The crisis fuelled immense public opposition to nuclear power, but Japan is facing a summer of power shortages.

The leftist Utopian mindset is that we should get something for nothing, whether it be services (rioting "students" in Montreal this spring) or "Green" energy. Shit ain't like that, as Newton encapsulated many moons ago. There are reactions to actions, and while these can and should be be mitigated when possible, changing anything from one state to another will have a range of effects, not all of which we want.

That is where the mitigation strategies come in because radical environmentalist cant aside, the era of rampant pollution is past. Air and water are cleaner (in the developed world) than they were 40 years ago, and it's because of improved practices and technology. This brings us to Diminishing Returns and Risk Management.

It's difficult to ascribe priority to one or the other as I can make an argument either way, but for purposes of this post I'll give Risk Management planning priority. I'll also give my own interpretation of RM which is as follows: with a particular end-state in mind (affordable energy, for example) you decide what will do more damage, the various ways of producing it or the effects of not having it.

I'm sure that's close enough for unpaid work (e.g. here) to work with, and the position of the Japanese PM re: reactors is pretty much a textbook example of risk management. With all reasonable (more on that in a bit) precautions taken, the damage to society would be far greater if the power generation is foregone than the risk presented by the possibility of accident in the production of it.

It's NOT about wringing ones' hands about the worst-case-scenario and assuming that (however unlikely it is) will be what happens. In this case, something pretty close to the worst case happened at Fukushima, and as much of a mess as it is NOBODY HAS DIED because of the radiation released from it. This is after an old (and sub-optimally designed) fission reactor was completely overwhelmed by a massive natural disaster which itself killed over 15,000 people leveled a number of small cities and actually changed the elevation of those seaside areas.

There aren't a lot of ways in which that could get worse in terms of what happened in the end result at the reactor complex itself. The Wikipedia link seems (at tme of writing) well balanced, and even the worst-case reputable estimate for lifetime cancer increase amoungst those exposed (100 cases) pales in comparison to the devastation wrought by any good-sized quake in Japan. Fukushima was rated at the same level of "devastation" as Chernobyl which is questionable at the very least from the point of view of fatalities.

Chernobyl was indeed the worst case (see link above) and I notice that the world has not ended, save for the <300 people who died as a direct result of it. Risk Management in the USSR was a very blunt instrument, leading to bad designs like the RMBK reactors. Three Mile Island marked the death knell of the American nuclear power program and NOBODY even got measurably sick from it.

The word for the reaction to all of these events is "panic". I'm not a fan of panic, but there are times when some healthy caution is in order when things go wrong. It breaks, you fix it, you carry on. You do it with your car (or bike if you're a real Green hardcase), you don't say "OMG, it broke and it could fail catastrophically, cars/bikes must be banned!"

Back to the oil spill. These have happened thousands of times in the last 100+ years and again, the world has yet to end as we know it or otherwise. I am not a fan of industrial accidents, but a certain failure rate is the price of doing anything that accomplishes anything. We take reasonable precautions, the state of "reasonable" being a moving target depending on time and perspective.

Enter Diminishing Returns. Of course if we have no rules we see all sorts of short-term gain behaviour which is why unbridled capitalism is a bad idea. That said, the "worker's paradise" of the USSR and satellite Commie states made a MUCH bigger mess of the environment than the Evil Capitalist West. At a certain point in trying to improve something you will hit that point when a further 1% improvement in x will require increasingly more effort past the diminishing returns point than what led to it.

It happens with schoolwork, it happens at work and it gets to the point where further improvement is either impossible or would be uneconomical in effort or expense. Zero-defect is what we seem to expect these days, and that 's not the way things work. The key to keeping the wheels on is to not getting bogged down striving for perfection, but to keep moving forward as best we can.

Cheap clean energy is the key to the future, and the dividing line on the global warming/climate change seems to involve the definition of what is cheap and what exactly is clean. Right now natural gas seems to split the difference with only radical anti-CO2 wingnuts having a problem with it. The supposed "environmentally friendly" sources of wind and solar are anything but, and hydrocarbon based energy will be with us for the foreseeable future. As we will also be around for the (by definition) foreseeable future, we have to do the best we can to not "shit where we eat".

The best we can do will never completely eliminate human error or materials failure. We can however keep improving things as long as we keep things in perspective and keep the people who are producing what we need honest. People aren't good at thinking rationally about stuff so we'll make a mess of it, but in the meantime we'll keep the lights on and our food coming to us by making as few errors as possible while not making it impossible for people to do the things we need them to. Mistakes will be made, but clean them up, learn the appropriate lessons and keep moving forward.

How much Bang is stopped for your Bucks?

Back to Slate again, but not to excoriate this time. It's pretty 'Progressive" but balanced enough or I wouldn't read it, and today's link ties into whatever it is that I've been on about here lately. The trend seems to be "efficiently fighting bad people" and here is the authors' explanation of "cost effectiveness":

A conventional approach to cost-effectiveness compares the costs of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. The benefit of a security measure is a multiplicative composite of three considerations: the probability of a successful attack, the losses sustained in a successful attack, and the reduction in risk furnished by security measures. This product, the benefit, is then compared to the cost of the security measure instituted to attain the benefit. A security measure is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing the security measures.

Hearken back to my problems with the methods of the TSA in the last post, and we're all on the same page here. The enemy of cost effectiveness is bureaucratic empire building, and we come to where that begins in the context of American Homeland Security:

To evaluate the reduction in risk provided by security measures, we need to consider their effectiveness in foiling, deterring, disrupting, or protecting against a terrorist attack. In assessing risk reduction, it is important first to look at the effectiveness of homeland security measures that were in place before 9/11. The 9/11 Commission's report points to a number of failures, but it acknowledges as well that terrorism was already a high priority of the government before 9/11. More pointed is an observation of Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism: "The most important work in protecting our country since 9/11 has been accomplished with the capacity that was in place when the event happened, not with any of the new capability bought since 9/11. I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post-9/11 security."

There is another consideration. The tragic events of 9/11 massively heightened the awareness of the public to the threat of terrorism, resulting in extra vigilance that has often resulted in the arrest of terrorists or the foiling of terrorist attempts.

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, we come back to the fact (visited a couple of posts back) that history and terrorism didn't pop out of nowhere ten years ago. I will make the argument that 9/11 was Team bin Laden's peak (safe bet at this point) and only worked because they had element of strategic surprise about the suicide bombing thing. No one will ever again allow terrorists to take over an airplane, and you'll notice they have stopped trying and merely try to destroy them in air. A cost effective solution to hijacking: lock the cockpit door and give flight attendants tasers.

With that in mind, into the meat of Mueller and Stewart's excerpt:

Putting this all together, we find that, in order for the $75 billion in enhanced expenditures on homeland security to be deemed cost-effective under our approach—which substantially biases the consideration toward finding them effective—they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect each year against 1,667 otherwise successful attacks of something like the one attempted in Times Square in 2010. In other words, we'd have to foil more than four major attacks every day to justify the spending.

I don't crunch numbers too much here, so I'll use theirs and take this at face value. Assuming there was this much terrorist activity in the USA (it's a big place, but seriously?) how much of it is there that wouldn't be picked off by routine law enforcement? Standard police work with some elementary triggers (chemical purchases, reports from concerned citizens, etc.) will sort most of this out, and indeed there were warnings about the 9/11 hijackers which could have been acted on.

Now the age-old question: how much is your life worth?

It is possible, of course, that any relaxation in these measures will increase the terrorism hazard, that the counterterrorism effort is the reason for the low-hazard terrorism currently present. However, in order for the terrorism risk to border on becoming "unacceptable" by established risk conventions, the number of fatalities from all forms of terrorism in the United States would have to increase 35-fold, equivalent to experiencing attacks as devastating as those on 9/11 at least once a year or 18 Oklahoma City bombings every year. Even if all the (mostly embryonic and in many cases moronic) terrorist plots exposed since 9/11 in the United States had been successfully carried out, their likely consequences would have been much lower. Indeed, as noted earlier, the number of people killed by terrorists throughout the world outside (and sometimes within) war zones both before and after 2001 generally registers at far below that number.

At the end of the day it again comes down to leadership or the lack thereof. If rational decisions are made and explained by calm, rational people to the rest of us, we will (mostly) follow that example. secure in the knowledge that our concerns are taken seriously and are being acted on. However, the Zero-Defect mentality is enforced by the media, and it takes a very strong personality to stand their ground in face of the shit-storm should something slip through, as it inevitably will.

Even with the extra multi-billions spent on all of this, things still slip through to be stopped only by alert and motivated members of the public. All that money and a Dutch tourist sitting next to the would-be bomber had to do the job; your organization was not very cost effective, was it, Ms Napolitano? Good leadership is also shown by subordinates who know when to act, but huge expensive bureaucracies don't generate many of those, and promote even fewer. Good thing the Americans can afford all of this...

Non quia aliquid consequendum

The link is to another of the inevitable elitist out-of-touch Hollywood liberals who need a bandwagon to jump on:

"I want to add my body and my voice to the thousands of others who are laying themselves on the line and saying,'No, we do not want to be party to this incredibly destructive path. We're becoming more dependent on fossil fuels and now we're becoming dependent on the most dirty of the fossil fuels, which is the tarsands fuel'," Hannah said.

TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline would run from Alberta through Nebraska to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. It would double the capacity of the existing Keystone pipeline.

Proponents say the expansion would create thousands of jobs in both Canada and the U.S. and would help reduce U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Environmental activists say the pipeline is too risky and that extracting oil from the oilsands creates far too much greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week, the U.S. State Department released a report that said the proposed pipeline would pose no major risks to the environment and would not necessarily spur further oilsands production in Alberta.

There is nothing in life without some risk (title, in classy and hopefully correct Latin thanks to Google Translate), and no, I'm not talking about getting arrested for a sit-in against something you don't like. We are indeed "dependant on fossil fuels", but this will not change by hamstringing our productivity and prosperity. I have gone over the "alternative" energy problem before, but in short Ms Hanna has no idea what is involved in keeping the modern world's lights on if she thinks that all of our energy can be produced by "solar, wind, geothermal, microhydro" and any other pie-in-the-sky "green" options.

Those listed are only good in specific locations and/or on small scale. Solar and wind farms are as much, I'd even say more, of a blight on the landscape as any (decent) pipeline and are not reliable sources of power. Geothermal only works very locally, and you can bet that any large-scale geothermal project (in, say, Yellowstone Park) would have the Green movement's useful idiots chaining themselves to drill rigs. As for microhydro, great if you have your own river, but how many people does that apply to?

Rich people can afford whatever low-efficiency power scheme tickles their fancy; the rest of us need what works, is proven to work, will continue to work or (the future) will work better than what we already have. That last one includes "scary" things like Liquid Fluoride Reactors which will do everything we need it to do, and do it more safely than existing nuclear plants or even hydrocarbon refineries. I would have one in my backyard, or at least where I could see it from there (it's still a powerplant after all) but the Greens would shit themselves at the name of it alone.

In the meantime, the USA needs to get back on its' feet economically and politically, and affordable secure energy is one brick on that path. Celebrities making responsible, informed announcements/actions would help in a small way too but fat chance of that; the sensible ones seem to just keep their opinions to themselves. Cutting the size of their government by about 50% would help that immensely, but that is another post.

Curtain coming down on Security Theatre?

That which has long been the elephant in the room of airline security is now stepping on enough toes it seems. I am seeing more calls for profiling, which of course turns into "racial profiling" in the media and nattering classes, but some people are far more likely to cause certain types of problems than others.

The incoming head of Germany's airport industry association has called for Israeli-style passenger profiling to be introduced. Christoph Blume said that grouping passengers into different categories of risk could put an end to the ever-growing number of security checks. Detection equipment would, he argued, "at some point... reach its technological and operating limits". But the country's justice minister said there was a risk of stigmatisation.

The usual response to that is "Racism!" and there are those lines showing up in this BBC article, but the shift in tone is noticeable. This is fairly even-handed, something I haven't seen enough of from the BBC the last several years. No security is perfect is it's not going to bring processes to a grinding halt, so a bit of brainpower will tilt the odds in your favour while speeding things up.

The harsh truth is that young Muslim males are most likely to try to take down an airliner; there has been no example that I am aware of of elderly women or toddlers making the attempt. The argument can be made that the parents could smuggle things onto the plane using the kid, but the same risk assessment applies to the parents. If they seem dangerous, their kids warrant some more attention too.

High-risk passengers - those deemed more likely to carry out terrorist or illegal activity, such as organised crime, drug trafficking or espionage - would undergo more stringent security checks. This could mean anything from a bag search to a full body search.

"This way [through profiling], control systems could be more effectively employed for the well-being of all participants," the new head of Germany's airport industry association ADV said.

Here's the key takeaway though (emphasis mine):

Joerg Handwerg, a pilot for Lufthansa and spokesperson for the German pilots' association Cockpit, told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle that current security procedures were not working and profiling was common sense. "The current controls are foolish, because we waste resources by doing things that feign security but don't actually bring security," he said. Mr Handwerg suggested a points system could be employed to determine which passengers might pose a higher security risk.

I am not so optimistic to think that things will change quickly, or indeed at all, but it's nice to see some cracks in the slap-dash edifice of airline security. Still, until this calms down a bit and I can go somewhere without being treated like a criminal all of my vacations will be within driving distance.