INSURGENTS = ENTREPRENEURS?

John Robb has a must-​​read post today about the “guerilla entre­pre­neurs” now oper­at­ing in Iraq. If you want to know why this insur­gency in Iraq is going to be so tough to stop, start click­ing.

Arab war­fare, until late in this cen­tury, was dri­ven entirely by entre­pre­neur­ship. For exam­ple: Lawrence of Arabia, the father of mod­ern guer­rilla war­fare, used com­bi­na­tions of direct pay­ments and the promise of loot to build his forces. Faith played a major part, but it was almost always sec­ondary.
Recent reports con­firm from the US mil­i­tary ana­lysts con­firm the finan­cial nature of the open source bazaar in Iraq:

* “Unlimited amounts” of vio­lence cap­i­tal for guer­rilla entre­pre­neurs is flow­ing into Iraq from ex-​​Baathists, rel­a­tives of Saddam Hussein, Saudi sources, and bin Laden. Given global guer­rilla ROIs (returns on invest­ment) of up to 100,000 x, this should be cause for alarm.
* Loot from con­voy hijack­ings, theft of oil through bunker­ing, and ran­soms play a major part of the moti­va­tion for attacks. Fully 80% of the attacks fall into this cat­e­gory.
* A gran­u­lar com­pet­i­tive mar­ket. There are over 50 guer­rilla groups active in Iraq. The sheer diver­sity of the effort indi­cates a process that is very sim­i­lar to his­tor­i­cal pat­terns of Arab warfare.

THERE’S MORE: “About $500 mil­lion in unac­counted funds from Saddam Hussein’s for­mer regime is being used to finance a grow­ing insur­gency in Iraq,” accord­ing to CNN.

October 22nd, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.