BUSINESS = WAR, BUT NOT “WWIV”

We don’t do much mil­i­tary strat­egy around here at Defense Tech. I don’t think I’m smart enough for it, frankly.
But guys like John Robb and Thomas P.M. Barnett, they’re dif­fer­ent. Both of them have brains big­ger than water­mel­ons in July. And they both have had fas­ci­nat­ing posts in the last week on the chang­ing nature of war.
“Is busi­ness war?” Robb asks, over on his Global Guerillas blog. “It is in the world of post-​​industrial, post-​​state con­flict.“
Case in point: Equipment Express CEO Jeffrey Ake, who was taken hostage in Iraq ear­lier this month.

CEO kid­nap­ping isn’t new. It is com­mon prac­tice in Brazil, Mexico, etc. The dif­fer­ence in Iraq is the motive. In Iraq, it isn’t purely finan­cial gain. It is being used as a way to unravel the fledg­ling Iraqi gov­ern­ment.
Here’s why. America’s sec­ond largest ally in Iraq isn’t the UK. Not even close. Corporations like Halliburton pro­vide almost as many trig­ger pullers and engi­neers as the US Army. They are the bat­tal­ions of foot sol­diers in Thomas Barnett’s sys-​​admin force — con­nect­ing Iraq to the US and the world.
This role con­verts CEOs into generals/​colonels in the US glob­al­iza­tion machine… They are now legit­i­mate and highly prized targets.

That’s because the CEO is so cen­tral — too cen­tral, in fact — to his company’s suc­cess. It makes him “a sin­gle point of fail­ure for the entire cor­po­rate organ­ism,” Robb says. With comap­nies so impor­tant these days to the American war effort, this cen­tral­ity makes CEOs “bet­ter tar­gets than gov­ern­ment or mil­i­tary offi­cials.“
Barnett, on the other hand, is focus­ing on what peo­ple are call­ing this strug­gle with Islamic extrem­ism. Since 9/​11, some admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and their tag-​​along reporters have are got­ten used to call­ing this fight “World War IV” (the Cold War was III). Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map, says that’s dead wrong. Click here to find out why.

The WWIV crowd wants to use this notion to rally the nation, to make it the defin­ing cause of the next “great­est gen­er­a­tion.” In real­ity, the strug­gle has lit­tle to do with America, which may have started the cur­rent iter­a­tion of glob­al­iza­tion This strug­gle is cur­rently about how Islam adapts itself to glob­al­iza­tion. America is a dis­tant “devil” in this fun­da­men­tally intra-​​civilizational process, a con­ve­nient scape­goat for past fail­ures and cur­rent defi­cien­cies, but noth­ing more. Trying to make this all about us is the height of his­tor­i­cal arro­gance, and a fun­da­men­tal mis­read­ing of his­tory. Globalization comes with rules, not a ruler. America plays globalization’s body­guard, but hardly its sole defender. Yes, 9/​11 was the prompt for us to step up and assume our right­ful strate­gic role, but let’s argue this role ratio­nally, with­out invok­ing any war clause that the unscrupu­lous will inevitably use to shout down oppo­nents and their crit­i­cisms of cur­rent pol­icy. There is no with-​​us-​​or-​​against-​​us dynamic at work here, but rather a with globalization-​​or-​​against-​​it choice that America makes for no nation, no cul­ture, no individual.

Worse still, Barnett says, is that WWIV “is a self-​​serving con­cept that encour­ages us to ratio­nal­ize failure.”

All’s fair in love and war, or so we are told. But noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth, espe­cially in this strug­gle, which will involve ele­ments of war­fare but hardly be dom­i­nated by them. Since war­fare will be but a means and never the sole deter­mi­nant of our achieve­ment of ends, how we wage war will be incred­i­bly impor­tant. It has to be con­tex­tu­al­ized within the larger frame­work of rule-​​set exten­sion, mean­ing we fight and kill and die not just by exam­ple but for exam­ple. Demonstration of val­ues means every­thing in this con­flict, and so the ratio­nale that some fail­ure can be excused sim­ply because “we’re at war­damnit!” is wrongvery wrong.
We don’t wage war­fare sim­ply to deny our ene­mies their desired future (although that is an out­come we seek), but rather to invite [other] soci­eties to join our inevitable, shared future. Globalization will win out in the end, because con­nec­tiv­ity trumps dis­con­nect­ed­ness, and if we have con­fi­dence in that out­come, then we must tem­per our desire for short-​​term suc­cesses with a sense of play­ing out history’s clock and under­stand­ing that if we can­not look our oppo­nents in the eye upon any conflict’s res­o­lu­tion, our vic­to­ries will seem hol­low indeed. There will be no glob­al­iza­tion at the bar­rel of a gun, but rather at the accep­tance of legit­i­mate rule sets to which we like­wise must sub­mit in both wartime and peace. Abu Ghraib was wrong, as is Guantanamo, as is ren­der­ing ter­ror­ist sus­pects to Gap states which use tor­ture. “WWIV” is eas­ily dis­torted to excuse all these fail­ures of judg­ment and action, and for that rea­son alone it does us far more harm than good.

April 26th, 2005 | Strategery | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.