1. Anonymous says:

    I’m not sure I entirely agree, because I think that Hezbollah is more like a state entity than most people believe. They control territory. They are the defacto civil authorities in that territory. They have a bureaucracy, they provide social services. They have a political party. And they have a military. They exist within a recognized state, but that state is secondary within Southern Lebanon.

    Yes, I agree that the Israelis are using means inappropriate for and ineffective against their enemy. But I don’t think that’s unique to a post-nation state world. What Hezbollah is doing militarily against the Israelis isn’t dramatically different from what the Colonists did during the Revolutionary War. It’s not that different from what the Viet Cong did in Vietnam. Nor, for that matter, is it that different from what the Mujahadeen did in Afghanistan.

  2. Anonymous says:

    I’m just impressed by someone who can plow through a book as huge and dense as Shield of Achilles. I tried and tried, but just couldn’t make it past the first hundred pages. Too many assumptions that I completely disagreed with, buried beneath layers of ponderous writing.

  3. Anonymous says:

    DH

    I think you’re absolutely right about Hezbollah’s state qualities. I was thinking of them more in terms of their mastery of 4G warfare and the prospects for the future. Mao won using 4G, but then adopted 3G to solidify his state’s position. As did the Viet Cong. But there is the potential here for the repercussions to extend beyond Lebanon, to areas where Hezbollah’s allies don’t have state-like control.

    And my basic point is, we don’t KNOW what’s going to happen, but this does seem like the dominance of 4G over 4G may be solidified, with unknown consequences for us.

    Nell

    I just kept writing what I was screaming in the margins. There are pages you can’t really read now, through all my notes. But yeah, I got through it.

  4. Anonymous says:

    emptywheel,

    I’m curious. Does he discuss the Dutch empire? I would imagine if one is going to talk about market-states, that would a place to start.

    More to the point of the post, a big part of what’s happening in the Arab (and more broadly in the Muslim) world is just jumping on the bandwagon of the perceived winner. I seriously doubt that centuries of Sunni-Shia divisions are going to resolved by the current situation.

    I think it’s important to remember that there really isn’t anything new about 4GW. It’s a just a theoritical framework around some (mostly) ancient techniques for effective war-fighting and it’s not simply synonymous with guerrilla warfare. In past conflicts, the Israelis have been pretty accomplished practicioners of 4GW. I wonder what’s happened to them. I’m also very curious about how the Hezbollah fighters developed their expertise. Most folks seem to assume Iranian training, but what Hezbollah is doing is very, very different than what the Iranians did in their war with Iraq. All this is just the morbid curiousity of a pacifist.

  5. Anonymous says:

    Kind of, but he mushes it into his â€Kingly States to Territorial States†phase. So he reads it as more of a failure of sufficient territoriality than as a successful market-state.

    And yes, there isn’t anything new about 4G, except that it is proving remarkably effective against 3G warfare of late. One might better describe current events as an effort to delegitimize 4G warfare (indeed, that’s largely what the rules of war do), because it really sucks when you’re the most powerful country in the world but you can’t impose your will. But that’s where, I think, it gets into questions of legitimacy. If Hezbollah’s actions are given legitimacy by a chunk of the world’s billion Muslims, what then? Does it make it harder for the (3G) powerful nations to insist on the legitimacy of the laws of war (though it’s not like George Bush is insisting on the rules of war either).

    And in the short term, it seems like the consensus around the UN is going to be the first to collapse.

  6. Anonymous says:

    In our ‘entrepreneurial market-state’, the economy functions primarily as the playing field for would-be ‘masters of the universe’. Control of government policy and procurement are prizes in the ‘competition’.
    The US military’s armored vest fiasco is an example of the consequences. The bidding process was conducted on K Street, and the winner was obviously more interested in making profits than making vests.

    Re: Afghanistan. The USSR wasn’t defeated by the humble mujahadeen. The wahhabis were proxies for the USA and Saudis who invested billions. Most say the turning point was Reagan’s gift of stinger missiles to Bin Laden & Co. Even then, the soviets didn’t really lose. They morphed into ‘Russians’ and then switched sides. Until then, the Najibullah government was controlling the major cities, and Kabul was physically largely intact.