Tag: strategy

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Counter-Force versus Counter-Value in Conflict.

Given the amount of dis/misinformation being pushed about the nature of the conflict between the Israel-US alliance and Iran, it might be good to understand some basic concepts. I will leave aside for the moment that blatant illegality of the US/Israel preventative war of aggressive choice on Iran and instead concentrate on the nature of their respective approaches to the conflict when seen in broad context.

Counter-force strikes are lethal kinetic operations against “hard” targets like military installations, command and control bunkers, air, land and naval platforms, missile depots, launchers and launching sites, and anything that is involved in an enemy’s ability to mass and project force. This includes intelligence-gathering and military communications grids and even satellite surveillance and sensor stations. The key to the definition is that the targets are identifiably military or military-related in nature. The purpose of counter-force strikes is to degrade or eliminate the enemy’s military capabilities and ability to fight whether or not it has the will to continue to do so. Along with strikes on airfields and naval depots, Ukraine’s attacks on missile and drone production sites in Russia are examples of counter-force targeting,

Counter-value strikes are lethal kinetic operations undertaken against “soft” targets. The include all non-combatants and non-military infrastructure like civilian power grids, water treatment plants, hospitals, schools, churches, athletic and community facilities and anything that is not directly involved in a military effort. Counter-value strikes are generally prohibited under international law, including the Laws of War, but have continue to be used as a psychological weapon whose purpose is to undermine the collective morale of and willingness to continue support for the fight by the targeted population. This can be done to provoke a popular uprising, prompt socially disruptive internal refugee flows and to foment political unrest, or can simply be designed to psychologically break people and destroy the material and social cohesion of society.

The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo in WW2, as well as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were counter-value strikes. The Japanese military campaigns in East Asia, particularly in China and Korea, were mostly counter-value in nature. The Russian drone campaign against civilian targets in Ukraine is a recent example. So are most terrorist attacks regardless of who commits them. Assaults by military forces on civilian targets with the objective of eliminating popular support for insurgencies, be they in Gaza, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chechnya or Afghanistan, are another instance of counter-value targeting. All hark to a previous era where unlimited wars of annihilation were waged by societies, not just military forces representing them. As exercises in collective punishment, they are all contraventions of international law.

Long term readers will remember when I posted here at KP about the error of thinking that the nuclear doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) still applied to contemporary nuclear targeting strategies. Killing cities is a counter-value proposition, and in the days of dumb bombs and inaccurate guidance and surveillance technologies, was deemed the necessary means of bringing wars to their earliest conclusion (although the repercussive effects would remain for decades). Heavier throw-weights (warheads, as measured in mega or kilotons of nuclear explosive yields) compensated for inaccuracy (as measured by Circular Error Probables (CEPs), which is the circumference around a target point within which a warhead can be expected to fall). But as military technological advancements took hold by the 1970s, MAD was replaced with “flexible response,” where nuclear strikes were first directed at counter-force targets like ICBM missile silos, air and naval bases with nuclear weapons presence. CEPs were reduced to meters as distances and numbers of warheads increased per missile launched, which along with real-time manoeuvrable guidance systems allowed the use of lower throw-weights on more accurately designated counter-force targets.

Having killed the enemy’s response capabilities, surrender can be compelled or negotiated with the defenceless decision-makers on the other side. If that fails, their societies remain as easy counter-value targets. That logic now spans the spectrum of warfare capabilities from the battlefield to the strategic level.

In conventional wars, militarily superior actors–those with dominant military capabilities and resource bases–prefer counter-force targeting because it suits their strengths and degrades the opponent’s military capabilities without excessive “collateral” damage amongst civilians. As the old saying goes, after the strikes have achieved their strategic objectives there needs to be someone to negotiate with and a society that is capable of restoring some sense of functionality to its institutions and administrative and logistical capabilities. Removing a threatening military presence without removing or destroying its host society is seen as the most cost-effective means of achieving post-war peace and stability on the dominant actor’s terms.

Military inferior actors–say, guerrilla groups or less powerful states (as measured in military capabilities, resource bases and social support for political decision-making processes and institutions)–prefer to engage in counter-value strikes. They cannot afford to fight toe-to-toe against a more powerful foe or engage in a counter-force wars of attrition. That only plays to the stronger opponent’s strengths and hastens inevitable defeat. Think of Saddam Hussein’s strategy in the first Gulf War (Desert Storm), where he tried to use old Soviet era tactics to confront the US military and its allies in Kuwait and Iraq as if they were peer competitors. Instead, “Shock and Awe” did not go well for Saddam’s forces. The war lasted six and a half months and although Saddam was allowed to remain in power because no better options were deemed to be available, it was believed that he had learned a lesson and returned to his “box.” As it turned out, it just set the stage for the second Gulf War and his overthrow a decade later.

Most militarily inferior leaders are not as foolish as Saddam was and do not “stand up” to fight countries like the US and Israel on symmetrical terms. Instead, their best bet is to resort to unconventional, irregular warfare tactics that place a premium on counter-value targeting and flexibility of maneuver as part of widening and prolonging the conflict into non-military spheres. They seek to involve the enemy populations and neutral actors in the fight, making it an ongoing engagement with economic and social repercussions that extend far beyond the conflict zone. That raises the direct and indirect political and material costs of the militarily-superior opponent.

That is what Iran is doing in response to the US/Israeli attacks. While it does some counter-force operations against Israeli and forward-positioned US forces, its strategy is also based on counter-value targeting of civilian infrastructure in neighboring Arab countries as well as Israel. That includes key shipping lanes and transportation/logistical hubs. The counter-value targeting is illegal, to be sure. But from the Iranian perspective it is a necessary part of its defensive strategy against the military superiority deployed against it. It cannot win the war on military terms, although it might be able to force a stalemate if the will of the US (and perhaps Israeli) public turns against continuing the war, something particularly significant given that the US holds midterm elections in November.

Raising the economic, social and political costs of the war, including but not limited to oil prices, is one way that the Iranians can compensate for their militarily inferior position. Threatening civilian targets in the Arab oligarchies, along with the threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz, has an adverse ripple effect on tourism, air and sea passenger travel, merchant cargo and air freight prices and supply chain schedules, insurance premiums, and much more. It also sows fear in the populations of states that Iranians target because of their alignment with the US and Israel, even if they do so in a passive way (say, by allowing military overflights and/or forward US basing). That in turn can pose domestic problems for Gulf oligarchies because even if they aren’t democracies and are as closed when it comes to governance as is the revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran, most have significant Shiite minorities living and working in them. Killing the Shiites’ spiritual leader as well as the head of the Islamic State of Iran, Ayatolla Khamenei, does not sit well with his millions of co-religionists, so Iranian attempts to stoke tensions along sectarian lines via kinetic operations on civilian targets inside Sunni Arab territories can be expected as part of its counter-value campaign. In other words, it brings the war home to the Arab oligarchs.

For their part, the US and Israel have engaged in a hybrid or mixed conflict model: they use both counter-force and counter-value strikes as part of their military campaigns. They both emphasise to the public the successes of the former, including the Israeli strike on the compound that killed Khamenei (along with his wife, daughter-in-law and grandson and his son-turned-successor badly wounded). The MAGA administration boasts of destroying dozens of Iranian warships (including a lightly armed frigate that was over 2000 nautical miles from Iranian waters when it was torpedoed off of the coast of Sri Lanka after participating in an Indian-led naval exercise) and aircraft as well as hundreds of land-based military targets (e.g., missile launchers and weapons storage facilities).They are less keen to acknowledge their counter-value strikes, such as the bombing of a girls school that resulted in over 170 deaths (the US says it had dated targeting coordinates for the double Tomahawk missile strikes on the site), a desalination plant and an oil refinery in Tehran, to say nothing of numerous civilian buildings throughout the country. (Incidentally it is against international law to target water supplies and bomb facilities that result in great environmental damage, such as the refinery Tehran).

From the various US statements about why it chose to make war on Iran–first to destroy its nuclear program (supposedly destroyed last year), then eliminate it as the “greatest sponsor of terrorism in the world” (although the 9/11 attackers, al-Qaeda, Taliban and ISIS are overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim and unrelated to Iran and recent mass attacks in the West have been carried out mostly by rightwing extremists), and then to pursue regime change, to now a bit of “all of the above”– it is clear that the hybrid warfare strategy is basically a catch-all assault blanket designed to destroy Iranian society as much as its military and political regime. In other words, it is an attack on the Iranian nation-State, not just those at the top of the bureaucratic ladder (and now subjected to “decapitation” strikes).

Perhaps the US believes that a popular uprising will emerge from the rubble and that someone like the son of the ousted dictator Shah Reza Pahlavi will restore the Peacock Throne. If so and inspire of what Iranian exiles in the West claim about the strength of organised opposition to the Islamic Republic inside and outside of Iran, they are deluded and will be disappointed because the revolutionary regime is resilient, determined, well-prepared for a protracted struggle and very much infiltrated into every aspect of Iranian life. Plus, Persian ethno-nationalism is a very strong ideological bind in Iranian society, so even if the US and Israel attempt to “Balkanise” Iran via the arming and funding of irredentist ethnic groups like the Kurds, it is unlikely that Iranian society will atomise along ethnic lines over the long-term. But if it does, that will only lead to more instability and conflict as primordial divisions spill into modern conflict modalities.

Israel has a different strategic agenda. Convincing the US to join it in its attack on Iran citing “existential” grounds is just part of the larger plan to redraw the map of the Middle East in an image more favorable to Israel. With an accommodation having been reached with its Sunni Arab neighbors on regional security issues (including intelligence-sharing and non-support for an independent Palestinian state), October 7 was the catalyst-precipitant for the move, which has been decades in the making amongst Zionist strategists and intellectuals. Once Hamas gave Netanyahu the excuse–and saved him from his ongoing legal troubles in the process–with its indiscriminate as well as ill-fated assault on Israeli civilians as well as military personnel, the gears were set in motion for a multi-fronted/multi-pronged hybrid war involving conventional and unconventional means (and perhaps nuclear weapons if the desired geopolitical outcomes of the war look increasingly unachievable by conventional means).

US and Israeli war-mongering is also a double “wag the dog” scenario. Netanyahu needed to divert attention from his court case and the costs of occupying Gaza and the West Bank, whereas Trump needed to divert attention from the Epstein files and his unpopular domestic policy agenda. For Israel, destruction of Iran as a nation-state is seen as a way to remove a longer-term existential threat to not only Israel but Jews is general (because Iranian proxies have targeted Jews around the world). This is why the possibility of an Israeli first strike use of nuclear weapons on Iran cannot be discounted. Should the US quit the fight and/or the war bog down and become a Ukrainian-style quagmire, then the resort to nuclear strikes may be put on the table. Given Israel’s record when it comes to international conventions and the Laws of War, that is a worrisome prospect. Given the global community’s record when it comes to stopping aggression and thwarting nuclear weapons first use (even the US refuses to renounce first use strikes and Israel certainly does not), who is going to stop them?

When militarily-superior actors become frustrated by their lack of success in forcing opponent’s capitulation via counter-force targeting, they are tempted to resort to counter-value targeting in order to intimidate and force the opponent’s population into submission. That denies the opponent its support base and cannon fodder in a protracted war scenario. But it also is a type of state terrorism in wartime and as such a war crime. And it often has the opposite effect, as besieged populations abandon short-term internecine enmities in favour of uniting against the common aggressor. Think of it this way: whether the parent’s of the murdered schoolgirls opposed the ayatollahs or not, they all know very well who killed their daughters. It was not Khamenei and they will not forget.

Given that the US has been the most consistently at-war country in the world over the past 60 years and Israel has consistently used counter-value targeting as a social control instrument in occupied Gaza and the West Bank over the same period, both have dark records of moving from counter-force to counter-value operations depending on tactical circumstances, This is more the case for the US, where failures in strategic framing and overly-optimistic reliance on weapons technologies and belief in “effects-based” results have left gaps in short-and medium-term goal-setting and contingency planning. Be it in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran, the US has consequently veered into counter-value operations well beyond the counter-force objectives of its initial rules of engagement. In a sense, the move to counter-value targeting is a sign of the desperation on the part of political and military leaders when their counter-force superiority does not produce the results that they anticipated in the (short) time frames that they hoped for (remember that the US likes its wars short and snappy, much like the video games many of its soldiers played before they joined the kinetic real world).

For Israel, the resort to counter-value targeting pursues both tactical and strategic objectives. At the broadest level, this is what distinguishes Israeli from US military objectives in Iran. It can be argued that there is some legitimacy of the Israeli position in that some of the extreme anti-Semitic statements of Iranian leaders over the last 4 decades have involved threats to eliminate the “Zionist Entity” in its entirety. Clearly that is a poor choice of words when it comes to menacing a nuclear-armed regional rival backed by a declining superpower, but in any event it has given Israel a (largely contrived) justification for its actions along “kill or be killed” lines.

The summary outlook for this war is for it to slow down, widen and become more of a counter-value than a counter-force affair that costs millions in treasure and litres of blood, and eventuate with a status quo that is different at the margins but essentially the same at its core–but all at a far higher price in terms of international stability and global order.

The situation distilled: This war has plenty of background but the immediate reason is that two powerful and malevolent guys and their respective support retinues needed and therefore staged a diversion from their respective personal and political foibles by picking a fight with some other distasteful foreign fellows just because they could.

Others are and will suffer the consequences long after they are gone.

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Media Link: AVFA on the Ruso-Ukrainian conflict and what is to come.

I have not been up to blogging that much as of late for various reasons but continue to do the “A View from Afar” podcast series with Selwyn Manning. This week we reviewed the current status of the Ruso-Ukrainian conflict and explore the broader (economic, diplomatic and longer-term) aspects of it. In short: time is on the Russian side when non-military considerations are factored in, so the Ukrainians have to make the most of the current strategic moment.

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Big Vehicle

The matters I discussed in the previous post to do with reality-adjacent campaigning are about targeting voters with messages they can grok about issues they care about. But empiricism is not much good for deciding a party’s ideological values or for developing policy. Parties made up of committed ideologues remain indispensable for that reason.

As is often pointed out to me, I am not such a person. I have never been a member of a party, nor involved in a campaign, and I have little desire to do either. For some people this means I obviously don’t know what I’m talking about; fair enough. As an analyst, I prefer the outsider’s perspective. I don’t feel any pressure to be loyal to bad ideas or habits, and I try to answer only to the evidence. Ironically, though, there isn’t much hard evidence for the arguments I’m about to make about the medium-term future of the NZ left. Nobody has any. It’s value-judgements all the way down. So my reckons are as good as anyone else’s, right?

“That doctrine of the Little Vehicle of yours will never bring the dead to rebirth; it’s only good enough for a vulgar sort of enlightenment. Now I have the Three Stores of the Buddha’s Law of the Great Vehicle that will raise the dead up to Heaven, deliver sufferers from their torments, and free souls from the eternal coming and going.”
— Bodhisattva Guanyin, Journey to the West

For mine, the major shift from the 2014 election — apart from the unprecedented dominance of the National party — is away from Small Vehicle politics and towards Big Vehicle politics. Only National and NZ First gained modestly. All other parties all failed to meet the threshold or lost support. The destruction of Internet MANA and the failure of a much-improved Conservative party demonstrates that there is no tolerance for insurgency, and the cuts to Labour and the Greens indicates that any confusion or hinted shenanigans will be brutally punished. National can govern alone; it is including ACT, United Future and the Māori Party as a courtesy, and to provide cover. This is Key’s money term. It should be a period of grand political themes and broad gestures, and the left needs to attune itself to this reality: Labour needs to take the responsibility of being a mass movement with broad appeal and capability; a Big Vehicle. The Greens will hopefully get bigger, but I think they will remain a Small Vehicle, appealing to relatively narrow interests, however important they are.

Assuming it doesn’t annihilate itself utterly in the coming weeks, Labour will be the core of any future left-wing government, but the strategies that served it poorly as a substantial party of opposition will be utterly untenable in its diminished state. Throughout most of the past six years, Labour has been the party opposed to National. They haven’t been a party that clearly stands for anything, that projects the sort of self-belief that National, the Greens, and even NZ First does.

Labour therefore needs to re-orient its conduct and messaging to its core values, and those are fundamentally about secure and prosperous jobs for the majority of working people, and those who rely on the state as the provider of last resort. But I am emphatically not calling for a retreat to doctrinaire materialism at the expense of superstructural considerations. The demographic groups that kept Labour alive this election were women (6.6 points higher than men), Māori, and Pasifika, and the party would be insane not to recognise the debt that they owe these voters. Of 11 MPs in whose electorates Labour won the party vote, only one — David Clark — is Pākehā, and in his electorate of Dunedin North Labour got 24 votes more than National. Five (Williams, Mahuta, Sepuloni, Wall, and Whaitiri) are women. The return of Te Tai Hauāuru, Tāmaki Makaurau and especially Te Tai Tokerau to Labour underscores the opportunity that exists to reconnect with Māori.

There will be enormous pressure to begin taking these voters for granted again, and it must be vigorously resisted. As for talk of reaching out to “the base” — a party’s “base” is who votes for it when it is at its lowest. Labour’s base as demonstrated by the 2014 election is comprised largely of working-class women, Māori, and Pasifika. So policy proposals that impact those groups more directly — parental leave, free healthcare, ECE, support for family violence services, social welfare — should not be neglected. By and large, though, these voters will also be motivated by many of the same concerns that speak to anyone else, particularly as the National government’s policies begin to bite. But the party’s appeal must expand well beyond this base into the centre ground. It need not be zero-sum. Labour cannot afford to be caricatured as a party that only cares about those groups, it must be a party that a broad range of people feels like it could vote for — like the party understands their needs, and would act in their interests. The key is framing messages and policies in ways that speaking to the base without alienating the broader public, and to the broader public without excluding the members of these base demographics groups, using separate channels and emphasis where necessary. The key term here is “emphasis”.

The party also has to be smarter and more pragmatic than it has been, especially in social policy. At a minimum, this means an end to opposing Whānau Ora on principle. The new MP for Hauāuru, Adrian Rurawhe, speaking to Radio New Zealand’s Te Ahi Kā on Sunday, has a strong line on this: to not attack the philosophy, to not attack the model, but to attack the implementation of individual schemes. There’s a distinction between cartelised privatisation of service delivery, and self-determination, and a party of Māori aspirations should work, even in opposition, to strengthen and entrench the latter so it can succeed. National has spent six years making policies targeted at Māori, run by Māori and under Māori delivery models politically and culturally acceptable, and has made enormous progress on Treaty claims. Labour must capitalise on these gains. They also provide an opportunity to reach out to the Māori Party, should they survive another term in government and remain viable.

The same imperative also means collaborating with the government on distasteful topics like RMA reform, regional and rural development, and charter schools. The battle over whether these will happen is comprehensively lost; the questions now are how badly are they going to be done, and how much political capital will be wasted in trying to unshit the bed later. Better for Labour to work collaboratively with the government to limit the damage and make the best possible use of the rare opportunity to reform entrenched systems. Let the Greens fight them. Don’t worry! There will be plenty else to oppose.

The Greens are here to stay, and Labour should not be reluctant to bleed some of its liberal-activist support to them, to make up bigger gains elsewhere. This will infuriate many in the activist community, and most everyone on Twitter, but my sense is nearly all of those folks vote Green anyway, and they will be in safe hands. Labour hasn’t been a radical or activist party in recent memory, except for 1984-1990, and we know how that turned out.

There is an opportunity to coordinate and make use of the temperamental differences between the parties, with the Greens taking a more vigorously liberal and activist role against Labour’s moderate incrementalism. The strategy that has been proposed intermittently for ages that Labour should attack the Greens directly is insane — the two parties, while allied, do not and should not substantially share a constituency. Labour, like National, is is a mass movement of the people, and should become more so; the Greens are a transitional insurgent movement seeking to influence the existing mass movements, and they seem intent on continuing in that role.

Of all the Small Vehicles, the Greens are best equipped to thrive in a Big Vehicle-dominant context. New Zealand First will struggle. While Labour should collaborate with the Greens, Labour should contend with NZ First, and aim either to gut it of its voter base or, more plausibly, to drive it towards National where the inevitable contradictions and ideological enmities will probably cause harm to both parties. ACT and United Future are wholly-owned by John Key and are effectively irrelevant.

The worst case for Labour, apart from continuing in the blissful ignorance that nothing is really wrong, would be a retreat into sullen populism, trying to out-Winston Winston or out-Key Key, or chucking the vulnerable passengers overboard so that the ship might float a little higher in the water for those who remain. The party has to have its own identity and its own motive force, and it has rebuild its own constituency. It can be done. I hope they can do it, because we haven’t had an effective Labour party for a long time now, and we really need one.

L

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What is success for Internet MANA?

In the previous two posts I’ve covered the strategic rationales behind the Internet MANA alliance, and how, even if they spend their money very inefficiently, they are still very likely to gain a stronger presence in Parliament. But what does success actually look like for Internet MANA?

This is a complex question to answer because Internet MANA, for all its potential, is a mess of vanity projects existing in a state of ideological and pragmatic tension. But tensions all resolve sooner or later.

Kim Dotcom: Disruption (a change of government, or 10%)
Of all these vanity projects, Kim Dotcom’s is the greatest. It’s hard to imagine a guy who donated $50k to John Banks starting a cyber-utopian radical-left-aligned political vehicle for altruistic reasons, and it seems plain that he means to prevent, by any possible means, his extradition to the USA on copyright infringement and money-laundering charges. This is fair enough from his perspective — he can’t spend his pile in a US prison. NZ is a well-chosen target: a country with a small (therefore shallow, cheaply-manipulated) political system, but, unusually, also possessing a reasonably robust and independent judiciary.

To get his extradition case thrown out, Kim Dotcom needs to change the government, and prevail upon an incoming Minister of Justice that he and his party are great assets to that government.

The likelihood of this is slim, because he has already antagonised Labour, and because the leader of his own party has insisted she will not be led on the matter. Other members of the radical left groups aligned with the party are probably supportive of his ideological aim here, if only due to generalised anti-authoritarianism and anti-Americanism. And the other branch of Kim Dotcom’s game is fame, or notoriety, and if he can put his disruption engine in parliament, he will gain that, and it may provide him strategic cover for other manoeuvres regardless of who is in government.

The other way it could happen is if Internet MANA shocks everyone and polls very high — say, 10% — which would ruin almost everyone’s coalition plans. This is also extremely unlikely, but clearly it is Kim Dotcom’s hope, and it would be the purest sort of success for everyone involved.

Laila Harré: A launch (5%+) or a lifeboat (3%)
Her return to politics with the Greens last year was welcomed, and the conventional wisdom is that her appointment to lead the Internet Party was a strategic coup. I agree. But as I discussed in the first post, the deck is stacked in Te Mana’s favour. It is plausible, if the alliance performs poorly, that Harré would find herself marooned amid the wreckage of the Internet Party as its only MP, or even outside parliament, when the Internet MANA agreement expires six weeks after the election.

There’s a quirk here: Te Mana gets list places 1,3 and 4; Internet Party 2, 5 and 6, after which they alternate. So if they win five seats or fewer, Te Mana MPs will outnumber the Internet Party’s. If they win six or more seats, the numbers are more or less even. This provides a strong incentive for the Internet Party to perform, and also suggests shrewd negotiation by Te Mana.

In the event that the Internet Party bring Harré only into parliament (four seats or fewer), or if Kim Dotcom withdraws his cash and the party structure is no longer found to be self-sustaining, it seems very likely that Harré would join Te Mana formally. While her history in parties of this sort is its own guide, I suspect they would welcome her and it would be a fruitful arrangement: a win, of sorts, both for her and Te Mana.

The Internet Party: A future (7%)
The Internet Party doesn’t really exist. Kim Dotcom exists and Laila Harré exists, but without them it has no motive force. It could acquire such force by gaining a very substantial share of the party vote (7-8%, or 9-10 MPs), half of whom woulf be from the Internet Party, which could possibly — not probably — become self-sustaining. Without Laila Harré’s star power and Kim Dotcom’s money, this is a hard row for Vikram Kumar and the Candidate Idol contestants to hoe.

Te Mana and Hone Harawira: The only way is up
Te Mana’s case is easiest here: everything looks like a win for them. They have one MP facing a strong electorate challenge and polling under 1%, with no money, who is almost universally hated by the political mainstream. Even a mediocre performance of 2-3% would see Annette Sykes and possibly John Minto join Hone Harawira in parliament, which would make for some impressive fireworks. Even if the party then has to fend for itself, as Kim Dotcom’s largesse expires, or he is shipped off overseas, they have been granted a rare opportunity to galvanise the marginal electorate, and that’s better than under any other conceivable scenario.

The Left: It’s complicated
Given Labour’s current posture towards all parties that aren’t Labour, there is no way that Internet MANA benefits the left generally in the immediate term. Many commentators — Phil Quin has a good example at Pundit — have argued that the mere existence of Internet MANA could return John Key with a clean majority and the ability to have his way with Aotearoa in a glorious third term. I think this is pretty plausible. By no means does the left look like winning this election. But Labour has been underperforming for most of the past decade, and it might be that an injection of crazy disruptive ideas from a weird agglomeration of old leftwing radicals and young idealistic crypto-libertarians is what they need to shock them back to their senses.

There remains the slight possibility that they will bring enough MPs into parliament to make a chaotic and unholy alliance of the left a just slightly less-bad alternative to the Golden Age of John Key. As an aside: the better the Greens do, the better for Internet MANA post-election; and if nothing else they should hopefully form a strong ideological and generational counterpoint to New Zealand First, which I fear starts to fancy itself as the UKIP of the South Seas.

Aotearoa as a whole
I think New Zealand is better off having this argument than not. Much of what Internet MANA stands for has been unduly marginalised and is due consideration; especially the emergent aspects, such as with regard to modern standards of surveillance, the relationship and competing loyalties of the state to the citizenry and to its international community, and to the comparatively trivial matter of copyright. These debates feed into the notions of sovereignty and the primacy of people, rather than corporations and institutions, which mobilise Te Mana, and there are significant areas of ideological overlap, such as the flagship Internet Party policies of free tertiary education, withdrawal from the TPPA, severe constraints on the GCSB and other security and intelligence services, and — less popular with Hone Harawira than with his voters — the decriminalisation of marijuana. These are debates worth having, and we will be better off for having had them, whether the major parties want to or not.

L

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The hazards of MMP

David Cunliffe’s apparently-rash pledge to scrap the coat-tail rule that permits a party with less than 5% of the party vote to bring in additional MPs as long as it wins an electorate within 100 days turns out to not be quite so bold: it looks as if they simply intend to introduce Iain Lees-Galloway’s member’s bill — currently before Parliament — enacting (most of) the recommendations of the Electoral Commission as government legislation. That isn’t bad. It initially seemed as if he intended to ram through just this one cherry-picked rule under urgency, and some of us overreacted to it. There are still problems with the plan, but they are more complex.

Anyway, the episode throws light upon a lot of the tradeoffs and subtleties inherent in MMP — the major one of which is whether proportionality or equity in the distribution of proportionality is more crucial.

What MMP is good for
MMP is a rather ugly, instrumental system for balancing the expressed wishes of fickle and often arbitrary voters with regard to an volatile and rather shallow pool of political talent against the need for stability. It is not a means by which to determine moral merit, as trial-by-political-combat FPP claims to be, and nor is it a route to the mutually-least-bad choice, as in STV and related systems. It is what it is.

What it is not is an elegant expression of noble political aims. I guess this is why traditionalists dislike it viscerally: it feels kinda shabby, but it works.

“Rorts” and electorate-level match-fixing
So with that last point in mind, Danyl has said it best: the game is the game. Its job is not to look nice, it’s to deliver representative parliaments. I don’t much like it, but the utility of the kind of strategy in play in Epsom is obvious, so fair enough — as I said before the 2011 election, “If the electorate won’t punish them for doing so they’d be rude not to.”

Two things to add. The first is that the electorate clearly isn’t inclined to punish the ACT and UnitedFuture parties, at least not locally, because in the solitude of a cardboard booth, orange marker in hand, self-interest tends to overcome ethical compunctions. But the appeal to such compunctions is still the only way to reduce the viability of the “rorts”, so it is natural that those opposed will try to jawbone those compunctions. Patrick Gower is leading the charge here — although he, too, has been consistent in his derangement about this topic since before the 2011 election.

Second, the agreement between the Internet and Mana parties where Hone Harawira’s seat in Te Tai Tokerau will, they hope, bring in Internet party votes and list MPs is emphatically not of the same type as Epsom and ÅŒhariu, where major parties throw the electorate to exploit the coat-tail rule. Nobody is throwing anything in Te Tai Tokerau — in fact, it seems likely to be one of the most strongly-contested electorates in the country, a fact which is causing conniptions in some quarters. While the electoral outcome will look similar to the undiscerning eye, the Internet MANA deal is different — smaller parties allying to overcome structural barriers to their participation in democracy. Not only is it not only not a rort, it is perfectly just and rational behaviour in the face of an iniquitous system.

Consensus and timing of law changes
In general there should be consensus in changes to electoral law. But I agree with Rob Salmond that “should” is not the same as “must” — the object is to be sure that changes will be generally popular, and will be durable, and in this case an independent commission and the deep consultation that occurred during and after the referendum strongly suggests that implementing the recommendations via the Lees-Galloway bill will be both those things.

But timing matters: now that Internet MANA has declared its hand and chosen to take advantage of the coat-tail rule in a similar way as ACT and UnitedFuture, it would be unjust to change the rule immediately before the election. Depending on how things play, it might still be unjust to change the rule without further consultation after the election, because it may be that people see in the Internet MANA a new way to challenge the entrenched parties (I plan on writing more about this if I get time). For this reason it is good that John Key has ruled out supporting the Lees-Galloway bill.

Proportionality versus equity
All that having been said, I favour scrapping the coat-tail rule. Even though, as Graeme Edgeler has explained, it increases proportionality rather than decreasing it, mitigating the effect of the 5% threshold that kept New Zealand First, with 4.07% of the party vote, out of Parliament in 2008. The trouble is that it increases proportionality selectively rather than equitably — that is, among minor parties who are willing and able to become the vassals of larger parties — as Gower said in 2011 “It’s finally official: John Key owns the ACT Party.” Proportionality in an instrumental system is not an intrinsic good that automatically trumps other considerations. Process does matter. But outcomes matter too.

Political clientism in an instrumental system is not so much morally or ethically wrong as it tends to degrade representativeness, and delivers huge benefits to the strongest parties — who have the ability to burn political capital to take advantage of these sorts of relationships — in ways other parties cannot. So while you get the appearance of more diverse representation, the effect is more that the liege party gets to offload political risk and responsibility to its vassals. The clearest case of the present government is the charter school policy that, had National passed it of its own volition, would have endangered Key’s moderate reputation. ACT’s presence in parliament — even without deputy leader Catherine Isaac, who was outrageously granted the sinecure implementing the charter schools plan — gave the government cover to implement policy they wanted, but which was too politically risky.

Self-interest dressed as principle
So to an extent the proposal from Labour is sour-grapery from a political middle power that is neither big enough to be able to benefit from the coat-tail rule, nor small enough to potentially need it. For all their posturing about the integrity of the system, I am sure they would use it if they could get away with it (as they did in Coromandel in 1999), but they can’t. They have no potential clients, so they have no need for the coat-tail rule. The Greens, secure above the threshold, don’t need them for this, and they (correctly, in my view) regard Internet MANA as too radical for such a relationship. The retreat to electorate nostalgia is also strategic positioning from a party that has seen the resentment that exists towards list MPs, and has pledged to re-take the provinces and rebuild its electorate network.

National’s refusal to implement the findings of the commission also come clearly down to self-interest. They are so far the major beneficiaries of the coat-tail provisions, having used their two vassal parties to good effect through both terms of their government.

Ultimately while both the major parties’ positions are self-interested, Labour comes closest to the right conclusion: that the iniquity of the coat-tail rule’s additional proportionality is a greater cost than the additional representation gained by it is worth. The best cure for the problem is to cut the party vote threshold — to 1/120th of the party vote, or a “full seat”, which would obviate the coat-tail rule. Scrapping the coat-tail rule is a rather distant second-best outcome, but doing that as well as cutting the threshold to 4% as recommended by the commission seems like the sort of compromise with which nobody will be totally happy, but which will endure.

Because functionality is what matters, not perfection.

L

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Crossing: the flaw

This evening the GCSB Amendment Bill passed its third reading in Parliament, 61-59, despite a desperate last-minute campaign to persuade selected government MPs to cross the floor and vote against the bill.

I’m sure everyone involved would accept it was a long shot, a last-ditch effort after every other challenge had failed. But it shares some faults with the remainder of the campaign, and the left’s political strategy more generally, which has been marked by a lack of coherence and internal consistency, poor targeting, and seemingly more at shoring up support among activists than in extending that support.

Motivation

The merits of the GCSB issue were thoroughly thrashed out — the main problem is that it is an extremely complex topic about which few people have the expertise to make authoritative claims. Nevertheless, many of those people have made such statements, and the evidence is out there. This has been the strongest aspect of the “Stop the GCSB Bill” campaign more generally: its appeal to evidence.

But this was not a topic upon which government MPs were amenable to evidence. If they had been, they would surely have been swayed by testimony from the Law Society, the Human Rights Commission, and defence, security and IT experts including the former head of the GCSB itself. They were not moved by these appeals to evidence; not even slightly. They simply hold a different opinion on the merits of the GCSB Bill, one that happens to not be supported by the aforementioned experts (no doubt the PM provided another set of experts who gave them a counterview).

This is fundamentally because their motivation for passing the bill is ideological, not policy-oriented. National governments are strong on security. Whether they are or not, it’s part of their brand. They keep people safe, both at the day-to-day criminal level and at the level of transnational crime and terrorism. They are simply not willing to let some liberal bed-wetters prevent them from implementing a security system that better suits their petit-authoritarian worldview.

Hardening

Calls to cross the floor arose mainly from the left-liberal activist community. The biggest problem with calling on your ideological foes to cross the floor is that they’re your ideological foes. If they cared about what you thought, they wouldn’t be your foes, and they very likely would be amenable to changing their views based on the evidence, or at least to moderating them and cooperating.

But this is war. Not war on terrorism; war on the liberals, who are the real strategic threat to this government, and are ascendant in New Zealand’s left following the success of marriage equality, the continuing strength of the Greens, relative to Labour. In a war, when your enemies offer to parley, it is a sign of weakness, and nobody could mistake left-wing activists begging the Minister of Justice for a vote to sink a key plank of her government’s legislative agenda as anything other than a sign of desperation. In a war, when your enemies offer to parley, you only accept if you can’t crush them, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women. Hard ideological power is rarely vulnerable to moral suasion.

Trying to persuade individual MPs to betray their cause from a position of such ideological and strategic isolation was never likely to have any effect other than to harden their resolve, and to increase pressure on them from within their party to toe the line. In particular, given the vitriol to which certain MPs — notably Peter Dunne, hilariously regarded as being the most likely to switch — have been subjected in recent months, a sudden switch to flattery and appeals to better nature was simply incoherent and too jarring to be credible. Even a dog, if mistreated, will bite when petted. The fact that so much abuse continued even after the charm offensive began made it doubly ineffective.

In many ways this was a concentrated version of the overall strategy of moral and evidence-based persuasion: because support for the bill has been framed in a partisan way, there’s little point in convincing your own side. The task is to convince people who, for the most part, like John Key and trust his government that they are neither likeable nor trustworthy. It’s a hard thing to do — but doubly hard when your cause gets occupied by the Occupy movement, a point that Pablo made in one of his many excellent posts on this topic recently.

Target selection

Nine MPs were selected. Not to say that there were any actually good targets, but the selections misunderstand each MP’s place within the government machine.

The most obviously-idiotic target was Judith Collins, the Minister of Justice and probably the toughest authoritarian in government, including Key himself. Converting her was simply never a happening thing. National party newcomers Paul Foster-Bell and Claudette Hauiti were almost as laughable, given that their political careers exist only at the pleasure of the party.

Peter Dunne was probably the best target six months ago, except that he has since been subject to the greatest amount of vitriol over this issue. His relationship with the government has also been weakened recently, a bond he needed to renew, which he has.

John Banks, although personally of a nature similar to Collins, is vulnerable to his party machine which could possibly have been talked around — but the activist left thinks of him (and it) as being beyond liberal redemption, in spite of his voting in favour of marriage equality.

The others (Sam Lotu-Iiga, Melissa Lee, Jami-Lee Ross, and Nicky Wagner), were no worse than anyone else in the party.

Who do you love?

The only thing that gives a non-delusional Prime Minister in this data-driven age the sort of swagger John Key has is the knowledge that the polls are solid. There have been a few public polls: Research NZ; ONE News/Colmar Brunton; 3 News/Reid Research and most recently Fairfax/Ipsos.

Campbell Live’s unscientific, self-selecting plebiscite is barely worth a mention. So of these polls, only the last gives anything like a picture of an electorate that is closely engaged with this issue; it tells us three-quarters of New Zealanders do care about the GCSB Bill. But 75% on its own means nothing. Polls told us that 80% of the electorate opposed asset sales, and look how that worked out. This poll also tells us how much they care, and the answer is: only 30% are very concerned, and 25% aren’t concerned at all. More than half trust the government to “protect their right to privacy while maintaining national security”.

Key and his government will have much better polling than this, and broken down by party allegiance, too, and that’s important — Key would be perfectly happy to alienate 30%, or even 40% of the population as long as they’re all committed Labour and Green voters, and more than half overall still basically trust him. Key said people were more interested in snapper quotas than the GCSB bill, and he’s probably right — if you read that as “people who might actually vote for him.”

What was the performance in aid of?

The major effect of this campaign was to give the activist community something to believe in, a sense that they were Doing Something, rather than just sitting there while their freedoms got gutted. It was very much attuned towards focusing existing opposition, rather than towards expanding that opposition. (This was true to a lesser extent of the public meetings and mass rallies, which effectively church services, but these did also have an important role in disseminating evidence and bringing the discourse into the mass media).

The effect has been clear: there has been no effect. While opinion polling for the left has picked up in the last few days, it remains to be seen whether this will persist.

Although this one was poorly-executed I also don’t think a “cross the floor” campaign was necessarily a bad idea. Theatre matters. Morale matters. For all the criticism, there are many positives here. One is that people have gotten angry — even if it’s only a relatively small cadre of activists, that’s something we haven’t really seen much of recently. And there are some signs the discord may spread further (though not much further, as yet).

But while Do Something campaigns can be worthy in terms of making people feel better about losing, that is often all they are good for. They are often not very effective in terms of actually winning. This campaign worked well as a salve, but as far as effectiveness goes it was badly framed and focused on the wrong objective. It was both too partisan to draw in broad support from across the ideological spectrum, and then, later (once its ideological hostility was confirmed) began to treat the government as only a semi-hostile force that might be reasoned with. A less-ideological campaign to begin with, hardening into a more rigorous strategy as it became clear that the government would remain intransigent would likely have been more effective if it could have been stitched together (admittedly a big if).

Further, focusing on the bill’s passage was unrealistic. It was a fair enough interim goal, but more realistic is to focus on the repeal of the bill — now act — when Labour and the Greens are next in government, and to use it as a lever to assist them into government. Good progress has been made towards this as well, especially in securing what seems to be solid assurances of repeal from Labour, whose prior form on civil liberties has been very mixed.

What remains to be seen is if those involved can maintain momentum for another year. If they can, and this kicks off a 14-month campaign season, then it will have been a triumph, in spite of its tactical failure.

L