XIV. Criticality in the Iranian-Israel Confrontation

"Criticality"--the state of being organized to work at maximum capacity, right on the edge of collapse--is a concept that may
help us to avoid the collapse of countries into the chaos of war.

The conventional perspective focuses on addressing the symptom – the avalanche. Popular Soviet Bloc frustrations were unheard in the West until quiet East German self-organization in churches reached criticality, and people spilled out onto the streets in defiance of authority. Islamic frustrations were unheard in the West until decades of self-organization by fundamentalists brought them to the stage of attacking the U.S. mainland.

The complexity perspective reveals the build-up of pressures to the point where a slight push can cause an avalanche. Intuitively, the explosion of East Germans onto the streets and of fundamentalists into global terrorism seem to be examples of movements reaching criticality: somehow the East Germans and Islamic fundamentalists reached the point where they would put up with no more pressure, and a minor push caused a major avalanche. The trick is to avoid the push by dealing with the pressures.

Complexity theory typically speaks of the unified concept of "self-organized criticality:" self-organization that proceeds to the point of criticality at which point "the interactions tie far-away parts of the system together [so that] only a holistic description…will do." (Per Bak, "Self-Organized Criticality: A Holistic View of Nature," in Cowan, Complexity, 480) One aims to balance organization at the maximum sustainable point, but there is of course no requirement that the process of self-organization cease when reaching the state of criticality (i.e., the edge of the cliff). What happens when a society miscalculates is the subject of Tainter’s and Diamond’s books on the collapse of civilizations (Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, and Jared Diamond, Collapse).
The closer a system gets to criticality, the more "avalanches"—in social terms, protests—will occur. In physical systems, we find numerous examples of a "scale-free" distribution of events. Were this pattern found to occur in social systems, then we might view a lot of mild social protest (demonstrations, strikes) and a smaller number of violent protests and predict from that the eventual occurrence of one extraordinary terrorist attack. Research is called for.

Has the Islamic world now approached criticality as numerous variables (frustration with economic deprivation and lack of status in the world and loss of oil and corruption and mistreatment; rising awareness and ability to organize) interact and intensify? Does that explain widespread violence by small groups from London to Bali? If so, that hints at why we see few 9/11-scale events; in an arena characterized by a scale-free distribution, there will always be far more small ones. It also, however, in no way implies that another large-scale event might not occur soon – there is no implication that high magnitude events need be evenly distributed over time. If so, it also suggests that the protests neither begin nor end with al Qua’ida.

Israeli-Iranian relations are currently dangerously close to criticality: a slight mistake or provocation could produce calamity, after which the reverberations might echo through the system for decades. But this is not the only road to disaster. "Nuclear Standoff" could also evolve into a "hair-trigger" confrontation. The classic historical example of criticality was Europe on the eve of WWI. Since criticality tends to be invisible (earthquakes and avalanches are only visible after they happen) and disastrous, alerting decision makers to the possibility and, if possible, to evidence that one is approaching such a state constitutes one of the most important potential contributions scenarios that integrate the complexity perspective.

Chaos in the enemy camp may sound momentarily like victory, but that is a dangerous game in today’s interconnected world. If the trillion-odd dollar cost of the US invasion of Iraq were added to the price of whatever Iraqi oil the U.S. ends up getting, one would quickly see the price was rather high…and that’s without adding in the cost of the terrorism provoked by the invasion that is highly likely one day soon to explode outside Iraq’s borders. An Israeli attack on Iran would be likely either to cement the control of hardliners in both countries (a calculation they are no doubt counting on) or lead to chaos – hence the scenario title "Victory for al Qua’ida."

Criticality as it may apply to social systems is very poorly researched. These comments are intended as a argument that a sufficient intuitive match exists to justify serious study of the degree to which this concept may help us prepare for the social avalanches that today constitute such costly surprises.

XIII. Sensitivity to Initial Conditions in Iranian-Israeli Relations

The individual variation described in the last post in this series has huge potential significance because slight changes in initial conditions related to an individual can much later lead to fundamental changes in system behavior. Not only do our actions affect our opponents’ behavior but even slight actions on our part may ultimately have major impacts on the behavior of others. Thoughtful people intuitively sneer at hubris; this is the theoretical justification for such sneers.

Sensitivity to initial conditions explains how current conditions are likely to lead to widely divergent future possibilities: rather than waking up to find the world changed, it is more likely that slight variations in initial conditions will lead to a slow shift in the dominance of underlying causal dynamics. The first step on the road from "Victory for al Qua’ida," which so strikingly resembles current trends, to "Respect" might be as simple as ignoring a hostile comment by some Iranian politician and responding positively to a conciliatory comment by another Iranian politician. Small steps incrementally modify perceptions and lead to large cumulative changes in the behavior of an actor. These small steps can also start a trend:

Once a terrorist gang gets away with a few car bombings, then car bombings become all the rage among wanna-be infamous thugs everywhere;

Once a few irresponsible leaders get away with loose talk about voluntarily igniting nuclear war as a rational policy option, then power-hungry extremists everywhere lose their moral inhibitions.

XII. Individual Variation & the Future of the Iranian-Israeli Confrontation

Further thoughts on complex adaptive systems as a tool for
futurology in world politics...

The conventional perspective is that certain groups behave in a certain way. A group is judged "ready" or "not ready" for independence or democracy—without even considering the impact on the group’s behavior of, say, the colonial power that is repressing it. Members of a group are judged to be "terrorists" or "fundamentalists" or "imperialists" without regard for their personal behavior.

According to the complexity perspective, it is not enough to say that everything is connected by a complex set of interlinked dynamics that generate a multitude of tipping points shifting behavior in one direction or another. Reality is further complicated by individual variation, which means that you very well may not be able to simplify by averaging over all members of a group. This emphasis on individual variation is one of the fundamental distinctions between system dynamics, discussed in the earlier section of this study on dynamics, and complex adaptive systems. According to the complexity perspective, not only is the nature of a group not immutable (because all groups evolve in response to the behavior of other groups), but even at a moment in time, all group members are not cut from the same cloth. All characterizations of groups are false.

To say that "all characterizations of groups are false" is clearly an extreme statement…and intended to be taken as a theoretical guideline. The point is to caution against the vastly more common opposite generalization, by which a whole group is indicted as being "X" without regard for individual variation. It is not hard to find examples of actions taken in this spirit. So complexity theory provides the invaluable warning that one should make the default assumption that individual variation exists until discovering differently, rather than falling into the trap of simplistically acting as though "they" are all the same. One’s new view of the world will naturally be more complicated…but also more realistic. One will be sensitized to search for attitudinal and behavioral variations that one would previously have assumed to be nonexistent. We all know of certain roads where, in the fog, it pays to assume that potholes exist and drive accordingly.

When it comes to social groups, the assumption of (at least potential) individual variation raises all sorts of possibilities a skilled actor can exploit.

Since it is utterly obvious when you think about it that assuming
individual variation exists can open doors to gaining advantage, it is
curious why even experienced foreign policy practitioners so commonly
act as though individual variation not only does not exist but cannot be
provoked into existence.

Take, for example, the Iranian armed forces (Pasdaran, frequently called, in a questionable translation, "Revolutionary Guards"). The Iranian armed forces are reputed to do a couple things that "normal" armies presumably do not do: manage huge sectors of the national economy (including control over significant trade and manufacturing affairs) and conduct foreign covert operations. It is not hard to imagine that the generals whose careers focus on trade or manufacturing might have very different concerns (e.g., international stability so they can get access to the desired foreign goods) from the generals whose careers focus on carrying out covert operations (e.g., international instability that can be exploited politically to get permission and resources for more covert operations). This is an empirical question, which may or may not be true at any given point in time. But for a foreign country to make a policy toward the Pasdaran as a whole without first trying very hard to ascertain the truth of this hypothesis would be rash indeed and might well cement the unity of a potentially split organization.

The role of individual variation in the very brief scenarios in this study is far more muted than it would probably be in actual history, but even here, individual variation raises its head.

• "Respect" depends on a single creative and courageous Israeli leader’s willingness to stand out from the crowd.
• "Victory for al Qua’ida" also contains elements of individual variation, where the Iranian elite is seen as composed of individuals all along a continuum from moderation to extremism and posits that foreign threat will empower the extremists.

A different type of individual variation (not variation among individuals but variation by a single individual) was discussed in the section on "interdependence of parts." The point of itemizing a long list of different goals Ahmedinejad probably has in making extreme anti-Israeli statements is precisely that the relative importance of these goals can be assumed to vary in response to conditions, so a skillful reaction might alter his behavior even though he might well never consciously renounce any of his original goals.

Future posts will continue this discussion of how the concepts of complexity theory can be applied to the Iranian-Israeli confrontation and to international relations in general.

Part XI. Nonlinearity & Predictability in Iranian-Israeli Relations

Continuing the study of how the Iranian-Israeli confrontation may
evolve...

The conventional perspective is frequently to plan for a repeat of the last war; only slightly better, it may be to plan for continuation of current trends. Even worse, it may be to plan for continuation of one of several current trends – an arbitrarily selected trend that exists among many, a trend selected because one finds it beneficial rather than because it has any particular predictive power.

Complexity theory and system dynamics are both bearers of bad news: the disproportionality of effects to causes will undermine all efforts at planning. According to system dynamics, variables, trends interact. Under one set of conditions, a trend can vanish, under another set it can explode. Small causes can have huge consequences or no consequences; it depends. Complexity theory would have no argument with this, but would add several more layers, as suggested by the earlier discussions of adaptation and criticality.

The practical impact for foreign policy planning is that nonlinearity is an ever-present threat to prediction and understanding of world affairs. Nonlinearity pervades almost every imaginable scenario for the future of Israeli-Iranian relations:

Members of the Israeli elite call for nuclear strikes on Iran because certain Iranian politicians made insulting remarks; in response partly, perhaps to the war of words and partly, perhaps, to Israeli attacks in Gaza, Hezballah attacks an Israeli army squad on the Lebanese border, and in response to that Israel launches a campaign of ethnic cleansing that drives one million Shi’a out of southern Lebanon.

With responses this far out of proportion to causes, how can anyone predict the future? And although the above story reads like a bad Hollywood movie, it is not one of the scenarios in this study or even the creation of a drunken imagination: it happened last summer.

Nonlinearity also pervades the scenarios generated in this study of the future of the Iranian-Israeli confrontation.

• In "Mideast Bipolarity," grudging Israeli acceptance of Iran as a regional power transforms both Iran and Israel into moderate states.
• In "Respect," initial, low-keyed Israeli verbal concessions evolve into Mideast peace.
• In "Victory for al Qua’ida," short-sighted playing of the zero-sum game evolves into Mideast war.

Huge consequences from small initial conditions.

Can decision makers be taught to think before they leap?

Of course it is not necessary to study complex adaptive systems in order to realize that trends can be nonlinear. But in practice decisionmakers frequently do not foresee the likelihood that minor resentment will explode into full-scale insurgency or that simmering resentment will bring down a government. Complexity helps illuminate the processes by which this perplexing and seldom anticipated nonlinearity takes place: the adaptation of interdependent parts, the self-organization to the edge of criticality, the sensitivity to initial conditions. If complexity theory holds the answer to the future, we do not yet know it. However, knowing that disproportional effects will certainly occur is better than naively assuming tomorrow’s weather will be just like today’s.

Iraqi War "Progress???" - You Be the Judge

Now that certain of our elected representatives in Washington are contemplating launching a new war with Iran, might it be worth thinking for a moment about whether or not we are making progress with our two long-standing wars (in Iraq and Afghanistan)?

One could certainly discuss what would constitute valid indicators of progress, but certainly the level of U.S. forces deaths is one relevant measure. The graph below shows monthly totals for U.S. troop fatalities in Iraq between January and August of 2006 and 2007. Note that the totals are higher every month this year than the comparable month last year. Other indicators will be added in the future. Thanks to Juan Cole for suggesting this graph. Those who wish to make use of it, be my guest.

Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam

The brilliant “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam” bumper sticker, which has been around since the beginning of the American war on Iraq five long years ago, got it right. Details about Iraq and Vietnam of course differ, but arguments over the details miss the point. Of course, Vietnam is (well, pre-agent orange, was) green; Iraq is brown. Vietnam’s insurgents were Marxist-Leninist; Iraq’s are many things (secular Sunnis, fundamentalist Shi’a, various stripes of patriot, and now all manner of outsiders to boot) but hardly Marxist-Leninists...

Iraq is Vietnam (and, for that matter, Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation) for broad, basic reasons that cannot be wished away by hairsplitting:

1. a local conflict enflamed by superpower intervention;
2. superpower involvement by the most in-your-face means - a huge superpower army (some 200-300,000 U.S. soldiers including U.S. mercenaries in Iraq);
3. heavy-handed behavior by the superpower’s soldiers, including frequent killing of the civilians they supposedly went there to protect;
4. superpower emphasis on military victory in a battle actually about the quality of governance;
5. superpower intervention for its own reasons, not to help the locals – justified as preserving freedom (Vietnam), bringing modernization (Afghanistan), eliminating nuclear weapons and later bringing democracy or stopping an insurgency that was a result of the invasion (Iraq) but in reality much more about stopping China (Vietnam), inoculating Soviet Central Asia against the Islamic virus (Afghanistan), and a combination of controlling oil and strengthening Israel (Iraq);
6. destruction of the liberal middle--because empowering liberal, patriotic moderates means truly giving control to the natives--and thus leaving the battlefield to extremists.

But most of all, Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam—and Afghanistan--because in all three cases, the superpower assumed it had the right to smash down the front door and enter another man’s house without permission. Is there, with the benefit of hindsight, persuasive evidence that in any of these cases the superpower in fact had such moral superiority or wisdom as to justify that assumption? If the answer to that question is anything less than a slam dunk, then the American public deserves a policy alternative so on election day it can make a choice.

The alternative to the war policy is not to salami-slice the number of troops, the amount of time they spend on the street, the level of criticism of the puppet regime, the particular forms of torture to be inflicted upon locals convicted of no crime. The alternative to the war policy is not to continue the war policy by fomenting a coup. The alternative to the war policy is not to remove the official U.S. Armed Forces but leave the (now perhaps 100,000?) mercenaries. The alternative is not to remove the men but leave under U.S. control the several permanent military bases.

The alternative to the war policy is a peace policy; the alternative is to confess that:

• we were wrong to go in;
• we are there under false pretenses;
• our presence led to the mess that resulted;
• we do not have the wisdom to manage the solution and our presence is indeed preventing resolution, so we must leave and do what we can from a distance--and frequently through others--to make amends.

That would be an alternative policy on which a candidate could run an electoral campaign that would mean something.

Part X. Self-Organization in the Iranian-Israeli Confrontation

On the significance of the complex systems notion of self-organization
for the Iranian-Israeli confrontation…

According to the conventional perspective, when a system is broken, say by regime change or military defeat in the case of a country, it ceases functioning.

The complexity perspective, however, offers an alternative possibility – that the broken pieces will self-organize. This does not exactly mean that they will reconstitute themselves but create some, most likely novel, structure and start functioning again…perhaps for a very different purpose. Outsiders watching the process are likely to find this process surprising, but it is not. After all, the original system may have arisen in any number of ways and may have been under the conscious influence of a very different set of actors. Indeed, the old system that just collapsed was almost certainly controlled by a different set of actors than whatever new system that subsequently self-organizes (a landed aristocracy replaced by the middle class or whatever), so quite naturally the new system will take on new purposes.

This trait of complex systems would not apply to a shattered, helpless population in a situation of utter chaos because such a population would no longer constitute a complex system. But a population of still connected people, even after military defeat, might retain sufficient complexity to self-organize in the absence of central controls and transform into something very different. Indeed, precisely this seems to have occurred in post-invasion Iraq with the formation of a resistance movement composed of a multitude of highly adaptive insurgent groups exhibiting a complicated combination of independence and interdependence.

The message of self-organization is particularly pertinent to "Victory for al Qua’ida," a scenario leading to "preventive" Israeli aggression that could be expected to unleash numerous contradictory forces:

• The self-organization of interdependent Shi’ite resistance/revenge networks, which would be facilitated by the porous Mideast borders and tight personal ties among Mideastern Shi’ite elites;
• The self-organization of an Iranian nationalist movement;
• Efforts by al Qua’ida (in itself apparently now more of a self-organizing network than a tightly controlled hierarchical organization) to take advantage of both the above trends.

Precisely because these efforts would be self-organizing (assuming in this scenario the elimination of the regime), the degree of cooperation among Shi’ite fundamentalists, Iranian nationalists, and al Qua’ida proponents of a war vs. the U.S. would not be predictable.

Research Question: Given that the destruction of a complex system may
provoke the self-organization of some new system, how is one to think through in
advance the various ways in which such a new system might be likely to organize
itself?

This lack of predictability of a complex system resulting from its ability to self-organize from the bottom up, in defiance of those who plan to manipulate it constitutes a critically important warning for external opponents planning an attack and dreaming of an easy victory.

Part IX. Co-Evolution in the Iranian-Israeli Confrontation

Continuing the exploration of how the concepts of complex
adaptive systems may help us understand world politics in general and the Iranian-Israeli confrontation in particular…

The conventional perspective denies that “we” can be influenced by the enemy.

The complexity perspective sees actors adapting to respond not only to others but to their perceptions of how others will adapt. According to this perspective, one should assume ceteris parabis that all components of a system will adapt, as discussed in the previous post.

In world politics, a component could be not just a country but also a sub-national organization at whatever level down to an individual. A given component may not adapt, at least over some finite time period, perhaps because leaders put great effort into designing it in a hierarchical fashion precisely so it will resist adaptation. Such resistance to adaptation may or may not be healthy for the organization, as I have discussed here.

Given that all components of (or actors in) a system will, in principle, adapt, it is an easy extension to the concept of “co-evolution:” my adaptation provokes your adaptation, which in turn provokes…

Israeli foreign policy toward Iran is designed today to deal with a nuclear-armed Iran that is willing to use those weapons not just to prevent war or to defend itself in war but for offensive purposes. Israeli foreign policy thus rests on a whole cascade of unproven assertions. It might be worth weighing the possibility that Iran will in fact ceteris parabis turn out as predicted by this “mental model” against the possibility that Israeli policy will prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as Iran becomes increasingly willing to develop and use nuclear weapons precisely because it is threatened with them. Co-evolution guided by a biased model of the opponent can amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Research Question: Are there principles in complexity theory that might help students of world politics determine the conditions
under which biased perceptions of the opponent could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Co-evolution pervades the scenarios. Iran and Israel may continue co-evolving down the path of confrontation, as suggested by “Victory to al Qua’ida,” or may shift and co-evolve down on of several paths of conciliation, as imagined by the other three scenarios. Even the “Equilibrium” scenario, in which “nothing changes,” will probably see a zig-zag process of shot-term co-evolution first in one direction, then another.

Hostility by one side is likely to provoke hostility on the other side, and perhaps conciliation would do the same. This raises the question of how a co-evolutionary process toward rising hostility could possibly shift in the opposition direction and become a co-evolutionary process toward rising cooperation. Useful research could be done on the conditions for transforming an undesired co-evolutionary process into a more beneficial process.

Part VIII. Adaptation in the Iranian-Israeli Confrontation

Continuing the discussion of how the concepts of complexity theory can facilitate our understanding of the Iranian-Israeli confrontation…

If the conventional perspective in foreign affairs defaults to be "us vs. them," the complexity perspective begins by assuming that we are all part of an adaptive system. Win, lose, or draw—according to this perspective—we are tied to the opponent. Consequently, the fight will change us.

A contemporary example of ominous import is the way American society and attitudes toward international law and basic morality appear to be undergoing transformation as the result of the blatant public acceptance and indeed trumpeting by the Bush Administration and its neo-con fellow-travelers of the notion of "preventive war." This rising "acceptability" of the idea of an unprovoked (at least by any remotely comparable provocation) U.S. nuclear attack as a morally legitimate policy option against a non-nuclear state or even a group of private individuals (!)—now advocated even by some Democratic officials—further underscores the impression of a transformation in American moral attitudes. Regardless of the outcome of the particular wars of the Bush administration, acceptance of such justification for limitless aggression appears to be transforming American society into something less caring and less idealistic than the myth of American exceptionalism we so cherish.

From a complexity perspective, this degeneration is comprehensible: everything is connected, and the behavior of all system components (both ourselves and the opponents with whom we are linked) causes us—and them—to adapt. So whereas the conventional perspective simply starts by looking for "survival" or "victory," the complexity perspective accepts that adaptation will occur and thus starts by searching for a strategy that will facilitate adaptation in a desired direction. The conventional perspective enables decision-makers very easily to completely overlook this issue…and thus time after time snatch defeat from the jaws of victory because they make the naïve assumption that the act of pursuing and achieving battlefield victory will not change anything else.

Complexity theory certainly does not predict the outcome of specific issues, but it does caution us to raise critical questions. Put in the context of international relations, complexity theory leads to such questions as:

• If total victory requires changing into a garrison state, might a democratic society prefer a compromise that would enable retention of civil liberties?
• In an adaptive system, a simple white hates-vs.-black hats battle cannot occur; each side will adapt. What adaptation might we provoke to transform our opponent into something less distasteful…and with what (possibly beneficial) affect on ourselves?

A country that launches unprovoked nuclear war vs. a non-nuclear country will change itself in ways that may be very fundamental and unpleasant to contemplate.

Fear, horror, will also change observers – some will reluctantly kneel and hope for escape, others will take great risks to find a way to resist, but all will know the stakes are immeasurably raised and the level of international trust weakened.

Complexity theory does not tell us the result but can predict a period of disequilibrium as changes reverberate through the system. It therefore warns us to contemplate the implications of that disequilibrium before we provoke its occurrence.

Adaptation will, for example, work very differently under "Mideast Bipolarity" than under "Victory for al Qua’ida." Occurrence of the former scenario will reinforce, rather than undermine, international cooperative norms and put pressure on both Iranian and Israeli elites to adopt a more cooperative stance. A virtuous cycle will ensue in which compromise on one issue generates mutual benefit and thus predisposes actors to compromise on another issue – precisely the reverse of the vicious cycle of rising hostility that will occur under "Victory for al Qua’ida."

Discussing the collapse of societies, Tainter has pointed out that adaptation occurs at different spatiotemporal scales. What we define as a system is somewhat arbitrary. A system is a collection of distinct but connected modules; in reality systems are frequently hierarchies of systems: the international political system an aggregation of countries (and international corporations, international movements, NGOs), the countries in turn aggregations of provinces or departments, which are aggregations of individuals. At all levels units adapt because they interact with other units as well as because they consist of aggregations of units that are interacting and adapting. Since the various units interact at different temporal scales and over differing spatial distribution, opportunities for "crashes" are numerous, like a fog-bound highway on which some cars not only change lanes rapidly at the same time that other cars change lanes very slowly but on which cars may occupy either small or extremely large spaces.

How teenage Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan will behave over the next 20 years is one example of a dynamic with both unpredictable spatial and temporal scales that will impinge directly on Israeli-Iranian relations. How will they adapt to losing their country and living on the margins of a society that cannot afford to care for them? Will they return to Iraq as nationalists, as radicals, as middle-class businessmen in the years after U.S. troops have gone home? Will they join the Lebanese Moslem Brotherhood and shift power in Jordan from the monarchy to Islamic activism? Will it be the refugee generation or their children taking action? What influence over the answer will Israeli treatment of Palestine have? Will their behavior tempt or pressure Iran to engage in risky behavior it might otherwise have avoided?

The spatial arena in which Iraqi teenage refugees and the new generation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon (the 400,000 still in Lebanon 25 years after Israel invaded to push them out) will make their impact is highly questionable. Given the traditional cultural ties and current political ties connecting Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Egypt, today’s refugees in one country may well become tomorrow’s activists in another. Ten percent of Lebanon’s population and 25% (and rapidly rising) of Jordan’s are refugees with plenty of reasons to refuse allegiance to the regime that governs (or ignores) them.

The process of adaptation—both the adaptation of one side in reaction to the other and in reaction to its own behavior—is deceptively subtle. If the application of complexity theory to foreign policy issues does no more than alter us to think about how adaptation occurs in a political system, it will have been well worth the effort.

Part VII. The Iranian-Israeli Confrontation as a Complex Adaptive System

Complexity: How It Happens

In order to understand how the Iranian-Israeli confrontation may evolve, we need to dig deeper than scenarios, deeper even that the underlying dynamics that cause system behavior, and study the Iranian-Israeli political relationship as a complex adaptive system. Several principles of complexity theory are relevant to the evolution of the Iranian-Israeli political system:

• Interdependence of parts
• Adaptation
• Co-evolution
• Effects Disproportional to Causes
• Self-organization
• Individual variation
• Sensitivity to initial conditions
• Criticality
• Emergence.
  
  
  Rising education and technical advances such as the Internet, among other factors, have produced so many global interconnections that we need to master this new perspective on international political reality in order correctly to interpret the rush of daily events. The next several posts will introduce each of these concepts, which have in the last 20 years become common terms among physical and biological scientists, and offer some initial thoughts on how to apply them to the Iranian-Israeli confrontation and, by extension, to global affairs more broadly.
  
  
  
  Interdependence of Parts
  When pushed, we may all recognize that everything has at least some influence in world affairs on everything else, but typically most people assume their own country has a fixed nature independent of the rest of the world. Most people also all too easily slip into the assumption that all parts of a foreign country share a set of defining characteristics. As though, say, nurses, criminals, and politicians from the land of an ally shared one set of traits while nurses, criminals, and politicians from the land of our enemy of the moment shared another set – an obviously idiotic premise since our list of enemies mutates rapidly. (Saddam was closely supported by Washington in the 1980’s, we have alternatively supported and deserted the Kurds, our attitude toward Russians changed overnight when the Soviet Union collapsed, Iran a generation ago was a close ally, etc.)
  
  Complexity theory’s concept of interdependent parts sets a different baseline: unless you happen to have specific evidence to the contrary for a given case, assume all components in a class are the same. From this premise, it then follows automatically that:
  
• Diplomats will be inclined to negotiate;
• Politicians will be inclined to tune their messages to their audience (so one needs to know the intended audience in order to interpret the message);
• People in general have security concerns, tend to give themselves the benefit of the doubt, and see opponents in a negative light (e.g., "my" weapons are for defense, "yours" are for offense).

Second, the complexity perspective assumes that all components (regardless of class) influence each other, i.e., their natures are constantly evolving. (The many unresolved analytical challenges here include identification of the nature of the links, what governs the link intensity and reaction speed, how influences operate.) If all components—individual voters, interest groups, regimes, etc.—influence each other so that all are adapting in response to the behavior of others, then it becomes difficult to argue that these endlessly and unpredictably evolving components have immutable natures.

Once having accepted the complexity perspective, it becomes much easier to entertain a perhaps complicated but relatively realistic set of possibilities. In the case of Ahmadinejad’s firery rhetoric, for example, the following explanations are probably all true:

• By such rhetoric, Ahmadinejad is attempting to enhance his standing among Iranian voters;
• By such rhetoric, Ahmedinejad is putting his peers in the elite on the defensive;
• By such rhetoric, Ahmedinejad is making a global name for himself and his country as an independent actor to which global leaders must pay attention;
• By such rhetoric, Ahmedinejad ischallenging the Arab world to accept him as their leader, as the new Nasser, the one man with the courage to stand up and defend the downtroden of South Lebanon, Palestine, and, by extension, the rest of the region;
• By such rhetoric, Ahmedinejad is representing the views of the Iranian radical faction, which genuinely believes that injustice in the Mideast exists, is the fault of Israel and the U.S., and deserves to be addressed;
• By such rhetoric, Ahmedinejad is inviting the U.S. and Israel, both of which he probably perceives as only understanding the language of strength, to modify their behavior.

Where a traditional perspective will say, "Ahmedinejad’s rhetoric means X" (e.g., he intends to destroy Israel), the complexity perspective cautions one to avoid such childishly simplistic one-to-one equations. In fact, the equation is more nearly:

R = ∑(XiW…XjW)

Rhetoric = the sum of all Ahmedinejad’s different goals times the importance or weight (W) of that goal at the moment

It should be noted that theoretically the weight is also an attribute that is sensitive to adaptive pressures, i.e., is constantly evolving in response to the behavior of the various components. (In practice, a decision-maker might conceivably be so strong-willed that he could resist some pressures for some period of time, but complexity theory argues that we should assume, ceteris parabis, constant goal-evolution.) In brief, the relative importance of each goal depends on conditions and is therefore subject to the influence of all actors in the system.

Thus, the complexity perspective opens an infinite number of doors to those who want to have influence. A complex adaptive system has many components (e.g., ministries, corporations); many goals (e.g., security, profit, freedom, status); many links (meetings, phone calls, payments, rhetoric, treaties); many link types (e.g., cultural, legal, diplomatic, financial). All of these are adapting, so all constitute potential points of influence. That is the practical value of understanding the world as a complex adaptive system: everything is in principle changeable. Nothing is absolute, nothing is immutable. Nothing is "on" or "off;" everything is "more" or "less." Therefore, alternatives to extremist, black-and-white decisions are always available. This reasoning is fundamental to the "Respect" scenario.

Since the focus here is on Iranian-Israeli relations, it is useful to think of three linked complex systems – Mideast politics as a whole plus the two subordinate Iranian and Israeli political systems. All the parts of the Mideast system adapt in reaction to the behavior of the others even as distinct adaptive processes take place in Iran and Israel. Each of the many components (e.g., Majlis [parliament] and Basij [youth militia analogous to the Red Guards in China's Cultural Revolution] in Iran; the various political parties and the army in Israel) will have its own perspective.

The interdependence of parts also underscores that each actor functions within a set of constraints. Every terrorist attack on Israel makes it more difficult for Israeli democracy advocates to dismantle the Israeli apartheid system. Every threat of Israeli nuclear aggression on Iran endangers Iranian advocates of an opening to the West. Perceptions of other actors, behavior of other actors, and constraints each affect one’s own behavior. Causality is hard to determine, blame almost always shared, and the impact of interventions unpredictable.