Distracted Drivers

I try to pick subjects where I can either provide new (or at least not well known) information or a different perspective.  The bulk of this post will be rehash but I do have something new to add.  It's down at the bottom.

There is a computer term:  multitasking.  Over time the term has moved beyond its initial use only in a purely computer context to now frequently being applied more broadly.  As we will eventually see, it now applies even to the subject at hand.  But let's start with it in its original context.  Old computers were really slow compared to their modern counterparts.  But there was still a problem.  Generally speaking data would be pulled into RAM and processed.  It was then spit back out, typically in a new form.  But where was it pulled from or pushed to?

The old technical term was "peripheral devices", gadgets that were connected up to the "computer" part of the computer.  For modern computers these might be a disk drive, network card, etc.  Or they could be a human interface device; something like a keyboard, mouse, or touch screen.  Consider for a moment a keyboard.  A good typist is capable of typing 60 words per minute.  That's one word per second.  And, for the purposes of measuring these sort of things, a "word" was 5 characters and a space.  So in our example the computer would expect to see a new character every sixth of a second. 

But even a very slow computer can perform a million instructions (computations) per second.  This means that the computer can perform over 150,000 instructions while waiting for the next character to appear.  You ought to be able to do something useful with 150,000 instructions so it seems like a waste for the computer to sit around idly doing nothing useful while it waits for the next character to come in.  The solution was to have the computer work on two or more things "at once".  That way it could beaver away on problem #2 while waiting for the next character aimed at problem #1.

Now pretty much every peripheral device can handle data faster than a keyboard.  But the above example illustrates the problem.  And early computers were fantastically expensive.  They cost several millions of dollars each.  Wasting even a little computer time amounted to wasting a lot of money.  So various techniques were devised to allow the computer to have multiple tasks available and to be able to quickly switch from one task to another.

Most of the time any one particular problem (or task) is waiting for some I/O (Input/Output - a read or a write) operation to complete before it can continue on with the job at hand (executing instructions).  This "fill in the otherwise idle time with useful work" idea is the driving force behind many of the early networking efforts.  If several terminals are hooked up to the same computer then the computer can switch from working on the task associated with one terminal to working on the task associated with another terminal whenever the first task is hung up waiting for I/O to complete.

So the benefit was obvious.  Multitasking could keep the computer busy doing useful work more of the time.  But there was a cost.  In the very early days of computers RAM was very hard to make and, therefore, expensive.  A reasonable amount of RAM might cost a million dollars so every effort was made to keep RAM requirements to a minimum.  You needed a lot of RAM to have enough to keep the critical pieces of several tasks (say one for each terminal) resident in RAM at the same time.  But the price of RAM dropped and the cost of getting enough RAM to enable multitasking soon became manageable.  But there was another cost.

The computer doesn't really do multiple things at once, or at least computers couldn't in the old days.  So a piece of software called a "task switcher" was necessary.  This software kept track of all the tasks currently loaded into RAM.  It also kept track of what "state" each was in.  A task could be "running" or "waiting to run", or "waiting for a specific I/O request to complete" (the most common state).  The running task would go along until it needed to perform an I/O operation.  Then it would turn things over to the task switcher.  The task switcher would schedule the I/O, put the task to sleep, then look around for another task that was waiting to run.  If it found one it would wake that task up and turn things over to it.

It turns out that it takes the execution of a lot of computer instructions to do a task switch.  I have skipped over a lot of detail so you'll just have to take my word for it.  The modern "task switch" process eats up a lot of instructions doing its job.  So what's the point?  The point is that these instructions are not available for use by running tasks.  An old and slow computer from my past would often dedicate up to 45% of all instruction executions to task switch and other overhead processes.  If without task switching you can only keep the computer busy 10% or 20% of the time this overhead is a good thing but it is still expensive.

And that cost associated with multitasking applies to other contexts like people.  Most young people multitask all the time.  They might be sitting in class and simultaneously monitoring Twitter feeds and updating Facebook posts.  They are doing the same thing computers do.  They devote a small slice of their attention to one thing, say the lecture.  But then they quickly switch to focusing on their Twitter feed, but again not for long.  Because they almost immediately switch to the Facebook post they are creating.

If you ask them they will say that what is happening is something akin to what happened on computers in the olden days.  They are able to task switch quickly enough and often enough, and efficiently enough that their net productivity goes up.  The problem is that everyone who has actually studied the net productivity of multitasking people finds that their net productivity goes down, sometimes by a lot.  They think they are doing multiple things well at the same time.  But the studies show that they are actually doing multiple things badly at the same time.  So how does all this apply to driving?

It turns out that it is directly on point.  This same model of trying to do multiple things at the same time means you do them all badly.  And you especially drive badly.  People think they can task switch quickly enough and efficiently enough that nothing important happens on the road in the small time their focus is away from driving.  But every study says they are wrong.

And it turns out that there is a model for what is going on, driving drunk.  Drunk drivers aren't multitasking.  But they are doing the same thing multitaskers do.  They fail to sufficiently focus on their driving.  In the drunk driver's case their mind tends to wander.  They are not switching from one productive task to another.  They are switching from a productive task to a non-productive one, effectively day dreaming.  This behavior pattern and its impact on driving was recognized decades ago and the response has been Mothers Against Drunk Driving.  An emphasis on getting drunks off the road has cut down on crashes.

But with the advent of the cell phone things changed.  You didn't have to be drunk to drive badly.  If you were switching your focus between the road and your phone the results could be similar to driving drunk.  Lots of drunk drivers believe they can drive well while drunk.  Similarly, lots of cell phone users believe they can drive well while using their phone.  And it turns out that to some extent they are right.  What?

Put simply, there are times when driving requires laser focus and times it doesn't.  If you are driving on a straight road in good weather and there is no one else on the road driving does not require much intellectual effort.  On the other hand, let's say there is a lot of other traffic on the road.  And the speed of the traffic changes drastically and frequently.  And say your sight lines are impaired (or the weather is bad) so that things can "come out of nowhere"; a driver pulling out of a parking space, a pedestrian hopping between cars outside of a crossing zone; a bicyclist cutting in and out of traffic.  Then driving requires a great deal of attention and it requires it pretty much continuously.

The basic question to ask is "how many decisions per second need to be made".  Coupled with this are "how much time is there for the decision" and "how many items must be factored into the decision".  If the number of decisions per second is low and the amount of time permitted for decision making is long and the number of items is small then a great deal of "free time" is available without a significant diminution in your quality of driving.

Looked at this way we can see why the first scenario is easy.  Few decisions per second are required as not much is going on.  The good sight lines mean that there is a relatively long time within which to make the decision.  And few factors, perhaps one or two, need to be allowed for.  This results in few decisions needing to be made and not much effort being required to reach the correct decision and implement it.  And what this means is that in this situation a lot of time can be spent with your focus away from driving without risking any harmful consequences.  With a little discipline a cell phone conversation can safely take place under these conditions.

And also looked at this way we can see why the second scenario is hard.  This scenario involves a much higher potential decision rate.  And that's really the same as a high decision rate.  Deciding there is nothing that needs to be done right now is a special kind of decision.  And there are a lot of moving pieces to monitor.  The car in front is not far away (there is a car in front because there is a lot of traffic and it's not far away also because there is a lot of traffic) so it needs to be carefully and continuously monitored.  If it's a multilane road then cars in the other lanes need to be monitored for potential lane changes.  Blind spots need to be monitored for the unexpected.  And if something changes a decision needs to be made and acted upon quickly.  And it is possible, even probable, that several things will change at approximately the same time.  So the decision may not be a simple "slow down"/"speed up" decision.  Perhaps a swerve needs to also be thrown in so it's complex.

In the first situation if we are switching our focus from driving to the cell phone for short periods of time we will probably still be ok.  Something may have changed while our attention was away.  But the change will be simple and we should still have plenty of time in which to decide what to do and to do it.  In the second scenario the chances that something will go wrong while our focus is elsewhere is much greater.  In this environment the time and effort to task switch away from something else and back to driving is a luxury we can't afford.

I think that if we are being honest all of us would agree that talking on the phone while driving is a bad idea.  But a lot of us think we can get away with because we are good at task switching and we will be careful and only do in at "appropriate" (situation 1) times.  But people usually give themselves too much credit in these situations.  Let's move on.

The "fix" to the above situation is to only permit talking on the phone while driving only if we are using a "hands free" device.  There is something to this but not much.  The hand's free device allows us to keep our hands on the wheel and our eyes on the road.  This is an improvement but not much of one.  The decision to allow hands free cell phone use was a political one that was based on no scientific research.  The broad  availability of blue tooth hands free devices meant that many cell phone users had already gone hands free.  The industry could see sales of hands free accessories increasing so they decided to go along.  But the benefits of hands free are small.

The problem that hands free does not solve is the focus problem.  Where is your attention focused?  Theoretically hands free makes switching focus back to the road quicker.  But lots of people drive one handed so the fact that you are using one hand to hold the phone to your ear rather than doing something else with it doesn't really change things.  And it is easy to talk into a hand held phone while keeping your eyes on the road.  So there is no real difference during the conversation part of cell phone use.  Hands free plus voice activation does help with dialing and hanging up but that's only a small portion of a typical call.  In the end there is very little difference between hands on and hands free.

The discussion of talking while driving started when cell phones became common.  But a couple of generations of phones later a new threat arose:  texting while driving.  You pretty much need to look at the device and use both hands to text.  This removes your focus, your hands, and your eyes from where they are supposed to be.  It also means that the length of time you spend with your focus switched away from driving is much longer.  It require more of your brain to text than it does to talk and it takes longer to type a phrase than say it even if you are using all the cute texting shortcuts.  That means there is a much longer continuous interval where you are not monitoring the driving environment.  This is worse, much worse, and the statistics bear this out.  Texting while driving is way more dangerous than talking while driving.  And unfortunately there is a significant population that thinks they can get away with doing it anyhow.  They are a danger to us all.

So far I have mostly covered ground that everyone is familiar with.  Okay, I might have thrown is some computer stuff that is unfamiliar to most of us.  But for the most part people have gotten to the same conclusion I have by one means or another.  So where's the original content?  Coming right up.

I bought a new car about six months ago.  I purposely got a car with all the new "electronic assist" goodies.  I wanted a backup camera.  I wanted a blind spot monitor.  My car came with those and lots of other goodies.  If the road has decent lane markers my car will warn me if I start to drift across the lane markings without first putting on my turn signal.  It also has a alert that warns me that I might not have noticed the car in front of me slowing down.  It has another alert that warns me that the car in front of me has started moving and I haven't.  It has a bunch of more alerts too but I think you get the idea.

My old car was a 'mid-price 99.  It had some gadgets on it but nothing like what my new car has.  You could set my old car so the head lights stayed on for a while after you exited the car.  It had a compass built into the rear view mirror and cruise control.  That was pretty fancy for the time.  But my new car leaves all those old gadgets in the dust.  My new car has an "automatic" setting on the headlights.  They turn on and off automatically based on how much daylight  there is.  And, of course, it automatically delays shutting the headlights off when you exit the car.  My new car has a deluxe cruise control system and a full up navigation system to compliment the compass in the rear view mirror.  I'm not trying to brag here.  There are lots of other cars that come equipped with a similar (or perhaps an even more extensive) set of gadgets.  I am just pointing out that my new car has gadget after gadget after gadget.  And it's not just the sheer number of gadgets.  Each individual gadget is much more complex.

Let me give you an example.  I now leave my headlights set on  "automatic".  But once the setting got changed without my noticing it.  So now I'm driving around in the dark without my headlights on.  After a while I figured that out.  But now the headlight control is surrounded by a bunch of other controls.  So there is no way I am going to be able to fix the problem and drive at the same time.  Once I got where I was going I turned the cabin light on and spent about thirty seconds getting the setting fixed.  But while I was doing this I accidently turned the high beams on.  Again it took me a while to figure this out.  But that led to the "how do I turn the high beams off" problem.  I am so used to everything on my new car working differently than it did on my old car that the obvious solution of doing the same thing I would have done on my old car literally did not occur to me.  Someone had to suggest it to me and you'll be happy to know it worked fine.

I want to make two points.  First of all my new car is regularly alerting me to something or another.  Some of these are wonderful.  It will alert me to cross traffic when I am backing out of a parking slot.  With my old car I often couldn't see a thing until I was in the middle of the street.  By the time I was far enough out of the slot to see it was too late.  The crash would have already happened.  With my new car I get an alert, frequently before I have even started backing up.  The alert tells me when the traffic has finished passing by and I can back out safely.  So that alert is all to the good.

With the other alerts some of them are more of a mixed bag.  With the stopping alert I am most likely on top of what is going on.  I just want to start stopping a little later than the car does.  The car, for good reason, is quite conservative about when it thinks I should start to slow down.  Remember, it needs time to warn me, decide I am not going to heed its warning, and after that still have time to slow the car down on its own.  With the starting alert what's usually happening is I can see something (i.e. a pedestrian) that the car doesn't so there is a good reason why I haven't immediately imitated the car in front of me.  And so on.  The point is that my car now fairly frequently makes some noise that breaks my concentration and thus interferes with my focus.  So that's one thing.

The other thing is illustrated by the head light story.  Things that used to be simple to do are now often much more complicated.  A couple of weeks ago I was using the navigation system to get me home from an unfamiliar location.  The trip involved two parts.  The first part was "get from the starting point to the freeway".  For that part the navigation system was invaluable.  It did a great job of navigating me along a complicated path on unfamiliar streets.  But once I was on the freeway I no longer needed or wanted the navigation system.  All I wanted to do was turn it off.  But that is not a simple process.

It involved using a touch screen.  That involved taking my eyes (and one hand) away from their driving tasks and working my way through the process, all while driving in such a way that I did not run off the road or crash into anybody.  It turned out that what I did didn't turn it completely off.  I just put it to sleep.  So twenty minutes later it woke up and started alerting me to the fact that I should not take an exit that I already knew not to take.  So I had to fiddle with it some more to get it actually turned off.  And again it was important to not drive off the road nor crash into anybody.

I'm sure I will get better at this sort of thing as time goes by and I get more familiar with all these new gadgets.  And I'm sure that some of my fellow drivers thought I was nuts while I was distracted dealing with my navigation system.  But then we all see people doing nutty things on the road all the time now.  Why?  Because they are on the phone or texting or whatever.  In any case no one thought what I was doing merited a honk so I guess my behavior fell into the range of what now passes for relatively normal driving.

So my new contribution to the subject is to be the first to identify a new source of distraction that drivers can be subjected to:  new cars with a lot of electronic gadgets.  With my old car I was pretty much on my own.  I knew it and acted accordingly.  I didn't expect the car to be of much help but on the other hand the car did not routinely engage in distracting behavior.  And you could do simple things like turn the headlights on or change the channel on the radio without having to take your focus off of driving for longer than a brief moment.

With new cars things are quite different.  The car will routinely engage in distracting behavior.  Sometimes this is a totally good thing.  I love being distracted by a cross traffic alert when I am backing out of a parking stall.  In other cases the advantage is less clear cut.  Most but not all of the time the car is alerting me to a situation I am already aware of.  If I am already aware of it then it is a needless distraction that did not exist before the advent of modern "driver assist" electronics.  And I can't get a car with the long list of goodies my new car has without also getting a car that has much more complicated controls than cars like my old one.

And its not just me.  A few months ago Tesla put out an update to the software on their model S.  The update provided an extremely sophisticated cruise control.  You could take your hands completely off the wheel for long periods of time.  The car would automatically compensate for traffic conditions.  It would read the speed limit signs along the side of the road and act accordingly.  It would even change lanes if that seemed appropriate.  Way cool, right?  Apparently too cool.  Almost immediately Tesla released a new download that dialed way back on how much the car would do on its own.  Apparently It wasn't quite as ready for prime time as Tesla thought.

Finally, let me fold a "robot car" update in here.  Back when my old car was new we had a simple situation.  The driver drove the car with little or nothing in the way of intelligent assistance from the car.  That put the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the driver.  Once we get to robot cars we will again be in a simple situation.  Then the driving responsibility will be squarely on the shoulders of the car.  Where we are now is some kind of a middle zone.  Driving responsibility rests primarily with the driver.  But the car is making a significant contribution.  This makes the situation more complicated than either pure extreme.  And, as the Tesla experience demonstrates, navigating this middle ground is not going to be 100% smooth sailing.

And the general public has already picked up on this.  Surveys show that a large majority of people are not ready for a completely robotic car yet.  People definitely want a person to be able to take control back from the "robot" any time they feel the need.  That means it is going to be a while before there are cars on the market that do not include a steering wheel, brake pedal, etc..  As far as I can determine the Tesla problem resulted in a few scares but no actual accidents.  Tesla rightly dialed things back as soon as problems became apparent.  And I expect that is how things are going to continue to evolve for some time.

Development of robot cars is proceeding apace.  There are now multiple well funded groups with access to deep pools of technical expertise actively working on the problem.  It won't be long before someone finds a way to get robot cars into the hands of ordinary consumers.  And this will happen in the very near future (2020 or sooner).  Then consumers will be in a position to make an informed decision.  From Frankenstein to Jurassic World, all of us have long been exposed to "technology gone horribly wrong" themed movies.  The public is very attuned to the possibility that robot cars will somehow go horribly wrong.  So people want to take it slow for now, and with good reason.  But once ordinary consumers get their hands on these cars they will either work well in the real world or they won't.  I think before long they will work and work well.  At that point the situation will switch from movie plot to real world experience.  At that point I expect public to quickly become comfortable sharing the road with robot cars.  Time will tell.

Game of Houses

This post is actually one where I revisit a subject and check in to see how things are going.  In this case the post I am revisiting is http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/09/isis-do-something-stupid-now.html, one I made a little over a year ago.  (I'll explain the title of this post shortly.)  That post started out focusing on ISIS (or ISIL, or Daesh - the controversy over which title is the one that should be used continues to rage).  Then it pulled back to encompass a bigger chunk of the middle east.

So where does the title for this post come from?  It is a major component in an epic fantasy series called "The Wheel of Time" by Robert Jordan.  The meaning is the same as "The Game of Thrones", which comes from the epic fantasy series penned by George R. R. Martin.  The same thing was long referred to as "The Great Game" by the British.  Many have called it "Power Politics"  These are all different names for the same thing.  You have a number of players.  They are all jockeying between themselves.  They employ political and military strategies to achieve their objectives.  And their objectives are increased power and influence relative to the other players.  What's currently going on in the middle east is best understood as a many player Game of Houses where the players for the most part are countries both near and far.

And have I mentioned that George R. R. Martin based his series on the Thirty Years War, a real event from European history.  One of the defining characteristics of this "game" is that there is no end to it.  There is never an ultimate winner although there can be ultimate losers.  The game just keeps going on.  One player maneuvers and gains influence at the expense of one or more other players, at least for a while.  Then they slip or trip or are subject to a piece of bad luck, and their position deteriorates relative to the position of other players, again at least for a while.

No player ever achieves complete dominance and it is rare for a player to be completely destroyed.  This is because players often move to balance things.  A player who is up too far is knocked down.  A player who is down too far is propped up.  You don't want to let anyone else, even an ally, get too powerful and a former enemy may make a good ally in the next round.

Europe played this game for centuries.  The Thirty Years War was just one move in a game that looked like it would go on forever.  There was the Hundred Years War, the Battle of This, the War of That.  It went on and on and on.  First this country (the players are usually but not exclusively countries) is up.  Then it falls back and for a while another country is up.  And so it goes.  In the case of Europe it went on until World War I came along.  World War I was so costly in terms of blood and treasure that the traditional players fell into two groups.

There were the groups that were completely destroyed like Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, The Ottoman Empire, etc. Then there were the groups that were merely severely damaged like The United Kingdom, France, and Germany.  Going into World War I all three of them successfully operated overseas colonial empires.  Germany's was the biggest apparent loser as its colonial empire was dismantled after the war.  The UK and France seemingly fared better but after the War both found it difficult to find the resources to properly operate their old empires.  They kept things together more or less until World War II came along.  This second blow to their power, both financially and militarily, meant that neither colonial empire was able to last long.   The big winners coming out of World War I were the non-players like the US and Japan.  Both had been substantially excluded from the European version of The Game of Houses.

In my previous post I started by drilling down on ISIS and then pulled back for a broader view.  I will get back to my Game of Houses perspective later but first let's see how well my previous post stands up.  The answer is "pretty well".  I got a few things wrong but they were minor.  The big problem is a common one.  I assumed events would move faster than they actually have.  In other words, I did not lean heavily enough on my Game of Houses perspective.  On to specifics.

I questioned whether ISIS (I'm going to stick with this name for clarity) was actually unstoppable, a characteristic frequently attributed to them at the time.  They are now clearly stoppable.  In fact, they have lost territory between posts.  Have they dried up and gone away?  No!

The tensions and rifts caused by the way the boundaries of various countries in the area were drawn has increased.  And a number of those old boundaries no longer have any practical meaning.  But so far no boundaries have been officially redrawn.

Since then the position of the Kurds has strengthened.  They now control territory in what was Iraq and what was Syria.  The Kurds see the territory they control as a single unified country.  But their position has not strengthened enough for them to break away officially from either Syria or Iraq.  So while they have de facto control they do not have de jure (formally recognized) control.  And their very success has worried Turkey enough that Turkey has launched a number of attacks on majority Kurdish areas inside Turkey and has made it harder on the Kurds operating in the territory that used to be part of Iraq or Syria.

This shift by Turkey is one of a number of shifts.  Iraq has replaced al Maliki with Haider al-Abadi.  He has backed off on Sunni persecution.  Iraqi supported forces, now at least partly composed of Sunnis, have made some military gains but progress has been slow, expensive, and painful.

The situation on the ground in Syria has changed in detail but the general picture has remained the same.  There are still lots of factions fighting each other.  Al-Assad is still holding on along the coast.  He is now backed by both Iran and Russia and looks to be able to hold on indefinitely. 

Finally, one thing that has not changed is that there is still no well organized moderate Sunni opposition to ISIS.  In summary, we have a standard Game of Houses situation.  Factions rise and fall but there are no permanent winners.  Instead the churn goes on.  So let's review the current roster of players. And, be warned, there are so many of them I might leave some out.

Iraq has somewhat stabilized.  There is a big piece missing, roughly Anbar province.  But it has been missing since shortly after ISIS emerged.  There is also a smaller missing chunk that is, and since roughly the ouster of Saddam, has been administered autonomously by the Kurds.  This is not an official split but it is a split in practice.  The remainder of Iraq is heavily Shia (most of the other groups were killed or expelled during the US occupation that followed "Mission Accomplished") and is now exporting a lot of oil so it is in good shape financially.  Officially, Iraq's boundaries are the same as they were before 2003 but it seems unlikely to me that it will ever get much of the "disputed areas" back.  We are on the path to partition but we are still some distance away from official recognition of this.

Syria is still the scene of heavy fighting.  Who is winning in this area or that has changed somewhat.  This is mostly due to changes on how much outside support this group or that group gets.  It is not at all clear who will ultimately prevail.  Nor is a clear winner likely to emerge for several years yet.  In addition to a core area that Assad's people continue to control, there is a core Sunni area that ISIS has now maintained uncontested control of for well over a year.  And the Kurds have their own core area.  But that still leaves a large part of Syria that is being actively fought over.

Turkey has shifted somewhat.  They were mostly keeping hands off in Syria and looking the other way as long as the Kurds seemed focused on Syrian and Iraqi territory.  But they have decided that the Kurds are now too big for their britches and have gone back to bombing traditional Kurdish areas within Turkey.  They are also less willing to ignore what the Kurds are up to across the border.  And have I mentioned that they shot down a Russian military plane?  They have decided for whatever reason to pick a fight with the Russians.  These are all classic Game of Houses balancing moves.

Iran has seen its situation improve.  It has been supporting Assad and he has been holding on.  They have been supporting Iraq and Iraq has been doing ok.  Iran has traditionally made mischief in other places like Lebanon.  The news doesn't cover this sort of thing (one story at a time) but the impression I get is that they have dialed back somewhat in these other areas due to the need to focus on Iraq and Syria.  The recently ratified nuclear deal should also help their economy and their general standing in the world.  If they think this "world citizen in good standing" approach is working they may dial back considerably on their support for insurgent groups.

The Israelis and the Palestinians have been suffering from a lack of world media (and other) attention but this mostly seems like same old same old.  The only difference is that the outside players that traditionally backed one side or the other have been distracted by other conflicts.  This has taken some getting used to by both the Israelis and the Palestinians and it remains unclear as to what they are going to do about it.  The eminently sensible idea of settling their differences seems to be off the table on both sides so it's pretty much stalemate.

One country where things look primed for a major change is with Saudi Arabia.  Oil prices have been cut in half over the last year or so.  That means that the Saudis are running giant budget deficits.  They are still several years away from running out of money but if oil prices stay low for four or five years they are in big trouble.  They had a succession a year or so ago and the new guy is feeling his beans.  So Saudi Arabia got directly involved in the war in Yemen.  Iran is involved on the other side.  So the traditional match up between the defender of all things Shiite (Iran) and the defender of all things Sunni (Saudi Arabia) is now playing out directly in Yemen.  So far it is mostly a stalemate, which is bad for Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has yet to play the role they should be playing with respect to ISIS.  Bombing can hurt ISIS but it can't destroy them.  What's needed is boots on the ground.  I argued, I think persuasively, in the previous piece that US (or European) boots on the ground would be a mistake.  The obvious alternative is Sunni boots on the ground.  But remember these need to be "moderate" boots on the ground.  And the moderate champion is, drum roll, Saudi Arabia.  Except they make a terrible moderate champion.  Go back and reread what I wrote in the previous piece on Wahhabi-ism.  That's the official version of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia.

The next problem is population.  Most Muslims, and there are over a billion of them, are Sunnis.  So in general there are lots of Sunni Muslims around.  Just pick out a bunch of moderate ones, train them up, and send them in.  If you are Saudi Arabia the obvious first place to start is from within your own population.  But the population of Saudi Arabia is tiny.  And what population there is has been brought up Wahhabi, not exactly moderate.  So okay, go somewhere else.

How about Egypt?  Big population, check.  Sunni, check.  Political stability, oops.  The same thing is true of Libya.  The suppression of the Arab Spring movement by, among others, the leaders of Saudi Arabia has resulted in there being nowhere to go for moderate Arab Sunni Muslims.  There are lots of moderate Sunni Muslims in places like Indonesia but they are not Arabs and not interested in getting involved.  The countries that should contain lots of available moderate Arab Sunni Muslims are all in turmoil (Egypt, Libya) or places so close to being in turmoil (Jordan) that their governments are not in a position to contribute any troops.  Saudi Arabia has put together a Sunni coalition to oppose ISIS.  But for the reasons I have outlined above it is a completely paper effort so far.  So Saudi Arabia is MIA for the most part in Syria.

Finally, there is the US (and to some extent Europe).  There is a lot of "do something stupid" rhetoric being slung around here.  President Obama is trying to play a long game and not do stupid things.  He is not getting much help and support in his endeavor.  This is in spite of the fact that he is actually one of the most successful players in the region.  He has two giant triumphs.  He got chemical weapons out of Syria and has eliminated the nuclear bomb program in Iran.  Imagine inserting either into the present conflict.  Either would turn the horror up to eleven.  It is bad enough now with hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced.  With either chemical or nuclear weapons it could be worse, a lot worse.

One of the keys to the Game of Houses is to keep the stakes manageable.  In the middle ages kings used to raise an army and then march off to war somewhere.  One of the tricks was to have the war somewhere else.  That way most of the death and destruction was visited on some other country.  Poland used to be one of those "nice place to have a war" places.  Nobody from somewhere else cared how much death and destruction was heaped on the heads of Polish peasants.  So what if a king lost a few soldiers or knights as killed and wounded.  Everybody knows these are dangerous professions.  In the mean time he knows he is not risking his neck or his job.  Even if he looses things in his kingdom will continue on with little or no change.  And if he wins there's the loot and the glory.

And that's what is going on in the middle east.  Sure it's hard on the people who live there.  But the US and Turkey and Russia and etc. can afford the resources they are pouring into the area.  And since most of the death and destruction is being visited on the middle eastern locals that is not a cost borne by Americans (or Turks or Russians or etc.) so it is easy to pretend that it is not our (or their - as in Turkey's, etc.) problem.  The Europeans are dealing with a massive onslaught of refugees but that beats heck out of having a war going on in your country.

We get all up in arms about a few people getting shot or blown up on the domestic front when these deaths are somehow connected to the Game of Houses going on in the middle east.  But this is a misplaced concern.  It is a concern mostly because politicians and the media stir us up continuously about it and we are dumb enough to let them get away with it.  We kill our fellow countrymen in vastly larger numbers on a daily basis than the number killed by all the terrorist attacks put together.  But there are two critical differences.  The most important one is that the media is obsessed with terrorists.  And the other is we are so used to the daily carnage we inflict on ourselves that we no longer notice it.

Over time Europeans came to understand how the Game of Houses was played.  Since World War I no one in the western world has been willing to admit in public that it still goes on and that the rules are the same as they have always been.  So most people are no longer familiar with the rules of this particular game.  And people who are unfamiliar with the rules tend to play badly.  But their play, bad as it is, is much better than their ability to predict how the game will evolve.  This is why pretty much everybody's predictions, but especially the "experts" on TV,  have been and continue to be so wrong so often.

We are seeing this play out as I write this.  Iran and Saudi Arabia are in a big dust up.  It supposedly started because Saudi Arabia executed a Shiite cleric.  Then an embassy got burned in Iran.  Then . . . well it really doesn't matter.  This is just typical Game of Houses play.  The TV people tell us it signals that we are on the brink of the end of life as we know it.  But that's what they always say.  In actuality, it is just a minor move in a mid-level game of the Game of Houses.

So what are my predictions?  What is most likely is that things are going to continue pretty much as they are for some time (years).  One group will be up then it will be another group's turn.  If the US plays it smart and mostly works through the locals and mostly confines our support to behind the scenes efforts then we stand a good chance of doing well in the long run.  The Republican party seems hell bent on sabotaging this approach.  Unfortunately, that means a lot of people in the middle east will be killed and a lot more will be subject to extreme hardship.  But I just don't see any way to avoid it.  There are too many players and if they see us making a strong public move their inclination will be to block us.  (That's how the Game of Houses is played.)  And there are all too many players who can block us if they set their minds to it.

Saudi Arabia is the joker in this game, the player who could break things out of standard play.  It is not clear that they can maintain their traditional way of doing business.  This consists of trying to buy what they want or need.  They have bought off their domestic religious opposition by putting the Wahhabis in charge and funding them way too generously.  Part of the deal is the Wahhabis keep the rest of them in line.  They have used oil money to purchase passivity at home and influence abroad.  The money they spent and continue to spend influencing the US, for instance, is still working just fine.

But what if the oil money runs out?  They have built an economy that only works because it is massively subsidized from oil revenues.  And the Wahhabis are not the only domestic group they have bought off.  But the result of all this is that the ruling family can only maintain its position by playing the Game of Houses within Saudi Arabia.  If they no longer have all that oil money then their house of cards will collapse.  And there will be nothing left.  They do not have a well educated and industrious population.  They do not have strong institutions.  They could be gone in the proverbial blink of an eye.

They owe their regional and international influence primarily to the leverage oil money gives them.  There are a lot of people in the region who resent them.  Their influence outside their borders will evaporate instantly the day the money spigot dries up.  They will be left with nothing.  And their will be a giant vacuum with no obvious successor around.  40 years ago Egypt could have stepped into the void.  But the reaction to the Arab Spring by government after government leaves no government, and especially not Egypt, with any legitimacy left that would allow them to step in.

Well theoretically there is Iran.  But everybody forgets that Iran is Persian.  Arabs and Persians have been hating on each other and fighting with each other for thousands of years.  There may be some short term situational advantage to allying with the hated Persians.  That, after all, is how the Game of Houses works.  But a ceding of real power for the long term to an enemy of such long standing?  Never!

If Saudi Arabia blows up, and I think there is a significant chance they will, then we could see truly massive shifts in the balance of power.  And that could blow up the Game of Houses, at least for a while.  What things would look like when the dust settled, and it could take a long time for the dust to settle, is completely unpredictable.