Bullish on Neocon Strategy

Cutler: I agree with particular solutions for particular problems, but I am rather bullish on Neoconservatism as a mindset.

The fundamental tenet of neocon-ism is that stability itself is not a good strategic objective if it is not coupled with the implementation at the state level of internal mechanisms of progress. Ad hoc dictatorships are never permanent solutions, only temporary fixes in a time of trouble. During the Cold War, many things were justified that can't be today, etc. etc.

What we cannot do is accept short-term solutions that lead to long-term problems. The reverse, accepting short-term problems for long-term solutions, is something we can now entertain because of the current circumstances of the world: our immense power, public support, no counterbalancing superpower, communicaton tech., etc.

Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a short book, The Islamic Paradox (available online at aei.org), where he argues that the process put in place in Iran by the fall of Shah and the implementation of Islamism actually creates a firmer foundation for a long-term reconciliation with that country and its people. There are no people in that region that are as pro-US as the Iranians. And it is precisely because the Iranians have experienced the bad reality of something that looked good on paper that Islamism, if Iran does go democratic, will be so delegitimized.

The mindset, then, is not the problem. It is the implementation where we must be judicious. Places with real high short-term costs will have to be handled with kid-gloves (Pakistan, maybe Saudi). But overall, I think the strategy is a winner.

The Muslim Mind is on Fire

Youssef M. Ibrahim writes:

DUBAI -- The world of Islam is on fire. Indeed, the Muslim mind is on fire. Above all, the West is now ready to take both of them on.

The latest reliable report confirms that on average 33 Iraqis die every day, executed by Iraqis and foreign jihadis and suicide bombers, not by US or British soldiers. In fact, fewer than ever US or British soldiers are dying since the invasion more than two years ago. Instead, we now watch on television hundreds of innocent Iraqis lying without limbs, bleeding in the streets dead or wounded for life. If this is jihad someone got his religious education completely upside down.

Palestine is on fire, too, with Palestinian armed groups fighting one another - Hamas against Fatah and all against the Palestinian Authority. All have rendered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas impotent and have diminished the world's respect and sympathy for Palestinian sufferings.

A couple of weeks ago London was on fire as Pakistani and other Muslims with British citizenship blew up tube stations in the name of Islam. Al Qaeda in Europe or one of its franchises proclaimed proudly the killing of 54 and wounding 700 innocent citizens was done to "avenge Islam" and Muslims.

Madrid was on fire, too, last year, when Muslim jihadis blew up train stations killing 160 people and wounding a few thousands.

The excuse in all the above cases was the war in Iraq, but let us not forget that in September 2001, long before Iraq, Osama Bin Laden proudly announced that he ordered the killing of some 3,000 in the United States, in the name of avenging Islam. Let us not forget that the killing began a long time before the invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, jihadis have been killing for a decade in the name of Islam. They killed innocent tourists and natives in Morocco and Egypt, in Africa, in Indonesia and in Yemen, all done in the name of Islam by Muslims who say that they are better than all other Muslims. They killed in India, in Thailand and are now talking of killing in Germany and Denmark and so on. There were attacks with bombs that killed scores inside Shia and Sunni mosques, inside churches and inside synagogues in Turkey and Tunisia, with Muslim preachers saying that it is okay to kill Jews and Christians - the so called infidels.

Above all, it is the Muslim mind that is on fire.

The Muslim fundamentalist who attacked the Dutch film director Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands, stabbed him more than 23 times then cut his throat. He recently proudly proclaimed at his trial: "I did it because my religion - Islam - dictated it and I would do it again if were free." Which preacher told this guy this is Islam? That preacher should be in jail with him.

Do the cowardly jihadis who recruit suicide bombers really think that they will force the US Army and British troops out of Iraq by killing hundreds of innocent Iraqis? US troops now have bases and operate in Iraq but also from Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman.

The only accomplishment of jihadis is that now they have aroused the great "Western Tiger". There was a time when the United States and Europe welcomed Arab and Muslim immigrants, visitors and students, with open arms. London even allowed all dissidents escaping their countries to preach against those countries under the guise of political refugees.

Well, that is all over now. Time has become for the big Western vengeance.

Visas for Arab and Muslim young men will be impossible to get for the United States and Western Europe. Those working there will be expelled if they are illegal, and harassed even if their papers are in order.

Airlines will have to right to refuse boarding to passengers if their names even resemble names on a prohibited list on all flights heading to Europe and the United States.

What is more important to remember is this: When the West did unite after World War II to beat communism, the long Cold War began without pity. They took no prisoners. They all stood together, from the United States to Norway, from Britain to Spain, from Belgium to Switzerland. And they did bring down the biggest empire. Communism collapsed.

I fear those naïve Muslims who think that they are beating the West have now achieved their worst crime of all. The West is now going to war against not only Muslims, but also, sadly, Islam as a religion.

In this new cold and hot war, car bombs and suicide bombers here and there will be no match for the arsenal that those Westerners are putting together - an arsenal of laws, intelligence pooling, surveillance by satellites, armies of special forces and indeed, allies inside the Arab world who are tired of having their lives disrupted by demented so-called jihadis or those bearded preachers who, under the guise of preaching, do little to teach and much to ignite the fire, those who know little about Islam and nothing about humanity.

Exit Strategy (Or How I Came to Love the Bomb)

An example of an ethic that is currently being falsified: multiculturalism. This idea is being mugged by what happens when you universalize tolerance; the ethic soon negates itself by tolerating intolerance, exposing the path of multiculturalism for what it is: an exit strategy.

The multi-cultis are experiencing a crisis right now, so look for them to revert to the previous norms.

Beyond Exploitation

heraclitus: "The title of the book was "BEYOND Good and Evil", hence it behooves one to purge moral imperatives from the idea of a 'failed state'."

Yes, I agree that is what he said. Hence, when I wrote:

"Simply, what he was saying is that the terms 'good' and 'evil', since they could evolve, were actually meaningless, and needed to be discarded for a new paradigm of creativity and will to power."

He wanted to discard (to go beyond) moral imperatives and the language of good and evil, and I am saying he was right in his analysis and wrong in his prescriptions, that it was folly to recommend a replacement (exploitation, will to power, etc.) that, as a survival value, is prisoner of a statistical curve. In other words, Nietszche's new conceptual paradigm is only occasionally 'good'; other times it could be positively 'evil'. There are times when the exploitation paradigm dries up as a survival value (how you treat your children, for instance); therefore, since it can not be universally incorporated as a guide to individual behavior, why use it as the bedrock foundation of a mental universe? My thought once I absorbed the descriptive analysis of Nietzsche's geneology, was not to discard the moral universe, but to bring it down to earth. If virtue can be different for different societies, and societies are complex systems that emerge organically from the properties of human beings and their interaction, and if the properties of human beings are accredited to a selection process of evolution, then it stood to reason that at both the biological and the memetic levels a process of evolution was present and at work all the way down.

So I use 'good' and 'evil' as substitutive symbols, a conceptual shorthand, to define the apparent forces behind all of evolution: the drive to further life, and the drive to take it away (broad categories that often blend). It has nothing to do with moral imperatives as abstractions (Forms, Essences, Categorical Imperatives, etc.), nor does it have anything to do with doctrinal or emotional sensibilities. I was, and am, trying to create a workable paradigm by using these ancient words, whose meanings have mutated and adapted continuously for 10,000 years. Because of the confusion, I pegged the definitions to the most obvious point: That Which Affirms Life (good), and That Which Destroys Life (evil). And 'life' means the individual all the way up to the ecosystem of human interaction, one level's survival value being interdependent on all the others.

So, when you write: "A State in form is an organism which through exploitation of the macrocosm achieves a condition of growth, in decline, it is an object of exploitation." You imply my point. In this system (which in reality is more complex) the overall 'good' would be the actions that encourage the continued power and growth of the state while discouraging exploitation and ultimate cannabilization. For all states that participated in this closed system, the definition of good would be exactly the same for each player, exploit (good) or be exploited (bad), and cannabalization would be evil (when you are no longer in the game).

But if you start with exploitation as the founding principle of a system, soon it will evolve, if more than one player continues to play, into a multiplayer game of competition, and we can turn to game theory for guidance on emergent rules or ethics (functionalism).

Read Edna Ullmann-Margalit's "The Emergence of Norms" in which she argues that moral norms enable agents to cooperate and coordinate their actions in situations where the pursuit of self-interest prevents this.

These system properties (ethics) emerge as organizing or governing principles out of the self-preservation imperative of the players. Insofar as these organizational principles further the life of each player individually, and the life of the system as a whole, they can be described as 'good'. If it comes to pass that they do not, if these ethics are falsified by reality, they will be dropped and new rules will take their place.

Thomas Kuhn describes this phenomena as the evolution of a paradigm: Emergence, Normality, Crisis, Revolution. 'Good' in 627 AD hits a crisis in 1490 AD, and a new paradigm emerges.

So, using everything we know about systems theory, game theory, evolutionary theory, moral theory, anthropology, biology, and history, it seems to me we can move beyond the simple explanatory thesis of 'exploitation.'

Why I am a (small 'l') liberal

Hayek writes:

To live and work successfully with others requires more than faithfulness to one's concrete aims. It requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends.

In the last resort, the conservative position rests on the belief that in any society there are recognizably superior persons whose inherited standards and values and position ought to be protected and who should have a greater influence on public affairs than others. The liberal, of course, does not deny that there are some superior people - he is not an egalitarian - bet he denies that anyone has authority to decide who these superior people are. While the conservative inclines to defend a particular established hierarchy and wishes authority to protect the status of those whom he values, the liberal feels that no respect for established values can justify the resort to privilege or monopoly or any other coercive power of the state in order to shelter such people against the forces of economic change. Though he is fully aware of the important role that cultural and intellectual elites have played in the evolution of civilization, he also believes that these elites have to prove themselves by their capacity to maintain their position under the same rules that apply to all others.

That the conservative opposition to too much government control is not a matter of principle but is concerned with the particular aims of government is clearly shown in the economic sphere. Conservatives usually oppose collectivist and directivist measures in the industrial field, and here the liberals will often find allies in them. But at the same time conservatives are usually protectionists and have frequently supported socialist measures in agriculture. Indeed, though the restrictions which exist today in industry and commerce are mainly the result of socialist views, the equally important restrictions in agriculture were usually introduced by conservatives at an even earlier date. And in their efforts to discredit free enterprise many conservative leaders have vied with the socialists.

I have already referred to the differences between conservatism and liberalism in the purely intellectual field, but I must return to them because the characteristic conservative attitude here not only is a serious weakness of conservatism but tends to harm any cause which allies itself with it. Conservatives feel instinctively that it is new ideas more than anything else that cause change. But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

The difference shows itself most clearly in the different attitudes of the two traditions to the advance of knowledge. Though the liberal certainly does not regard all change as progress, he does regard the advance of knowledge as one of the chief aims of human effort and expects from it the gradual solution of such problems and difficulties as we can hope to solve. Without preferring the new merely because it is new, the liberal is aware that it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and he is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge, whether he likes its immediate effects or not.

Personally, I find that the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it - or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism. I will not deny that scientists as much as others are given to fads and fashions and that we have much reason to be cautious in accepting the conclusions that they draw from their latest theories. But the reasons for our reluctance must themselves be rational and must be kept separate from our regret that the new theories upset our cherished beliefs. I can have little patience with those who oppose, for instance, the theory of evolution or what are called "mechanistic" explanations of the phenomena of life because of certain moral consequences which at first seem to follow from these theories, and still less with those who regard it as irrelevant or impious to ask certain questions at all. By refusing to face the facts, the conservative only weakens his own position. Frequently the conclusions which rationalist presumption draws from new scientific insights do not at all follow from them. But only by actively taking part in the elaboration of the consequences of new discoveries do we learn whether or not they fit into our world picture and, if so, how. Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would hardly be moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge facts.

What I have said should suffice to explain why I do not regard myself as a conservative. Many people will feel, however, that the position which emerges is hardly what they used to call "liberal." I must, therefore, now face the question of whether this name is today the appropriate name for the party of liberty. I have already indicated that, though I have all my life described myself as a liberal, I have done so recently with increasing misgivings - not only because in the United States this term constantly gives rise to misunderstandings, but also because I have become more and more aware of the great gulf that exists between my position and the rationalistic Continental liberalism or even the English liberalism of the utilitarians.

If liberalism still meant what it meant to an English historian who in 1827 could speak of the revolution of 1688 as "the triumph of those principles which in the language of the present day are denominated liberal or constitutional" [13] or if one could still, with Lord Acton, speak of Burke, Macaulay, and Gladstone as the three greatest liberals, or if one could still, with Harold Laske, regard Tocqueville and Lord Acton as "the essential liberals of the nineteenth century,"[14] I should indeed be only too proud to describe myself by that name. But, much as I am tempted to call their liberalism true liberalism, I must recognize that the majority of Continental liberals stood for ideas to which these men were strongly opposed, and that they were led more by a desire to impose upon the world a preconceived rational pattern than to provide opportunity for free growth. The same is largely true of what has called itself Liberalism in England at least since the time of Lloyd George.

It is thus necessary to recognize that what I have called "liberalism" has little to do with any political movement that goes under that name today. It is also questionable whether the historical associations which that name carries today are conducive to the success of any movement. Whether in these circumstances one ought to make an effort to rescue the term from what one feels is its misuse is a question on which opinions may well differ. I myself feel more and more that to use it without long explanations causes too much confusion and that as a label it has become more of a ballast than a source of strength.

In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use "liberal" in the sense in which I have used it, the term "libertarian" has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive. For my taste it carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.

I also have racked my brain. The term anti-idiotarian carries much of the substance, but none of the spirit, of classical liberalism. I guess we liberals are just going to have to fight the good fight and reclaim our lost definition, and our heritage.

Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes

Mansour El-Kikhia wrote an article today called Arabs Shouldn't Have to Apologize.

There are some things he says which are true, some things that are misleading, and some things that are plain false. The gist is that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism; instead, it is American policy we can blame. He begins:

I am fed up with the ceaseless requests by columnists, religious personalities and other American public figures for Arabs and Muslims to apologize for terrorist acts committed by thugs and murderers in the name of Islam.

He focuses on Cal Thomas in particular, but I am sure he could have used any number of names as the target for his anger and disgust, as this is not a rare or isolated meme. Even Tom Friedman broached the subject.

Now, I do not think it is either smart or necessary to ask Muslims to individually apologize for acts they did not commit. As Lincoln said in his Temperance speech, nobody likes a scold. However, if the problem is located in these communities, and it is, it seems only prudent to warn the locals, and raise the alarm. Now, onto his attack on Cal Thomas:

He represents a despicable and ignorant attitude that, unfortunately, a sizable segment of America has come to share. There is nothing American Muslims can do to satisfy this group short of packing up and leaving the United States.

But there is something they can do. They can teach their young men that violence, in response to grievances a world away, is not something that will be condoned. They can teach them to be Americans first, Muslims second, and Arabs third.

Arab and Muslim Americans are responsible for neither the twin towers nor the London subway bombings, and as Americans they should never accept responsibility for actions they did not instigate, commit or condone.

This is a narrowly true statement, it was not Arab-Americans or Muslim-Americans that perpetrated 9/11. The terrorists were foreigners, no Americans were involved.

But nobody is implying that responsibility rests in these American communities; it is a straw man set up by Mansour so he can justify his later remarks. Yet the fact they these groups remain hyphenated, that they think of themselves as Arab- and Muslim-Americans, causes many of us Infidel-Americans to worry that the latter part of the hyphenation could be dropped, if push comes to shove. I can only believe that Mansour would rather not have to divulge his primary allegiances, which is why he abhors the question.

Furthermore, in spite of the fact they are constantly condemned for one thing or another, they — like other Americans — are victims of these murderers.

This statement is anachronistic in light of the British-born terrorists that hit London on July 7. If you can have British-Muslim-Terrorists and British-Muslim-Victims, why is it inconceivable that you could have the same in America? But then Mansour delivers a whopper:

It is rejection of U.S. and British policies in the Middle East, not Islam, that has promoted terrorism against America. And for the benefits of those who do not know, 95 percent of Middle Easterners are Muslims. Hence, it is only natural that those opposing the United States and Britain in the region would be Muslims. In India, they would have been Hindu; in Latin America or Northern Ireland, they would have been Catholic.

So, instead of Islam being a rather huge animating principle, Mansour treats it as no more than an irrelevant characteristic, like having dark hair. He accuses us of making the pedestrian error of assuming causation from simple, and insignificant, correlation. Nothing to see here, move on through.

And there are so many other things wrong in this paragraph. For one, terrorism is not simply a "rejection of policy." If that were the case, then Hollywood would be the terrorist capital of the world. By reducing terrorism to "policy rejection", he is playing a dangerous game of historical determinism and removing any moral culpability from the terrorists. To say "terrorism is inevitable because of such and such a policy" is a short step away from saying "those poor terrorists, they have a point."

To claim "American policy in the Middle East" causes terrorism is a grossly truncated and inadequate statement. The complete truth is that the perceived Infidel American policy in the Muslim Middle East is used by Osama in Fatwas and by Imams in Mosques as a tool, a pretext, to agitate the young and vulnerable Muslim faithful into action. Mansour needs to relearn his history if he thinks that there is anything exceptional about American Middle East policy this past century; it is not any worse, and in many cases much more benign, than what has passed for "Arab government" or occupational powers during the past 1400 years. The "policy complaint" registered by the aggrieved, then, is not a substantive objection; these men are not freedom fighters hoping to stop American support for dictatorships. If they were, the Iraq War would not have been such a clarion call to action. The grievance is not any particular policy in the Middle East, is that we have one at all; it is a religious complaint that our unclean feet should ever traverse the holy lands of Islam.

The terrorist paradigm gets its animating strength from the specific Islamic dichotomies of Muslims and Infidels, Dar al'Islam and Dar al'Harb; the Koran itself creates the framework these young men use to justify their horrendous attacks. The grievance of "infidel troops on holy soil" is specifically an Islamic grievances, no other religion is so centered on land, its acquisition, and its defence. Why else would Pakistanis, Saudis, Syrians, Moroccans, etc. all have the same grievance? The occupation of "Islamic land", and the grievances of Muslims all over the world, is used to motivate the young Muslim men that Mansour assures us are much different, and totally immune, over here. The Koran explicitly calls for action in defense of Muslims and their land. Should we not ask for an interpretative stance from the Muslims on our soil?

In the end, Mansour's assertions collapse on first contact with reality. This is from Osama's 1996 Declaration of War. The same Osama that created Al'Qaeda, that motivated the British-born Muslim men to slaughter their own countrymen. Luckily for us, Osama is not as shy about the religious overtones of terrorism as Mansour is.

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience.

The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka'ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (We bemoan this and can only say: "No power and power acquiring except through Allah").

As stated by the people of knowledge, it is not a secret that to use man made law instead of the Shari'a and to support the infidels against the Muslims is one of the ten "voiders" that would strip a person from his Islamic status (turn a Muslim into a Mushrik, non believer status). The All Mighty said: {and whoever did not judge by what Allah revealed, those are the unbelievers} (Al-Ma'ida; 5:44), and {but no! by your Lord! they do not believe (in reality) until they make you a judge of that which has become a matter of disagreement among them, and then do not find the slightest misgiving in their hearts as to what you have decided and submit with entire submission} (An-Nissa; 4:65).

The right answer is to follow what have been decided by the people of knowledge, as was said by Ibn Taymiyyah (Allah's mercy upon him): "people of Islam should join forces and support each other to get rid of the main "Kufr" who is controlling the countries of the Islamic world, even to bear the lesser damage to get rid of the major one, that is the great Kufr".

I say: Since the sons of the land of the two Holy Places feel and strongly believe that fighting (Jihad) against the Kuffar in every part of the world, is absolutely essential; then they would be even more enthusiastic, more powerful and larger in number upon fighting on their own land- the place of their births- defending the greatest of their sanctities, the noble Ka'ba (the Qiblah of all Muslims). They know that the Muslims of the world will assist and help them to victory. To liberate their sanctities is the greatest of issues concerning all Muslims; It is the duty of every Muslims in this world.

Muslims need to choose whether they will follow Bin Ladenism or Modernism, and Mansour is not helping by blurring the issue.

To Gibson's Sister

I just read your brother's comment below, and it came to my attention that you are currently in Iraq.

There is not much I can offer accept my thanks, and my prayers. Just know that, even if the story is not told in the papers of today, your courage and sacrifice will ring true through all the proud and protected generations to follow. This time of blood and toil will be remembered as one of America's finest hours. You are, and will be, honored.

When the oldest cask is opened,
And the largest lamp is lit;
When the chestnuts glow in the embers,
And the kid turns on the spit;
When young and old in circle
Around the firebrands close;
When the girls are weaving baskets,
And the lads are shaping bows;

When the goodman mends his armour,
And trims his helmet’s plume;
When the goodwife’s shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

Steyn on the Columbia Disaster

Posted in Full (from steynonline.com):

This week the United States got back in the space shuttle business. This is what I wrote about the last shuttle, in The Sunday Telegraph of February 2nd 2003:

The last early-morning Texan TV viewers saw was a beautiful shot of the Columbia streaking across a clear blue sky over Dallas, caught by the cameras at WFAA-TV. These are the marvels of the age -- not only the extraordinary technology that enables man to return from a trip to space, but the ordinary everyday technology that lets a cameraman from a local TV station capture the scene as it's happening overhead at 12,000 miles per hour. It's not just that most countries can't do the former, they can't manage the latter, either: Everything about the moment sums up the remarkable pre-eminence of America.

Four decades ago, the space program was the only romantic thing about an unromantic war -- the competition between two high-tech superpowers to put a man in space, and then on the moon. Now there's no one to compete with. For America's new enemies in a new war, "victory" means no more than American failure. You can't take down a spaceship at 200,000 feet with a shoulder-launched missile. Even the Americans would have difficulty blowing the shuttle out of the sky, though the missile defence system currently under development will be able to do it, despite the usual Euro-Canadian naysaying. Al-Qaeda can't do it, and nor can the French or anyone else. These days, American technology has to pace itself.

But you don't have to believe, as NASA fretted in the weeks before launch, that this shuttle could be a terrorist target to wonder at the freakily perfect symbolism of Saturday's tragedy: The Columbia's crew included the first Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon. Better yet, he was an Israeli who'd participated in the successful raid on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, back in the Eighties in those dark days before the policing of Saddam's nuclear program was entrusted to Hans Blix. And, of course, the shuttle came down over Texas, home state of the President and in the European press the favoured shorthand for what they see as the swaggering cowboy braggadocio of the United States -- and, just to confirm it was the will of Allah, not merely in Texas but in the vicinity of the small town of Palestine, Texas. At creative writing classes, they'd tell you to make the symbolism more oblique, less clunkily literal.

You don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the shuttle's loss, a CBC interviewer was asking her bemused expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance," the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" -- sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer -- said no, it wasn't "arrogance." When something happens in the middle of your broadcast and you tear up the running-order and scramble for guests and clips and background, things get said that might otherwise be more artfully veiled. But that's the point: Most of us when we're caught by something sudden and unexplained retreat to our tropes, and the gleeful rush to the cliche of American "arrogance" is revealing. An hour later this had apparently morphed into mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led NASA to go ahead with the flight. World coverage of U.S. affairs is taking on the same stunted perspective as the old showbiz joke beloved of failed actors: It is not necessary that I succeed, only that my friends fail.

What happened Saturday is a personal tragedy and an historic disaster -- in 42 years of manned flight, NASA has never lost a crew during landing or the return in orbit. It's also a setback for Washington, which had plotted this week as a projection of American resolve: the State of the Union, Bush's meetings with Berlusconi and Blair, all working up to Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council. Now, instead of steely determination, the TV screens will be filled with funerals, elegies, interviews with neighbours, mounds of flowers and teddy bears: It enables the networks to slip in to their preferred mode, of America as victim, weak and vulnerable, which is why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were so good in the immediate hours of September 11th and, for the most part, so bad in the months since.

You can't blame the news shows for their priorities: For most Americans, this will be the only attention they've paid to the space program since the last disaster -- the disintegration of the Challenger on take-off in 1986. Nothing in between has captured the public imagination -- pictures from Mars? Yawn. There's something very American about the presumption of success, about the way something unprecedented quickly becomes routine -- unless it all goes wrong. In 1986, President Reagan, eulogizing the dead, said that they had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God," quoting the marvellous poem by John Magee, the son of an American father and British mother who couldn't wait for the U.S. to enter the Second World War and so signed up with the RCAF. (For Canadian readers, I should explain that RCAF stands for "Royal Canadian Air Force," but, not to worry, it was abolished and replaced by Canada Post.) President Bush, whom commentators have increasingly compared to Reagan in recent months, is not so comfortable with such highflown rhetoric; he's a more openly emotional man, and it will be the smaller human elements in the story that touch him -- men and women in their early forties, leaving behind young children. They were an American crew -- four men, one black; two women, one born in India. That last is the American Dream writ large across the stars: You can emigrate to the U.S. and become an astronaut within a decade.

Nonetheless, this will not be as traumatizing as the Challenger disaster. The yellow-ribbon era died with September 11th: Even if their TV networks haven't quite adjusted, Americans are tougher about these things; this is a country at war and one that understands how to absorb losses and setbacks. What happened happened most likely because the Columbia was just so damn old and rusty. If anything, it symbolizes not American "arrogance," but what happens when the great youthful innovating spirit of the country is allowed to atrophy: The entire space program is now dependent on a transit system from the 1970s. If President Bush really wanted to emphasize the gulf between his country and both the Islamist cave dwellers and "Old Europe," he'd announce a major renewal of the space project. A frontier is part of the American character.

Two weeks ago, when the shuttle was launched, the enterprising Internet commentator Charles Johnson posted an almost note-perfect parody of an Arab news report denouncing the presence of Colonel Ramon:

"This is surely but the first step towards complete and outright illegal Zionist occupation of space," said Arab League spokesman Abr Souffla ... Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, "It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens?"... In New York today, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that an Israeli presence in space is "unhelpful" and would only serve to further aggravate tensions between Israelis and Arabs. The sentiment was echoed from Madrid by EU representative Javier Solana, who said that what the Middle East needed was more negotiation, and "less cosmic adventurism."

A couple of days later, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reprinted the story, having apparently taken it for real. In an odd way, the world's reactions are beyond parody now. No doubt in the big-time mosques the A-list imams really will regard what happened as the judgment of Allah on the American-Zionist plan to seize the heavens. PETA will denounce the loss of the rats and insects on board, victims of America's "arrogant" need to find cures for disease, etc. The rest of us will mourn the dead and urge NASA to get on with the next flight. That's the American way.

Cage Match, Final Round

bennet: "The "End Of History" argued that capitalism and democracy created a superior system and that all other forms would convert."

Peacefully. That was the argument. The dominant ideology had been exposed and all the rest would now fall into line. Nothing more could compete.

But someone out in the audience has raised their hand, and we are back in the sparring cage. What we are seeing is that the very success of the Western paradigm has created its new opponent; 'failure' has organized against us in one last stand to cheat the rules of selection and plunder riches that for them have been unearned. Our Marxist pal Grievance has joined hands with our Islamic pal Caliphate, and these petulant children of failure are trying their damnedest to bring the temple down with them.

Given this, just how do you suppose democracy, capitalism, freedom, and private property have been defeated?

No, it is just the case that we are still fighting; it was not the end of history after all. I can see how a pacifist would call the very act of fighting losing, but if you are expecting to see the "essence of failure" defeat the "essence of success", then you should study your metaphysics.

Offering democracy is the nice and easy opening salvo, what Wretchard called fighting with our little finger. If that doesn't work, IMPOSING democracy and the rule of law will be all that's left. Ask the Japanese how pleasant that is.

To Avoid Chemotherapy

dan: "Certain rogue barons out on the fringes have started to launch raids to test and stress our strength. How we distract the people from the basic glory that undoubtedly entails? These at least are the kind of people relative to their society that Nietzsche would have considered "healthy." They affirm the tribal pride--forcing their way by orthodox means into the position of traditional aristocrats--that we ultimately see as childish venality (because that is in fact what it is--this is the meaning of Nietzsche's word "developed"). So we first have to kill them, which is the only way to delegitimize them."

Earlier, I toyed with this theme on my blog:

"Nietzsche, in this case, was both correct and incorrect. He posited that 'good' and 'evil' were context-specific, that Master Morality, with virtues of strength, power, and conquering, could without contradiction claim certain things were good that Christian (Slave) Morality, with virtues of meekness, humility, and self-control, claimed were evil, and they could both be right within their particular contexts. Simply, what he was saying is that the terms 'good' and 'evil', since they could evolve, were actually meaningless, and needed to be discarded for a new paradigm of creativity and will to power.

However, is it the case that 'good' and 'evil' evolved, or is it simply that their application evolved? As the needs and evolutionary strategies of mankind changed, and as new systems emerged, cooperation and humility did indeed become the predominant survival techniques..."

"Good and Evil" is a universal language that all human societies understand, though sometimes the specific meanings are lost in translation between disparate groups. These terms prescribe behaviors that will be beneficial for the tribe or society, and they proscribe behaviors that will be deleterious to these units. It is the same everywhere.

Your comment made me think. If each culture's definitions of good and bad behavior are co-dependant, which they are, what are they co-dependant on? Specifically, what do these "values" act and interact with, how did they grow, and can they be changed?

They certainly act and interact within the culture itself, so one answer, if we are to help their culture 'evolve', is a change from within. This seems to be the most difficult for us, since as outsiders we will have difficulty assimilating our ideas into the flow of local logic, and, as you mentioned, the institutions for cultural interaction have atrophied in the Arab world. It is not impossible, it just takes the most time and learning, and we may not have much time. Iraq, in this respect, is our first effort at an internal shift.

But there are also outside forces that affect the internal survival values of "good and evil". These external forces can be thought of as the environment in which the tribal or cultural values strive and compete. If we look back in history, there are many examples of this, British Colonialism being but one, where the tribal preconceptions continuously bounced off the British values, which were backed by power, causing the tribal preconceptions to evolve over time.

So, we must become the environment in which these tribal preconceptions interact and compete. "Carriers" of an ideology that cannot assimilate, those who carry the doctrine of murder, will have to die. It will take years and years of power projection and resolve. I am not sure we will be able to do it...

As Churchill said:

"[H]ow the structures and habits of democratic states, unless they are welded into larger organisms, lack thoses elements of persistance and conviction which alone can give security to humble masses; how, even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued for ten or fifteen years at a time. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead directly to the bull's-eye of disaster. We shall see how absolute is the need of a broad path of international action pursued by many states in common across the years, irrespective of the ebb and flow of national politics."

A new cancer treatment is being tested, where nanotech drug delivery systems carry a precise amount of silver particles to surround a tumor. Once the silver is in place, the patient simply lies down in a "tanning bed" that sends infrared waves through the body. The silver particles collect and reflect these waves off the self-contained mirror system until the tumor simply dissolves from the extreme heat in the 'kill zone.' The rest of the body doesn't even feel it.

The world of today is populated with tumors, and we need a precise delivery system designed specifically for each problem area. If we are unable to find it, the cancers will metastasize, and the only option left will be a large and imprecise dose of chemotherapy.

The extreme solution weakens the body, sometimes to the point of death, recovery is difficult and painful, and there aren't even any guarantees that the cancer is gone.

It is something we should strive to avoid.

Failed State: An Effort at Definition

I believe you can trace it some of it back to Europe and the ideological and political virus of "eidodynamic" revolution:

"Isolated expressions of eidodynamic assumptions can be traced far back into history, Walsby finding them in ancient Greek and Chinese writings, {1} but they can hardly be said to have motivated political activities before the appearance of the Diggers and other egalitarian protesters of 17th century England. In the French Revolution Babeuf and followers, with their communistic Utopia, claim a place among the eidodynamics, but the main movement has to be ascribed to the ideology of precision. Not until the 19th century did the reformers and revolutionaries come to form enduring parties and movements.

These have not been able to realise their own idea of themselves; claiming to represent the interests of the great body of the people against a dominant and exploitative few, and therefore expecting to receive overwhelming numerical support, they have remained in the minority. They have known war and peace, boom and slump, the virtual disappearance of empires and ruling monarchs, the growth of political democracy, general education, widespread literacy and mass communications; one of them has been able to grasp control of governmental power in two of the largest states and a number of smaller ones. Each of these conditions has been proclaimed, before the event, the one thing needed to bring the great body of the people to accept socialism (or communism or anarchism) but none of them have produced this effect. The features and tendencies these groups oppose - private ownership, togetherness, economic competition, institutional religion, hierarchy, authority, low valuation of theory, respect for success in life, willingness to defend the national group - these continue to be the values by which society mainly operates."

In complex systems like human society, organizational success must emerge organically from the properties and interactions of the previous level. Failure to take into account the material you are working with is a fast route to failure; imposing a revolutionary (eidodynamic) paradigm from the top, an ideology based on false premises and contradictory to the properties of the existing system, will inevitably lead to the collapse of the system itself, and to our failed states.

In fractal geometry one of the first things you notice is how properties are self-similar and recursive, all the way to the bottom. Societies, if they are to have structural fitness, must also have self-similar levels and recursive properties. At the bottom of society lies the individual, then the family, then village, etc. The culture and customs that grow organically at these low levels are as important to the "state" as a cornerstone to a foundation; the low levels are determinative of of the nation's properties and fitness.

Some ideologies are never fit enough on a local level to have a new level "emerge", i.e. a nation built around those principles. Some paradigms are fit enough to go global.

Imposing a nation-state on unfit local paradigm's is one reason for state failure. Imposing unfit and eidodynamic paradigms on an otherwise fit nation-state is another.

When you look at the over-all ecology, the global system of interaction and competition, it becomes apparent why we must be like "swimming sharks", constantly moving. The world is constantly shifting, and if you sit back on your laurels and refuse to adapt, pretty soon your very successful paradigm at time 't', which was working with reality 'r', will be obsolete at time 'T' when you must work with reality 'R'.

Evolution. All these systems and all their levels have the self-similar property of participating in a selective system. The question each society must ask itself: can you compete?

If you cannot play by the organically-grown rules of world selection, then a priori you will fail.

Admission

Of course, this implies that there is such a thing as an "objectively failed state".

If life really is chaotic and random, if success and failure really are creatures of perspective and not at real things, then everything I've said falls apart.

But I'm comfortable in my assumptions. There really is such a thing as "better", and we are it.

And the Wind-Up...

stoutfellow: "Anyway, neither Dawkins nor Mandelbrot are gonna be much help in trying to prevent the coming Dark Age."

But they will be useful in describing it, yes?

The concept of a failed state implies the idea of a successful state, which in turn implies the presence of a competitive paradigm and selective process.

The Anthropic Principle states that everything that came before 'now' was necessary for us to be here, at this place. If you are an American, look around you at the prosperity, happiness, and wealth. These did not simply appear out of air, they were bought and paid for through the falsification process of our ideals.

Now let's suppose you are an Arab. All the poverty and failure around you also happened for a reason. Claiming that the West oppressed and manipulated your people is just another way of saying you were powerless to resist, which is another way of saying you lost the game. History is varied, and many causes can be determinative, but nothing can scrub away the fact that for the last 600 years your society has failed, miserably. After that long of a slump, you probably want to stop complaining about the pitching, and maybe change your swing.

The competitive value of any one state is co-dependant on the value and properties of all others, and all these are co-dependant on the properties of the system in which they interact. If the only way to compete globally is through resource aquisition (power) and world trade (production and wealth), it makes little sense to build a state paradigm on Greenpeace and the AFL-CIO. Now imagine how harmful it is to build a paradigm on something even more contradictory, and you will see why states fail the way they do.

When discussing a dynamic system where many different players can become dominant, the focal point and overall strategic objective for a state becomes the very act of competing and winning; if states lose sight of this imperative, like Europe has done, when they come out of their stupor they will find themselves much further back than they were before.

When a society chooses to structure its ideology in direct contra-distinction to reality, it will fail. And, much like in business, its resources will be cannabilized by a more fit player.

The Swamps of Sadness

This picture just struck me. It is the Chateau Woods in 1917, WWI.

Posturing for Energy in Central Asia

William F. Buckley's article of 2004 comes to mind:

"If one contemplates oil as simply an agent of energy, the idea becomes instantly clearer. Every advance by mankind against the material duress of life is most easily expressed in terms of energy spared. Electrical power is generated in part by running water and by nuclear energy. But mostly it is created by oil and gas. What is it that a people is willing to fight for? The security of home and hearth come first, and that is achieved mostly by weaponry; but weapons that seek to have their effects beyond the range of a cartridge of gunpowder do so, on battleships and airplanes, by the propellant force of oil.

If you are willing to die in order to protect your local hospital, then you must be willing to die for oil, because without oil, your hospital won't take you beyond a surgeon's scalpel, and a surgeon is helpless without illumination, which is provided (mostly) by oil.

To say that we must not fight for oil is utter cant. To fight for oil is to fight in order to maintain such sovereignty as we exercise over the natural world. Socialism plus electricity, Lenin said at the outset of the Soviet revolution, would usher in the ideal state. He was wrong about socialism but not about electricity. Electricity gives us whatever leverage we have over nature. To flit on airily about an unwillingness to fight for oil suggests an indifference to the alleviation of poverty at the next level after bread and water. Throw in, perhaps, the wheel. That too is an indispensable scaffolding of human power over nature. But then comes all the power not generated by the muscles of human beings and beasts of burden."

It is not to like or dislike. It is simply the nature of the beast.

The Bunker of the 21st Century

In that same article, another thing stuck out:

"The future battlefield will be “everywhere”—from the human mind, to the electromagnetic spectrum, to cyberspace, to outer space—and everyone will be a potential combatant, including hackers, genetic engineers, and financiers. Warfare will no longer be the sole province of nation-states and soldiers and will not be resolved only with military means. Instead, “all means” will be used to fight these wars—including trade warfare, financial warfare, terrorism, ecological warfare, computer-network attack, media warfare, drug warfare, and psychological warfare. “Extreme means” need not always be used, but victory will go to those who best combine all the resources at their disposal without regard for boundaries, restrictions, rules, laws, or taboos."

To the list of combatants I would add the blogosphere, and Wretchard's earlier post on "spontaneous organization" and information hubs is relevant here.

One of the great assets of the blogosphere is its ability to offer conceptual frameworks, ideological prisms and mental shorthands through which we can better process and understand the massive data crunch that attends the modern world. Belmont Club is such a site.

In a previous time of danger and confusion, writers like Tom Paine and Alexander Hamilton built for their countrymen just these types of frameworks, and the effect was a buttressing of their resolve and a justification of their courage.

We are also in dangerous and confusing times. But with our attention and stamina, our knowledge will continue to expand, and our conceptual arsenal will continue to grow.

The bunkers of the 21st century will be ideological, and they will be built on-line.

The Global Python and the China Trap

I was searching for information about our Central Asian strategic posture, and noticed something interesting.

"Most Chinese sources strongly criticized the use of force without United Nations sanction and rejected the ostensible rationales for Allied Force—to protect human rights and halt ethnic cleansing.4 They noted that these rationales could be used to justify intervention practically anywhere on Earth, since a great many countries have ethnic conflicts in progress, and intervening on behalf of separatists in Kosovo would only encourage separatists elsewhere. Moreover, they believed that these rationales were simply fig leaves used to cover larger American geopolitical purposes. The Chinese considered that these purposes included removing obstacles to NATO’s eastward expansion, reducing Russia’s sphere of influence, and using NATO as a tool for 'global hegemony.'

Some journalists contended that the next step in the “strategic conspiracy” is to expand NATO’s area of interest into Central Asia, the Middle East, and even the Asia-Pacific region.6 Another author considered that one goal of Allied Force was to “open up the Balkan corridor” to the military, political, and economic influence of the European Union, which would serve to secure a land/river route for the flow of oil and gas from the Caucasus and Central Asia to Western Europe.7 The author predicted that in the aftermath of the Balkan war, the United States would intensify its efforts to contain China. Containment would entail supporting India’s missile programs, encouraging separatists in Xinjiang and territorial disputes in the South China Sea, and strengthening the defenses of Taiwan and Japan.

Senior Col Yao Youzhi of the AMS argued that Eurasia plays a “decisive position in global geopolitical strategies.” He claimed that the United States views North America as its base, South America as its backyard, Africa as a “broken continent that cannot be lifted up,” and Eurasia as the “serious hidden danger to global dominance.” America plans to control Eurasia by keeping Russia weak, manipulating NATO, and containing China through military alliances with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand."

The dangers of Colonel Qiao Liang's Unrestricted Warfare are the unintended consequences that can attend any ill-thought over-steps. I have read since September 11, Colonel Liang and Wang Xiangsui have been treated as heroes in China for articulating the strategy of "terrorism, narcotics trafficking, drug smuggling, environmental degradation and computer viruses as methods to defeat America."

I bet the Chinese are not as sanguine anymore. In direct contra-distinction to Al'Qaeda's hopes and China's strategic analysis, the 9/11 attacks have focused and accelerated America's strategic posture. The Giant has awoken and discovered the world needs her attention.

Every single worry the Chinese had about Operation Allied Force have come to pass, via the GWOT. In the 90's, the Chinese thought we were a Python, using our great mass to suffocate all rivals. The present claustrophobia must be overwhelming.

Temperance and Caution

A lesson for Iraq, and for the world we try to create:

"In the absence of convincing evidence to the contrary the reasonable expectation has to be that the established pattern will persist, earlier developments serving as the enduring bases on which the later ones rest, and this is confirmed by recent political experience; even where eidodynamic movements have been in control of the state for generations they are finding themselves obliged to accept the eidostatic as constituting the bulk and substance of society. As they do this, in Russia and China for example, so the horrors resulting from the attempt to impose exclusively eidodynamic principles recede into history.

Once we cease taking society for granted, or thinking of it as a gift from God or an arbitrary creation of the human will, once we begin to recognise it as one term in the universal evolutionary process, we find ourselves virtually obliged to accept that each new phase in its development incorporates the functional relationships marking the previous condition. To treat any major ideology by itself is to create an abstraction; any given stage in ideological development comprises not just an ideology and the expression of it but also its context, with the previous ideologies in the series playing significant parts."

Paradigm Shift

Wikipedia def. emergence:

"An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. The property itself is often unpredictable and unprecedented, and represents a new level of the system's evolution."

Thomas Kuhn on Paradigm Shifts:
(from http://www.des.emory.edu/mfp/Kuhn.html)

"Failure of existing rules is the prelude to a search for new ones."

"Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

"All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules; the awareness and acknowledgment that a crisis exists loosens theoretical stereotypes and provides the incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift."

"New paradigms arise with destructive changes in beliefs..."

Osama has changed the rules and provided a crisis; the question, then, is where are we going?

Chutes and Ladders

Bennett: read Bush's words again.

Civil War will be a defeat. He says it explicitly when he says "if we do not win here."

However, the hope of success outweighs the cost of defeat. And this is where the Over-all Strategic Objective comes in.

I believe it was RWE that spoke of the strategy against the USSR, fighting them at every turn and competing at every game. Mixed in this analysis is the acceptance that sometimes you lose the battle, like we did in Vietnam. The point is to not lose the war.

Iraq is and always has been a battle in the greater Global War on (whatever). Abizaid's analysis that a United States victory would be the beginning of the end is true, which is why we had to try. In war you accept risks if the potential payoff is that large.

What you are reading here is the acceptance that we MAY NOT WIN, which is not the same as defining victory down. But it is still nothing more than a battle.

If you've ever played the game Chutes and Ladders, then you understand this strategy. September 11 was a chute that brought us almost to the bottom. As we were moving forward, a ladder to the top presented itself and we went for it. We may have missed, and the war may now take longer and have more twists and turns, but we are still in the game, and we will make it to the top.

So, if there is Civil War, the thing to do is accept defeat and move on. We still have plenty of rolls.

The Deadly Meme of Suicide Terrorism

This is a great example of how ideologies evolve, and how memes can mutate. Dennis Prager writes:

Palestinian Muslims -- no Palestinian Christians have committed a suicide bombing -- have created a religious and moral basis for mass murder and did so within a worldwide religion with a billion adherents. When the Palestinians sent brainwashed young men to blow themselves up in Israeli buses, cafes and discos, they offered justifications that provided the basis for many others to do the same.

More than any other cause, I believe the reason behind Islam's impotence in controlling this mutative virus is that the memetic arsenal of Islam claims to be complete and self-sufficient, but it clearly is not. If we look just to the constrained ideological universe of the Koran, and then add the interpretative history of 1400 years of Muslim action, there is nothing we can find in this collection of memes to immunize the Islamic universe from the outgrowth of suicide terrorism.

No, the only thing that can save Islam is to allow for evolution. It must tear down its walls of isolation and finality and interact with the memes of the rest of the world. If it continues to interact with reality as a self-sufficient ideology, the falsification of this religion as an evolutionary strategy will accelerate, and the world will get much worse for the Muslims. Not that evolution will be easy, either. The diehards are correct: if Islam walks out of the cave and lets in the sunshine, a good amount of accepted doctrine will probably be selected for extinction.

Our hopes in avoiding an all out war lies with the moderates: will they choose the harshness of the sun, or will they proudly go down with the ship?

Profiling, a Defense

Yishai Ha'etzni writes in the New York Post:

But in a perfect example of the complexity of profiling, a pregnant woman traveling alone roused the suspicions of security officials. They inspected her bags more closely and discovered a sheet of Semtex explosives under a false bottom. Unbeknownst to Murphy, her fiancé, Nizar Hindawi, had intended to kill her and their unborn child along with the other passengers on the plane.

Unfortunately, the rise in terrorist assaults on Israeli public transportation, entertainment venues and public spaces necessitated that the airport security model be implemented in those areas as well — for one simple reason: it works better than anything else.

This example of the pregnant woman illustrates the insufficiency of the pro- and anti-profiling arguments. Profiling is what you do subconsciously when you are well versed in the tactics of your enemy, it is not something you do knowingly, or, if it is, it will not be effective because the particular ways of attack will always be more numerous than what can stay in the front of your mind.

Profiling, then, is a skill, not a policy, and it needs and demands training.

Robert Redford, in the movie Spy Game, says:

Every room, every picture, every situation is a snapshot - I'm checking the room, memorising, people what there're wearing, and ask the question: What's wrong with this picture? Anything suspect? You got to see it, assess it and dismiss most of it without looking, without thinking...

The pro-profiling crowd is all deduction. Arab men hit us before, lets look for Arab men. It is the same complaint we've had about American generals, that they are always fighting the last war.

If profiling is to be serious and successful, we have to teach it as a skill. We aren't going to prevent an attack through painting by the numbers. We need to hone the senses of the screeners, and above all, we need to encourage induction.

A Day to Reflect, and Compare

Us:




















Them:

Iraq Civil War

This recalls Wretchard's analysis in a comment he left on Return of the Ripper:

"But it's almost like what happens when you do a cancer biopsy. One discovery leads to another, and you wonder whether you'll ever get to the end of it. But the alternative was never to have looked. And that's what the Left would have wanted. Never to have looked."

Right now we are learning lessons in Iraq that we never would have, nor could have, known otherwise. I still believe what I posted then:

Wretchard is right. By going into the Middle East we have collapsed the wave function, have drawn out real data, and can begin to see patterns and properties that we would never have been able to guess. We have set up the laboratory, and we are going to school.

Churchill spoke of how advantage is gained "in war and foreign policy and other things by selecting from many attractive or unpleasant alternatives the dominating point. American military thought had coined the expression 'Over-all Strategic Objective.' When our officers first heard this, they laughed; but later on its wisdom became apparent and accepted...Failure to adhere to this simple principle produces confusion and futility of action, and nearly always makes things much worse later on."

Wretchard writes:

"The Times of London interview of President George Bush last month suggests that at the highest levels American leadership sensed rather than calculated that taking down the most powerful Middle Eastern state would set a tsunami in motion that only the US, in its power, might ride largely unscathed."

Perhaps they did calculate. God Bless America, first and above all.

109 minutes

I felt this deserved to be memorialized. We should never forget the tragedy, and the heroism, of that fateful day:

By Brad Todd

Guest column

(Sept. 16, 2001)

It's been, of course, impossible to get past IT.

Even in a country with the attention span of a gnat, we're all still glued to the tube. The 24-hour news channels have heretofore proven they can make anything boring in short order, but this one drips with emotion so thick even they can't wring it dry.

Yep. We're as stuck on it as we were Tuesday morning.

Grocery store checkout banter is still single-subject. I understand it's the only topic at the manicurist's shop, too.I think even children sense how big IT is. The ones who walk by my front door don't have their normal sing-song cadence. There's no screeching. No laughter. They know something's not right.

What is IT?

Something besides the grief, I think -- although the grief is tormenting.

Something deeper than the shock -- although the shock is overwhelming.

No, I think it's the gut-level fear that for the first time in my generation, we were whipped.

Whipped by our own complacency. Our own comfort. Our own insistence on putting convenience ahead of precaution. Our own arrogance that let us forget that the world is a dangerous place.

And the outcropping of that fear is an angst about the new order. How long before we're not behind again? How much time must we spend off the top of the world? Out of control of our own lives?

This, of course, is the angst that people in most of the rest of the world feel every day. And if we look deep inside, we can probably acknowledge that for all our egalitarian pontifications, this is not the kind of equality and fraternal kinship in which we really believe.

I finally admitted this fear to myself three days after the attack. I wasn't particularly proud of it. It seemed like a shallow thing to fret over when such real suffering was all around me -- my house sits just three miles from the Pentagon, after all.

But there it was.

And the aftertaste of the bitter pill of my character flaw was the sad realization that such angst was Osama's primary objective. Buildings and airplanes and, yes, even 6,000 lives, were just the collateral damage. Despite the metaphoric value of last week's bricks and mortar targets, the real core of the Western economy isn't a skyscraper or a government building. It's the can-do swagger of the American worker. And bin Laden's soldiers cut deep into that swagger.

So he won.

Or did he?

I thought so ... until Friday night.

Friday night I watched a Jane Pauley interview with the family of Jeremy Glick. Jeremy Glick was a 31-year-old who flew as a passenger on commercial airplanes for a living. I describe him that way because right now I'm fairly convinced I'm just a 31 year old who flies planes as a passenger for a living...the other parts of my job having become less noticeable this week.

As the interview unfolded, I realized something I didn't know before: Jeremy Glick and the people on United Flight 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, knew what was happening on the ground.

At 8:48 a.m. Mohammed Atta took a jet headlong into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Eighteen minutes later and accomplice did the same to the south tower.

When Jeremy Glick called his wife, his first question was an attempt to confirm something another passenger had heard on his spousal call: was the World Trade Center story true?

Lizzy Glick paused, thought for a minute, swallowed hard, and told him the truth. Yes, they had. Moments later, still on the line with her husband, Lizzy Glick saw that another plane had run into the Pentagon. She passed that information on as well to her husband, who relayed it to the other passengers.

Jeremy Glick then told her that the passengers were about to take a vote and decide if they should rush the hijackers and attempt to foul up whatever evil plans they had.

He put down the phone and a commotion was heard by those on the other end of the line. Then nothing. A dead line. An aborted missile launch against the town where I live.

That was 10:37 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11... just 109 minutes after Mohammed Atta rammed the first plane into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Just 109 minutes after a new form of terrorism -- the most deadly yet invented -- came into use, it was rendered, if not obsolete, at least decidedly less effective.

Deconstructed, unengineered, thwarted, and put into the dust bin of history. By Americans. In 109 minutes.

And in retrospect, they did it in the most American of ways. They used a credit card to rent a fancy cell phone to get information just minutes old, courtesy of the ubiquitous 24-hour news phenomenon. Then they took a vote. When the vote called for sacrifice to protect country and others, there apparently wasn't a shortage of volunteers. Their action was swift. It was decisive. And it was effective.

United Flight 93 did not hit a building. It did not kill anyone on the ground. It did not terrorize a city, despite the best drawn plans of the world's most innovative madmen. Why? Because it had informed Americans on board who'd had 109 minutes to come up with a counteraction.

And the next time a hijacker full of hate pulls the same stunt with a single knife, he'll get the same treatment and meet the same result as those on United Flight 93. Dead, yes. Murderous, yes. But successful? No.

So I think the answer I come to is "yes, but at least not for long."

They did whip us. And maybe those of us who've demanded to be let on airplanes at the last minute fed a culture of convenience that made it possible.

But they only had us on the mat for 109 minutes.

Distant Grievances

Reuel Marc Gerecht writes in the Weekly Standard:

Europe's radical-mosque practitioners can appear, mutatis mutandis, like a Muslim version of the hard-core intellectuals and laborers behind the aggrieved but proud Scottish National party in its salad days. These young men are often Sunni versions of the Iranian radicals who gathered around the jumbled, deeply contradictory, religious left-wing ideas of Ali Shariati, one of the intellectual fathers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's "red-mullah" revolution of 1979, and the French-educated ex-Communist Jalal Al-e Ahmad, who became in the 1960s perhaps the most famous theoretician of Muslim alienation in the Western world.

...

The thousands of Iranians who gleefully went to their deaths in suicidal missions against the Iraqis in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war did so in part, as the Franco-Iranian scholar Farhad Khosrakhavar has written, because the "liberty to die as a martyr served to maintain the phantasm of revolutionary possibilities. Death is both the ultimate expression of a very Western idea of individual freedom and self-creation and a very Islamic conception of self-abnegation before God's will. Talk to young radical Muslims in Europe--young men who in all probability have no desire whatsoever to kill themselves or others for any cause--and you can often nevertheless find an appreciation of the idea of martyrdom almost identical to the Iranian death-wish of yesteryear. In the last three centuries, Europe has given birth and nourishment to most of mankind's most radical causes. It shouldn't be that surprising to imagine that Europe could nurture Islamic militancy on its own soil."

We are looking at the mutation of a virus. The intolerance and finality of Islam is being blended with the language and grievances of Marxist revolution, and if we don't find some way to stop it, Europe is going to explode in flames.

Finding the Key

This essay will be truncated by necessity, but I will try to flesh it out as I am able, time and circumstances allowing. Because it is jumping off my mind onto this page, the writing may be shoddy and the thoughts non-linear, but hopefully the points will be valid and clear.

I begin my analysis with the presumption that there are, in fact, clear and fundamental differences in Leftist and Rightist thought; more specifically, in light of the present inability for each camp to actually have a fruitful debate, I am searching for a common ground of first principles which can be appealed to during an argumentative impasse, and from which can be built a larger and more comprehensive plan for the future of Western Civilization. I will attempt on this blog to do nothing less, and nothing more, than provide a framework of discussion that all life-affirming individuals will accept, a framework that is built on a more complete understanding of just what type of world we live in.

The divide into Left and Right is a simple, and probably insufficient, dichotomy of ideological geneologies, and I expect to discover that they intertwine as much as the double-helix of our DNA, with crossovers and combinations prevalent and significant. Nevertheless, the differences between the geneologies are sufficient to have caused a rupture in the common language of the West; worse, the post-modernism and positivism of the 20th century have compounded the problem, not because of their inferiority, but because of their departure from their brethren. The words that bind and support our culture mean less, because they have, by necessity, been forced to mean more. Whether it is a problem of lay-men versus the initiated, science versus religion, or liberal versus conservative, the gulf between our intended meaning and our received meaning is becoming wider. Because language-based communication is a symbol-oriented, substitutive technique for transmitting and receiving information and knowledge, it seems to me a dire necessity, if we are to coordinate our efforts and survive, that we re-establish a workable code key that we can all embrace.

Much of this will simply consist of updating and modifying our supposed knowledge with the latest data. (As a side note, by knowledge I do not mean anything absolute. Knowledge is simply the deducement of patterns between different pieces of raw data. The usefulness of knowledge then becomes its predictive value, whether the noticed pattern will repeat itself and whether you can plan around it. Nevertheless, because of the weird nature of the universe at the bottom level, where events are governed largely by chance, we can never say that something is or isn't impossible. If a black-hole can radiate particles, and if the earth's atoms could decompose all at once, well, then, anything is possible).

For those familiar with logical positivism, I have already shown my hand. The most characteristic claim of logical positivism asserts that statements are meaningful only insofar as they are verifiable, and that statements can be verified only in two (exclusive) ways: empirical statements, including scientific theories, which are verified by experiment and evidence; and analytic truth, statements which are true or false by definition, and so are also meaningful. However, one of the tenets of logical positivism is to disregard moral philosophy because metaphysical analysis is no longer meaningful. This, I do not agree with.

One of the reasons I cannot not completely agree with logical positivism correlates directly with the task I have laid out. If Western civilization arose out of a discipline of moral philosophy, we do a grave disservice to our culture when we, with a flick of the wrist, discard it and presume that metaphysical analysis has no meaning. In fact, the very success we see around us proves that it has a meaning. Positivism may be correct that there are no metaphysical and verifiable truths, but is not this statement itself something that cannot be verified?

Metaphysics, for me, is simply a shorthand conceptual paradigm, a logical structure and language generator where terms like good and evil do exist and are verifiable, if we begin with the right definition. Nietzsche, in this case, was both correct and incorrect. He posited that 'good' and 'evil' were context-specific, that Master Morality, with virtues of strength, power, and conquering, could without contradiction claim certain things were good that Christian (Slave) Morality, with virtues of meekness, humility, and self-control, claimed were evil, and they could both be right within their particular contexts. Simply, what he was saying is that the terms 'good' and 'evil', since they could evolve, were actually meaningless, and needed to be discarded for a new paradigm of creativity and will to power.

However, is it the case that 'good' and 'evil' evolved, or is it simply that their application evolved? As the needs and evolutionary strategies of mankind evolved, cooperation and humility did indeed become much more important as survival techniques. But, ah!, there you have it. In Master Morality, the survival technique, from the man on up to the society, was strength and honor. 'Good', in this culture, was strength and honor. Therefore, we have a simple substitution. If A (good) = B (strength), and B (strength) = C (survival), then A (good) = C (survival). The definition of 'Good' then becomes Survival Technique, Evolution Strategy, or, as I posit: That Which Affirms Life. 'Evil', then, is That Which Ends Life. The scope and context is still important, but we now have a workable definition that can be verified and implemented.

That these precise definitions exist is enough evidence for me that there is something realistic and necessary in moral philosophy, that its acceptance and implementation has some kind of evolutionary value for us as gene-vehicles. If history is our laboratory, then the results are in and we can be certain: Mankind needs moral philosophy to survive, and any negation of this evolutionary strategy is fraught with unimaginable danger.

And that is the baseline to which I bring all of my thoughts. I am not an atheist, but I believe man to be an animal. I cannot be certain about the mystery that lies beneath, the foundational nothingness from which all particles are built, nor can I explain existence without some tribute to the unseen power that props up space and time, matter and energy, chance and event. I can, however, be certain that we are animals made from the same material as all other animals (genes), live on the same planet and succumb to the same rules as all other organisms, and so play the same game of selection, evolution, survival, and death. Once you accept that the game is survival, that the point is to maximize the good and minimize the evil, the next step is easy: we must learn the rules, and win the game.

And that is where I will stop for today. Perhaps more later.

Thank You, Rousseau and Marx

My problem with Leftist thought in general, and these two thinkers in particular, is their propensity to make statements that cannot be falsified, and that even though they begin with vaporous assertion they build on these shifting foundations entire ideological paradigms.

For instance, look at Marx's opening to The Communist Manifesto:

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master [3] and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

Do you see what he is doing? He makes a descriptive statement, that there are indeed distinctive stations in most societies, and then inserts an interpretive statement as a modifier: all distinctions are one of class, of oppressor and oppressed, master and slave.

And the paradigm builds. In addition to the language of oppression, Marx now brings in the use of the words "fight" and "revolution". And notice how he perverts the word "fight" into meaning open engagement and hidden struggle, implying that cleansing violence and shameful impotence are both types of fighting. So now we have "class", "oppression", "fight", and "revolution". If you accept social distinction, you must accept this paradigm. The reader, without being aware, has just been duped into joining Marx in a flight from falsification.

The same thing happens with Rousseau's 'Noble Savage', where he posits that the individual is essentially good but corrupted by society. Therefore, society becomes either a hindrance to the grace of mankind, or a vehicle to let out the savage's nobility, instead of what it really is: a tool to restrain the evil of man's nature and an evolutionary strategy to maximize gene-propagation. The very reality of the world, with societies everywhere and solitary man nowhere to be found, makes Rousseau's statement laughably sentimental, yet time after time it is used as a philosophical spring board for all types of anarchist and tyrannical ideologies.

And thus we have the foundation of all Leftist mumbo-jumbo, the flights from falsification we see in the solutions and strategies put forth by the Left. Welfare, because if we can just support him, man will make the right decision. Aid to Africa, because if we just give enough money, their nobility will shine through. Apology and Good Thoughts in foreign policy will make them love us, because underneath that gruff exterior lies a latte-sipping sophisticate just waiting to be given a Gap Card. Western culture is bad because it is self-evidently corruptive of the divine nature of man, and all Eastern cultures are good because they are authentic expressions of the noble savage.

And so, I am convinced we are going to have to go back and disprove the unprovable if we are to make any strides in the current war for Western Civilization. We must be consistent with our evidence that yes, there is indeed a difference between cultures, but this difference is one of value, not one of oppression. That yes, society can be corruptive, but only insofar that it encourages the evil nature of man while retarding his desire to do good. Man, like the beast, responds to incentive structures, and perhaps his greatest single attribute is his desire to live well according to his own lights, but within a system of cooperation and society where he feels he belongs. We need to show them that a kid from Iowa does not grow up to be a terrorist only because of the culture that surrounds him, and a Palestinian kid blows himself up for the same reason.

We need to show the Leftists that there are such things as values, that they do relate to a thing called reality, and if we do not pay attention, we will be mugged by it.

The Challenge

In essence, we are asking many peoples across a broad spectrum of ideologies to sacrifice emotionally and physically for a cause that remains nebulous and insubstantial.

The violence of terrorism gets our foot in the door and facilitates our urgings--and it is indeed starting to turn heads--but there are many people who do not read blogs and do not immerse themselves in data and have no idea how serious the problem is. For these people we need something simple, something primal that even the most cynical or uninitiated will accept.

We can never convince everybody, but we can strive to do so. Today is different from all others, for we have the ability to organize spontaneously around a valid theme and trumpet it to the world via the internet. The answer may be esoteric--built around a deep study of culture, history, and anthropology--or it may be simple, commonplace, and hiding before our eyes. Whatever it is, it will divulge itself. All we must do is remain focused and continue the search.

Gene Vehicle Means You

Doug: "VDH does a great job of illustrating the importance of maximizing cooperation and organization, but it seems to me that this has often meant a SMALLER number of greater cohesion/effectiveness = POWER."

I am constraining my analysis to simply mean survival, avoidance of massive and violent murder. I am not advocating a particular culture in the gene vehicle argument (though I do advocate American culture in general); I am advocating the adhesion of all viable cultures under a common ideological banner (as opposed to legalistic, that comes later). There must be some ideals that all rational people will embrace, a theme that speaks to the heart of us all. That is what we need to find. If it exists, or can exist, it will be simple, primal, and easily understood across all cultures that are viable.

What I am proposing, though it may sound fantasist, is not an increase of national power (though, again, I do propose that), but at minimum an elimination of organized, murderous intolerance. If we can bring the selective forum of ideology up from the barbaric, if we can eliminate the countenance of mass slaughter in the furtherance of belief, we will have made tremendous strides in the betterment of mankind, regardless of the power and political shifts that adhere to human interaction.

The bonus for America is that such a shift away from murderous intolerance will greatly improve her standing and her power. We are a nation of free peoples, and our fortunes reside in the direction of freedom and tolerance.

The winds of fortune themselves are ever changing, and who knows how long they will be at our back. The time for action is now, while we can exercise our enormous strength in the cause of life, without being constrained by a balancing force of tyranny and a truly existential threat of evil.

Therefore, we need to rally all available friends and allies, all likeminded men and women who want nothing more than to live well according to their own lights, without artificially limiting our strength by pushing away those who would join us but for a crass and irresponsible battle cry.

VDH is a bright guy, but he is arguing for the survival of a culture. I am arguing for the survival, and evolution, of its ecosystem.

Against a "War on Islam"

Abraham Lincoln, in 1842:

When the dram-seller and drinker, were incessantly told, not in accents of entreaty and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring brother; but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation, with which the lordly Judge often groups together all the crimes of the felon's life, and thrusts them in his face just ere he passes sentence of death upon him, that they were the authors of all the vice and misery and crime in the land; that they were the manufacturers and material of all the thieves and robbers and murderers that infested the earth; that their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their persons should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences -- I say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful that they were slow, very slow, to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations, and to join the ranks of their denouncers in a hue and cry against themselves.

To have expected them to do otherwise than they did -- to have expected them not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimination with crimination, and anathema with anathema, was to expect a reversal of human nature, which is God's decree, and never can be reversed. When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a "drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall." So with men. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.

Dram-Sellers and drinkers are, of course, not to be equated with Islam and Muslims. Nevertheless, it seems to me, if we are indeed trying to gain allies, and if we are indeed serious about winning the war, driving 1 billion Muslims into the enemy camp is a really intemperate way to go about it.

Targeting Capability First

From my Comment at BC:
We are in a struggle against terrorists, or more specifically, a collection of individuals bonded together by a conceptual paradigm, one that blends a radical Islamic ideology with the indiscriminate targeting of civilians.

A very significant characteristic of this paradigm is its inadaptibility; it has a built-in redundancy that disallows invalidation. When all pay-offs are in the next world, and when all events are determined, there is not much you can do to deter or forcefully modify the faith of the true believer when death (martyrdom) is embraced and celebrated. This is our opponent.

In strategy, the two most important things to consider are your opponent's intentions, and his capabilities. Now, what strategy should you choose when fighting an enemy that cannot be deterred, whose intentions are set and cannot be restrained?

Simply, you focus primarily on his capabilities. Unfortunately, we live in an age of force-multiplication via technological innovation, yet these multipliers still have costs and most have entry barriers to their manufacture. The creation of nuclear weapons is the best example, since the large infrastructure needed to manufacture this extreme multiplier demands vast resources that only a state can bring to bear.

But capabilities are restrained or multiplied in many ways that have nothing to do with weaponry. Freedom of movement, unadulterated time to plan, protection from interference...all of these can increase the capability of an organization. An cult like Al'Qaeda would have a precipitous drop in capability and power projection if they had none of these things.

Therefore, the most intelligent course of action would be to strike quickly at the nexus between your opponent and his access to force-multipliers, while also seeking to limit the places on the globe where quarter is offered. Hence our strategy to eliminate the places that posed both of these dangers: Iraq, Syria, and Iran. (I do not say North Korea because to my knowledge this country does not offer quarter; likewise, Saudi Arabia does not offer weapons, though they do offer money).

Iraq was the obvious choice after Al'Qaeda's base in Afghanistan was collapsed; in essence, it was the low-hanging fruit of the three problematic areas. 12 years of constant attrition of Iraqi military defences through no-fly-zone, 17 violated resolutions, our significant knowledge of the territory, the violation of the 1991 Armistice, the vast history of Saddam's repression and evil, the familiarity of the American public with Iraq's status as an enemy, the large quantities of unaccounted-for WMD, and the strategic placement of Iraq between the other two problem areas made it the obvious next step. Taking down Iraq and building a democracy offered an excellent opportunity to address the problems of Iran and Syria, too, in a non-military fashion. Iran's military was strong enough to be a deterrent, and the population restless enough, that it made sense to address it slowly and subtly. Syria, more than the other two, was vulnerable to pressure and political maneuvering. We have made great strides in these areas by going after Iraq.

But it all comes down to capability. There may not be much we can do against the ideology when British-born well-to-do Muslims decide their wives and Mercedes are unsatisfactory, when the hatred overwhelms reason and they lash out at the innocent. But a starting point would be to limit the amount of damage they can do when their eyes turn red.

The Nash equilibrium in Game theory is the best strategy for you to take given the constancy of your opponent's strategy. In a two-player zero sum game, it is called the Maximin Criterion. Focusing on Al'Qaeda's capability instead of focusing on deterrence was/is the Maximin Criterion and the simplest Nash equilibrium. If we are to take Al'Qaeda seriously, if we are to take their declaration of total war as a true exposition of their intention, and their strategy of terror as constant, OIF was by far the most responsible next step in this large and complicated war.

Without states that harbor and give quarter, without infrastructure to produce force-multipliers, and without the protection and organizational integrity that states can offer the terrorists, their capability will remain closely linked to the backback and the fertilizer.