The Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt was right.
We're facing the Attack of the Killer Dorks.
It must be tough wondering if God is with you as the first step into infinity is taken triggering the detonator. Why else do they bungle so? Surely not the fear of the Bailey. Our dialectic gives us few aces to hold in these matters of jihad, leaving us to whisper our secret dialogue, never shouting it. I fear we are scriveners of the absurd ourselves, make code and symbols for the unfolding clash of cultures that can leave but one standing.
Sometimes I think educated folks are more susceptible to ideology than other folks. But maybe I've been hanging around universities too long. Frederick Crews once described the academy as "a kind of heaven for ideas that have slipped their earthly moorings."
I do confess to involuntary shock when I learn how educated some of these people are, but then I usually think "of course they are."
Killer dorks...very much so.
Last edited by Nat Wilcox; 07-07-2007 at 04:08 AM. Reason: dorks, geeks...whatever.
If learned men of science are susceptible to the murderous jihadist ideology, how susceptible then are the uneducated Islamic masses to the Western counter-message? This is a caveat to the COIN philosophy IMO. We know how to grapple with this dilemma but that assures not an adequate understanding of it nor ready means of abatement.
An army of individual mass murderers
Setting aside the overall ideological leadership of an insurgent movement, is it possible to conceive the individual actors (like these doctors) more more along the lines of how we think of individual mass murderers, rather than as political ideologues themselves? In other words, if social conditions are so disrupted that berserkers are being generated within a society in large numbers, all it takes is an ideologue to point them all in the same direction.
For example, here is an interpretation of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, that sees him as a PTSD-generated berserker:
http://collegiateway.org/news/2007-virginia-tech
Supposed you had 50 of these, and could point them all in the same direction. It would make quite a suicide army.
Bob
"Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775
Originally Posted by RJO
What you suggest, I think, totally undercuts President Bush's strategy against terrorism. The central assumption of that strategy is that frustration born of the the lack of political and economic opportunity generates terrorists. So if you take that away through democratization, to stop or staunch the flow of terrorists.
But if the flow of terrorists is simply a reflection of a pathology that we can do nothing about, then democratization is irrelevant (thus taking away the very last shred of justification for the Iraq intervention). The only effective strategy would be aggressive defense (which might include very strict controls on people from Islamic countries who want to come to the West, and some sort of punishment for those who glorify terrorists, perhaps economic and political sanctions against government officials, media, family members, etc).
Personally, this idea appeals to me because I think the roots of the terrorist offensive is not a lack of democracy or, as some contend, misguided Americans policies, but rather a pathological, subrational combination of perceived victimization, a warped hypersensitive sense of justice and honor, and a desire for death on the part of some segment of Islamic societies. Even though it is a minority position, we cannot alter it. As with the Cold War, all we can do is contain it until it burns out.
And, we regain the "moral high ground" by non-interventionist policies.
Sure, it makes the US government look weak, and results in the inevitable absorption of terrorist attacks, but in the long run, we win by turning them into the aggressor.
How do we contain a nonstate actor
with a professed desire (and fatwa allowing them) to obtain and use WMD on US soil? In the case of the Soviet Union, MAD worked to cancel out the WMD factor, and containment was practiced in conventional ways (in small wars, espionage, etc.). But what do we credibly threaten to annihilate if AQ annihilates Cleveland?
Mind you, I am not meaning to defend current practices. But it seems to me that the containment metaphor doesn't clearly apply in the case of the current adversary.
Probably, y'all have discussed what a plausible containment strategy against AQ would look like elsewhere, and if so please just direct me there rather than wasting breath recapitulating it here.
So I think we agree on what the strategic objective is. The question is how best to attain it. But does the promotion of Western style democracy in the Islamic world help prevent an AQ WMD attack on Cleveland? (Of course, we might discuss whether the United States has any vital interests in Cleveland, but that's another issue).
Containment of the Soviet Union wasn't just nuclear deterrence--it was control of travel by Soviet bloc people to the West, economic and political support to fragile nations susceptible to Soviet influence or aggression, the creation of security pacts, etc.
Containment of Islamic extremism might include a similar control on people from Islamic nations who want to travel to the West, more aggressive action to deny the extremists a free rein in cyberspace (difficult, admittedly, but still possible), weaning ourselves off of imported petroleum, as well as more traditional intelligence and and defense activities.
No. We can safely lay aside this question; as I meant to imply, the question of what containment would look like is entirely separate from the critique of current policies.
It seems to me that our chief priority should be to protect ourselves from catastrophic outcomes that don't have vanishingly small probabilities of happening.
I agree with you that containment of the Soviets was not only a matter of nuclear (and other WMD) deterrence. But it certainly was a priority, and MAD (and measures, such as those taken after the Cuban missile crisis, to decrease probabilities of misunderstandings) was a simple (if extremely costly) way of meeting that priority. This allowed us and the Soviets to get on with the relatively trivial business of teasing, annoying and horsing around with each other by other means, such as those you mentioned and others I meant to include in "etc."
There is no MAD in the case AQ. Therefore, it seems to me that the "other means" become terribly important in this case--much, much more important than they were in our conflict with the Soviets. Therefore, they need correspondingly deep thought...does that make sense?
Given the experience of the ongoing War on Drugs and the attempt to stem the tide of illegal immigration, I have almost zero confidence in our ability to prevent the entry of materials and people into the US by the current means we deploy against this. So it seems to me that deep thinking about those two problems is necessary...and that they are extremely difficult subgoals to satisfy, in an effective strategy against WMD on US soil. This needs to be thought out very carefully, I think, in order to spell out a credible containment strategy. I claim no originality here--several people have been pointing out how vulnerable our ports are for many years (and I live in one of the biggest, with lots of rich targets as well)--but a really convincing containment strategy will need to pay lots of attention to that. I think this part of a containment strategy will have to constantly adapt and will be extremely expensive, but I don't see any way around that.
I also suspect we'll have to vastly expand our capabilities for intelligence and covert operations--and be willing to use the latter in ways that won't make us a lot of friends, at least some of the time. In this sense, I rather doubt that maintaining the moral high ground will be consistent with what needs to be done to prevent catastrophic outcomes.
There's also the theological impulse
I'd add another motive. There is a self-confessed theological motive here among the bombers, or at least some of them. Isn't there the duty of jihad to convert or kill the infidel? It beats me how democracy in Mesopotamia is going to deter or contain that kind of thinking.
This notion of keeping 100,000+ soldiers in Iraq just seems ill-suited to me to combat this kind of enemy. It is often stated that if we don't "fight them there, they will come over here." If they have a theological motive, they intend to come over here (or various European cities), no matter if we have troops in Iraq, or not. They might even wise up to the notion that knocking off other Muslims in Iraq isn't really furthering their stated pan-Islamic cause, and decide to refocus attacks over here, anyway.
It seems to me that you have to infiltrate these groups, or at least get good enough intelligence to identify who they are and then raid them. Obviously, that is going to be difficult. The best defense for the good folks of Cleveland against a terrorist WMD attack might end up being the cops on the beat and locals there identifying suspicious activity before they can set off a car bomb or whatever, rather than some platoon walking the streets of Ramadi.
We shall see...
No signature required, my handshake is good enough.
Is there already a containment thread?
If not, and this is so important (and I think it is), maybe a thread devoted to it would be a good idea. It's evident that people are dissatisfied with the current policies. In the sciences you sometimes hear that "You don't kill a theory with mere facts--you also need an alternative theory." Why don't all you very smart folks develop this alternative in detail?...Make for good reading.
Last edited by Nat Wilcox; 07-08-2007 at 02:31 PM. Reason: I can't spell
A lot of my earlier posts have been on this subject and one of the most important is switching our analysis frameworks. Ends,Ways and Means needs to change to the LE framework of Motive,Methods and Opportunity. Especially the motive. I wrote some time back that when you understand the motive you may have to face the fact that you cannot change it. Which is why trying force western style democracy on a Muslim country is the worst thing you could do. The dedicated hard core are like serial killers and there are basically two options for them, death or life imprisonment, you are not going to change these people.
The larger population is an opportunity that we have never exploited by finding common ground in both our legal systems. The payment of Blood money is close in concept to what we call wrongfull death, which is settled by money not blood shed.
Containment is close to what was used in LE some years ago. It was related to the concept of zoning laws that we have today. It can be very effect but it is manpower intensive, not technology oriented.
For the acronym-impaired,
help out this doddering old bystander and tell me what "LE" stands for in this context (I am pretty sure it doesn't mean "less than or equal to"...)
Law Enforcement.
Bin Laden and other extremists contend so, but the vast majority of Muslims (including clerics) do not feel so. The extremists pull passages out of the Koran that most Muslims believe were implorations for Mohammed's campaigns against Mecca, not general rules. After all, it is possible to pull things out of the Old Testament about killing heretics and stoning adulterers, and few Christians see those as general rules.
My concern is that when we treat extreme positions in Islam as main stream, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If mainstream Muslims feels that the West believes that they seek to convert or kill all non-Muslims, there is no ground for cooperation. Then the manichean view of Muslim and Christian extremists becomes reality.
200 % With You
Being a southern boy near Cajun and near purebred Redneck (some Okie Cheorkee got in there) I would have to say I agree 200 %
Tom
I'm with you here, in part. I would phrase our chief problem as more crime prevention, however, than law enforcement per se (though perhaps you include prevention under enforcement). It's clear to me that neither the deterrence nor retribution goals of much law enforcement are interesting here...as you say yourself, the hardcore guys aren't going to be deterred by anything, being willing to immolate themselves to kill my cats. And I'm not interested in vaporizing Medina in retribution for Cleveland. I'm sure you agree.
So, do you mean using the techniques or means of law enforcement in the service of prevention? Like infiltrating gangs, mafias and drug cartels for the purpose of prevention? I guess this is what you must mean, at least in part. Care to elaborate?
And the comment about "zoning laws" just blew right by me. What did you have in mind there?
Originally Posted by RJO:
Setting aside the overall ideological leadership of an insurgent movement, is it possible to conceive the individual actors (like these doctors) more more along the lines of how we think of individual mass murderers, rather than as political ideologues themselves? In other words, if social conditions are so disrupted that berserkers are being generated within a society in large numbers, all it takes is an ideologue to point them all in the same direction.
For example, here is an interpretation of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, that sees him as a PTSD-generated berserker:
http://collegiateway.org/news/2007-virginia-tech
Supposed you had 50 of these, and could point them all in the same direction. It would make quite a suicide army.I don't think my argument necessarily undercuts the democratization strategy. I should also acknowledge that my thinking on this is strongly influenced by Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.
It's possible to accept the notion that an important root cause of terrorism is a sense of victimization and a sense of the abuse of justice and honor (which is a central theme of Shay's work, since the Iliad opens with an aborted fragging of a commanding officer who violated a subordinate's sense of justice), while at the same time seeing democratization and its consequences as a tool to get at those root causes. Following the metaphor of "letting it burn out" -- for that approach to work, you have to make sure there aren't additional sources of ignition that will restart the fire at another spot. It may be that the individual cases have to burn themselves out, but democratization (or more generally, increasing the levels of justice within a society) dampen things down overall and prevent reignition in the minds of other individuals. That permits a shift from a large-scale military strategy to an individually-focused law enforcement strategy. (Occasional mass murderers will always be with us, but organized groups of them need not be.)
"Amid all the terrors of battle I was so busily engaged in Harvard Library that I never even heard of ... [it] until it was completed." —A student a few miles up the road from Bunker Hill, 17 June 1775
What has been a real eye opener for me is that I've spent quite a bit of time over the past few years in the "Small Talk" discussion board of http://southcarolina.rivals.com/forum.asp. It was a huge education. I came to realize that I've spent almost all my entire life around military officers, academics, and various and sundry DC wonks. Even though I grew up in a blue collar family in small towns in West Virginia and South Carolina, I'd lost touch with the man-in-the-street perspective. Small Talk has helped educate me.
Two things in particular have struck me. One is the pervasiveness of what I call "talk radio" syndrome. I'd greatly underestimated how many people form their political opinions almost entirely from political talk radio. As a result, they can only think in insults and caricatures. Logic and evidence are irrelevant; only congruence with the appropriate ideology matters. There is no "agreeing to disagree"--you are either right-thinking or evil. One cannot be a moderate; their political universe consist entirely of "conservatives" and "liberals." Yet these people vote.
I used to amuse myself by doing things to intentionally make their heads explode. The right wing ones, for instance, were always railing against the "liberal bias" of "the media." I'd ask, "What should be done about it?" Their answer was that "someone" should make them be "more balanced" [Fox News was their model!] I'd then point out that the media consists of businesses. They were advocated manipulating the market for political reasons which was a very "liberal" and "anti-conservative" position. The discussion usually died off at that point.
Second is the influence--at least in the South--of what I called evangelical extremism. These are the people who feel we have entered an end-of-time conflagration between Christians and non-Christians (which, depending on the time of day, seems to be either Muslims or secular liberals). At first I just scoffed at them until I began to realize how many there are and how much political influence they have.
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