Dec 06

Secret prisons

I’m having real trouble understanding the current flap over allegations that
the CIA is running secret overseas prisons for terrorists and enemy combatants.
I would prefer not to believe this is just another outbreak of reflexive
anti-Americanism, but I don’t see any principled case against what is
being alleged. Can anyone explain it to me?

Continue reading

Dec 06

Just desserts

There comes to us from Iraq the news that a terrorist group
calling itself Sword of Truth has kidnapped four people from a group
called Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) and has threatened to kill
them unless some demands for the release of certain terrorists from
Iraqi jails are met. What makes this interesting is that CPT exists
to oppose the U.S. occupation; that is, they are in effect (if not by
intention) allies of the terrorists threatening them.

When I first learned this, my first gut reaction was to think “Ha!
Off with their heads!” My second reaction was to feel ashamed of my first
reaction. How have things come to such a pass that I find myself
rooting for terrorists to kill Westerners?

Continue reading

Sep 13

Suicidalism

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist
terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The
suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to
spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or
journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s
will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.

But al-Qaeda didn’t create the ugly streak of nihilism and
self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I
believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by
Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with
conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West’s
intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with
such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union
itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western
intellectual life.

Continue reading

Aug 29

Getting Orwell Wrong

The interpretation of George Orwell could be a paradigm for how dead literary figures get knocked from pillar to post by the winds of political interpretation. During his lifetime, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm went from darling of the left to exile for having been willing to write the truth about Communist totalitarianism in allegories too pointed to ignore.

With the end of the Cold War, forty-two years after Orwell’s death, the poisonous fog breathed on Western intellectual life by Soviet agents of influence slowly began to lift. It became possible to say that Communist totalitarianism was evil and had always been evil, without being dismissed as a McCarthyite or reactionary not merely by those agents but by a lot of “no enemy to the left” liberal patsies who should have known better. In this climate, Orwell’s uncompromising truth-telling shone even more brightly than before. For some on the left, belated shame at their own complicity with evil transmuted itself into more adulation for Orwell, and more attempted identification with Orwell’s positions, than at any time in the previous fifty years.

Then came 9/11. Orwell’s sturdy common sense about the war against the fascisms of his day made him a model for a few thinkers of the left who realized they had arrived at another of Marx’s “world-historical moments”, another pivot point at which everything changed. Foremost among these was Christopher Hitchens, who would use Orwell to good effect in taking an eloquent and forceful line in favor of the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq. For this, he was rewarded with the same vituperation and shunning by the Left that had greeted the publication of Orwell’s anti-totalitarian allegories fifty years before.

Hitchens, who coined the term “Islamofascist” for the ideology of Al-Qaeda and its allies, is in particular responsible for having given renewed currency to the following Orwell quote addressing the war against the Nazis:

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically
help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me.

Reading it in its original full form, in a 1941 essay Pacifism and the War published in Partisan Review, only makes it clearer how directly the quote applies to the War on Terror.

Stung by this, various creatures of the pro-Islamofascist Left (and, alas, some liberal and libertarian patsies who should have known better) responded by asserting that Orwell repudiated this position in his 1944 essay As I Please. But a careful reading of this essay shows that there is less here than meets the eye.

What Orwell actually warns against in this essay is not the concept of “objective pro-fascism”, it is any unwarranted leap from noticing that someone is objectively pro-fascist to assuming that the person is intentionally pro-fascist. Orwell explains that confusing these categories is dangerous because it can cause you to mis-predict peoples’ behavior.

There is nothing exceptionable here, and nothing that repudiates the substance of the earlier quote. Yes, Orwell does observe “I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once”, but his “guilty” is a rhetorical flourish, a setup for his real point about confusing effects with intentions.

Both essays are examples of the determined stab, straight through cant to the heart of the matter, that Orwell did so well and so consistently. It was perfectly consistent with the rest of his work for him to observe that there is such a thing as objective pro-fascism, then insist that we not confuse that condition with intentional treason.

As for those who would like to use this “retraction” to take Orwell out of the fight…your behavior is objectively pro-fascist in precisely the sense he intended. At the very least, it is evidence of careless reading and sloppy thinking.

Aug 02

Libertarian realism

I hate war. Even when the results of defeat would be worse than
the results of war, I hate war. It kills people and makes government
stronger. But when the results of defeat would be worse, I face
reality and support war.

Our Islamist enemies want to kill us all — starting with Jews and
gays, but continuing to anyone who doesn’t convert to Islam and accept
shari’a and the whole nine yards. That’s not melodrama, it’s
reporting of the plain and simple statements Al-Qaeda uses in their
recruiting videos. They want to kill us all. They demonstrated
the deadly seriousness of this aim on 9/11.

The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of
enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian,
I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting
for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while
doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.

If I had a magic wand that could instantly materialize a world of
private security agencies, insurance pools, and mercenaries capable of
fighting the war on terror, I would have waved it long before 9/11.
But I am not capable of changing the objective conditions of the war
any more than I am of changing the murderous intentions of our
enemies.

Though I’ve been accused of abandoning my libertarianism for a
conservative position, I still believe in the non-initiation of force
as strongly as I ever have. I saw one damn huge freaking initiation
of force on 9/11 — not just an attack on one city or one country
but an assault on Western civilization. Everything al-Qaeda’s
propaganda organs have said since confirms that is what they intend.

George Orwell, writing during World War II, wrote:

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common
sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically
help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining
outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not
with me is against me.'”

If Orwell were alive today, I have no doubt he would view this war
as equally pressing, nor which side of it he would choose. And all
libertarians should heed his words. We’ve shown far too much of a
tendency to slide into denial about the war on terror and the
consequences of refusing to fight it.

Sliding off into denial and fantasyland is not noble, it’s an
abdication of our responsibility as human beings and members of a
civilization. If that denial becomes “the” libertarian position, our
statist opponents will damn us as for deserting our neighbors and our
civilization in its hour of need — and they will be right to
damn us.

Other libertarians may fail this test. I will not.

Jul 26

Kurds in the Coal Mine

How will we know if the attempt to reconstruct Iraq is failing?

This is a serious question. With as much hysterical anti-Iraq-war,
anti-Bush-Administration fabrication going in the media as there has
been, it’s tempting for a rational person to dismiss every negative
report as just another load of Michael Mooronism and dismiss it. That
would be a mistake. Things could still go very bad there. How would
we tell?

Continue reading

Jul 24

Sowing Dragon’s Teeth

David Lucas’s op-ed
in the Knoxville News-Sentinel combines with this story about active-duty military personnel criticizing Edward
Kennedy and Dick Durbin’s “gulag” rhetoric about Guantanamo Bay to suggest something interesting about the long-term political impact of the Iraq War.

Historically, one of the major byproducts of American wars is politicians. While it’s rare for a career military man to carve out a successful political career as Dwight Eisenhower did, there’s a strong pattern of non-career junior officers serving in combat returning to civilian life to become successful politicians. John Kerry, though he failed to win the presidency, has had a successful enough political career to count as one of the most recent examples.

I expect the Iraq war will produce a bumper crop of future politicians from its junior officer corps — men like David Lucas who are already making public names for themselves. So it’s worth asking what these people believe, and how the lessons they’re learning in Iraq will affect the attitude they bring to careers in civilian politics.

Recent surveys showing that 80% of the serving military officer corps voted Republican in 2004 combine with exceptionally high in-theater re-enlistment rates and op-eds like Lucas’s to paint a picture of a military that believes very strongly in the rightness of the Iraq war — a belief which appears to be strong not just among careerists but among short-timers who expect to return to civilian life as well. A related piece of evidence is negative but almost equally strong; the anti-war wing of U.S. politics has failed to discover or produce any returning veterans of Iraq who are both able to denounce the war effectively in public and willing to do so.

We already know, because they’re telling us themselves in mil-blogs, that the military serving in Iraq has developed a bitter contempt for the mainstream media. Biased, shoddy, and selective reporting with a heavy sensationalist and anti-war slant has had consequences; it has played well among bicoastal liberals in the U.S. but angered and alienated the troops on the ground. They know that reality there is greatly different from what’s being reported, and increasingly they’re willing to say so.

The Washington Times story shows that anti-war posturing by leading Democrats is angering and alienating the serving military as well. An increasing number seem to think they are seeing what is in effect a conspiracy between the mainstream media and the Democrats to make a just war unwinnable in order to score domestic political points. In the longer run, this is a disaster in the making for Democrats. It means that this war’s crop of successful politicians and influence leaders probably going to trend Republican and conservative to an unprecedented degree.

This is not a prospect that fills me with glee. Given their military background, the political children of the Iraq war seem more
likely to reinforce the authoritarian/cultural-conservative side of the Republican split personality than the small-government/libertarian one. In the worst case, military resentment of the Democrats could fracture the strong unwritten tradition that keeps the serving military out of civilian politics. That could be very bad.

I think that worst case is still quite unlikely. But if it happens, the Democrats and the mainstream media will have nobody but themselves to blame. Their irresponsible and destructive political games have sown dragon’s teeth; let’s hope we don’t all come to regret the harvest.

Jul 18

The Hollywood Left is from Venus?

David Koepp, the screenwriter behind the current blockbuster movie
War of the Worlds has said:
“the Martians in our movie represent American military forces invading
the Iraqis.”

As InstaPundit observed, you just can’t make this stuff up. It’s
hard to lampoon the Hollywood left any more, because they keep
uttering inanities that venture beyond far, far beyond parody —
yea and verily, into the Land of the Barking Moonbats. Nevertheless,
here at Armed and Dangerous we’re not afraid to
try…

OK, Mr, Koepp, let’s see if I have this straight. The Americans in
the movie aren’t Americans. they’re Iraqis. The Martians aren’t
Martians, they’re Americans. Fine, I follow you so far. Is there a
scene where the Martians collect toys from the Red Planet to give to
American children? Do they build schools and powerplants for the
Earthlings who are blowing them up with IEDs? Is there a scene where
the Martians depose the brutal American dicator George Bush —
you know, the one who fought a pointless war with Mexico and
nerve-gassed the population of the upper Midwest? Do we get to see his
twin daughters amusing themselves by feeding dissidents feet-first
into industrial shredders?

Koepp would have it that War of the Worlds is a fable
about the perils of military adventurism. As an anarchist who
believes that war is the health of the State and an overly healthy
State is a damnably bad thing, I daresay I’m more dead set against
“military adventurism” than he is; I’ll bet he thought it wasn’t so
bad when, say, Soviet tanks were rolling into Prague in 1968, if he
was alive then.

But “adventurism” is a peculiar word to use in this context. Not
the movie, but what he claims it refers to. Um. Just checking,
now…four years before the movie began, did the two tallest buildings
on Mars get flying saucers crashed into them by terrorists operating
from Guatemala? Did every intelligence service on Mars believe, and
tell their leaders, that the terrorists had been getting training and
logistical support from the CIA? Did the Martian press repeatedly
publish investigative stories about the terrorist/American connection
and urging Mars to do something about it — stories that were
believed clean across the political spectrum before a campaign for
Supreme Xyglfrntz made it convenient for one faction of Martians to
forget that?

Probably not. But that’s the movie I want to see. You know,
the one where John Kerry does a cameo as a failed candidate for Supreme
Xyglfrntz who voted for the invasion before he voted against it.

Jan 03

War is the Continuation of Journalism

StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now using
press credentials as cover
. Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested
after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now
protesting that this was an error.

Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this
is bleakly funny. Those Iraqi employees thought, perhaps, that they could
earn a nice bonus by doing with lead what Reuters does with ledes. Why not?
After all, the terror network and Reuters share an important objective
— the breaking and humbling of U.S. power.

Watch the aftermath closely. If (as seems not unlikely) there were
Reuters stringers involved in the attack, you will probably see
Reuters condemn the actions of its employees only on the general
grounds that actually shooting Americans jeopardizes the
customary privileges and immunities of the press, not because attacks
on American troops are in any way intrinsically a bad thing. The
anti-American slant of Reuters coverage will doubtless continue —
in fact, any suggestion that it might have contributed to or enabled
the violence of yesterday will be met with shock and indignation.

In the warped moral universe that Reuters and the BBC and much of
America’s own elite media inhabit, American power is so frightening and
loathsome that Islamist barbarians are actually preferable to George
W. Bush. They’ll print with a straight face quotes by al-Qaeda apologists
condemning the U.S. as a ‘rogue state’ and U.S. policies as
terrorism, while refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ for
Al-Hamas attacks that target Israeli children for mass murder.

Reuters stringers firing bullets at American troops makes concrete
a drama that has previously been abstract. Today’s war on terror is
not just a war between the West and fundamentalist Islam, it is a
confrontation of the healthy versus the diseased portions of the West
itself. The disease is Julien Benda’s trahison
des clercs
and all its sequelae. And Reuters, marching in step
with Old Europe and the American left, is objectively on the side of
the West’s enemies.

UPDATE: Three Reuters employees who were alleged to have been involved in the attack have been
released. This does not change my evaluation that anti-U.S., pro-terrorist bias is
pervasive and deep in Reuters international coverage, sufficiently so to put them on the enemy side.
As an index of this bias, consider that by editorial policy Reuters will not use the word “terrorist”
to describe groups like Hamas or al-Aqsa.

Dec 21

Lessons of Libya

Muammar Qaddaffi, Libya’s dictator and long-time terrorist
sugar-daddy, has agreed to dismantle his WMD programs and allow
international inspections. The NYT’s December 20th article Lessons
of Libya
, covering this development, is unintentionally
hilarious.

An honest account would probably have read something like this:

When Qaddafi saw the Hussein capture pictures they must have scared
him silly. Realizing that the U.S. is no longer in the mood to take
shit from tin-pot tyrants in khaffiyehs, and that the U.S. military
could blow its way into Tripoli and give him a free dental exam in
less time than it would take for an utterly impotent U.N. to pass the
resolution condemning American action, he crawled to the Brits
whimpering “Don’t let your big brother hurt me,
pleeeassseee…

Instead, we’re treated to a bunch of waffle: “To an extent
that cannot be precisely measured” and “yesterday’s
announcement also demonstrates the value of diplomacy and United
Nations sanctions”. I suspect the NYT will deny as long as it
can the real lesson of Libya, which is the same as the lessons of Iraq
and Afghanistan and, for that matter, Yugoslavia. And that is this:
the disarmament of rogue states has never once been accomplished by
the U.N. or by diplomacy or ‘international opinion’, but
is now being driven simply and solely by the fear of American military
power and the will to use it.

We are in what Karl Marx would have called a world-historical
moment — the first time that American hyperpuissance has
defanged a dictator without actual war. All the rules will
be different from now on, and Qaddafi (wily survivor that he is) has
figured them out well ahead of the Western chattering classes. The
most important rule is this: do not make the U.S. fear what
you might become, or it will break you.

Indeed, it seems very likely to me that future historians will date
the beginning of the 21st-century Pax Americana from Qaddafi’s
crawfishing. The U.S. is not merely maintaining its lead in economic
vigor and military heft over any conceivable opposing coalition, that
lead is actually increasing. Demographic trends (notably the fact that
Europeans and Japanese are not breeding at replacement levels) suggest
that U.S.’s relative power, in both ‘hard’ and
‘soft’ terms, will continue to increase through at least
2050.

The most visible indicator of this change, aside from the collapse
of awful governments in any number of Third-World pestholes, will be
the marginalization of the U.N. That organization, which has never
had hard power, will now lose its soft power as well. It might have
been different — but France and the other nations who aimed to
set the U.N. up as a geopolitical counterforce to the U.S. overplayed
their hand in the run-up to the liberation of Iraq. For that effort,
the capture of Saddam and Qaddafi’s surrender in the face of an
American-led New World Order are fatal blows. The U.N. may survive as
an umbrella for international aid agencies and a few technical
standards groups, but in the future it will constrain American
behavior less, not more.

The ripple effects on Middle Eastern, European, and U.S. domestic
politics will be significant. Even Arab News is
beginning to come around to the realization that the U.S. did the Arab
world a favor by deposing Saddam Hussein, and his capture
significantly betters the odds that the reconstruction of Iraq will
succeed. Since U.S. power has actually accomplished the peaceful
disarmament of a rogue state, making political hay in Europe from a
case against U.S. unilateralism is going to become steadily more
difficult. And in the U.S., the antiwar opposition is increasingly
marginal and demoralized as the war goes well and George Bush’s
re-election now looks like a near certainty.

To borrow Churchill’s phrase, this is not the end of the War on Terror.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Nov 10

Dehumanization

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist
holdouts in Iraq
werewolves
, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize
them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters
like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify
continuing to kill them.

This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a person who
cannot really imagine a moral stance different from his/her own. In
such tender-minded thinking, the world is neatly divided into humans
that one must treat pretty much as though they were one’s next-door neighbor,
and non-humans who are not part of the moral community. The possibility
that a human being could be outside the moral community is essentially
ignored.

But there are human beings who are outside the moral community by nature.
We call them psychopaths. They lack the wiring for empathy and reciprocity
that makes it possible for most human beings to cooperate; they can (and
often do) commit sickening atrocities for pleasure. Fortunately, most
psychopaths have other kinds of neurological deficits as well and are
therefore not very bright.

Some people who probably were not born with psychopathy make themselves
into psychopaths. Consider, as a relevant example, Saddam Hussein and
his sons. They fed living people into shredders for amusement. No semantic
debate over whether that sort of monster is “human” or “dehumanized”
is going to change my judgment that that it deserves a violent
death as quickly as that result can be arranged.

The Baathist holdouts in Iraq are the hench-monsters of the
Husseins — the men who tore infants’ eyes out and strapped women
to tables in rape rooms. Calling them “werewolves” or “orcs” is not
an attempt to dehumanize them; that would be pointless, since they
have already dehumanized themselves.

Nov 07

Call them Werewolves

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and
terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit
of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent”
or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we
are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to
war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf
Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized
a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla
warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and
tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very
close
.

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein’s autobiography that
he admired Hitler’s ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We
should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of
willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for
themselves.

Call them werewolves. It’s what they deserve.

Blogspot comments

Oct 21

Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a
denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of
comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and
I wasn’t a target.

I’d ask what I’ve been doing wrong with my life that I missed out
on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama’s fuckwit brigade.
But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for
going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes
in the wheels of SCO. I didn’t maintain the momentum I had in
2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats’ radar.

To all of you who were targeted — Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit,
Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and
my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war
of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly
exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologists in the
West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you
greater tribute than I can.

Hmmm. Maybe I ought to update the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto.
Think that’d piss ’em off enough that they’s try to DDOS me?

Blogspot comments

Oct 04

No Flies On The U.S.

In his recent article Flypaper:
A Strategy Unfolds
, Andrew Sullivan trots out some confirming
evidence for the theory that the U.S. is pursuing a “flypaper
strategy” in Iraq — encouraging the Islamist terror
network to fight American soldiers there so they won’t be attacking
American civilians here.

Mr. Sullivan’s analysis is plausible. Plausible enough that my reaction
to the article, especially the last paragraph in which he urges Bush to
articulate the strategy as a way of scoring domestic political points. was:
“OK, you’ve demonstrated your cleverness. Now would you kindly
zip your lip before you undermine the strategy?”

The leaders of the Islamist terror network are certainly evil and
arguably insane (if only in the general way that all religious
believers are insane) but they’re not stupid. If the
President of the United States got on network T.V. and yelled
“We have a flypaper strategy! We’re encouraging all the world’s
nut-jobs to attack us in Iraq so they won’t attack us in the
U.S.”, just what do you suppose would be the result?

Would our favorite murderous ragheads nod agreeably, say
“Peachy, we’ll play your game and keep attacking you where you
think you’re strongest?” Or would they bend all their efforts
to ginning up another mass-murder in the U.S. just to prove they can
do it and the flypaper isn’t working?

For anyone to talk about a flypaper strategy in public is
irresponsible. For Sullivan to urge that Bush should cop to it in
public in order to one-up his domestic opponents is beyond
irresponsible into idiotic and feckless. The President of the
U.S. would be profoundly derelict in his duty if he courted lethal
danger to American civilians by doing any such thing.

I’m normally a fan of Andrew Sullivan. His writing is witty if
occasionally a bit febrile, and he is clear-eyed on a handful of
subjects that normally induce rectocranial inversion in conservatives.
But today he should be ashamed of himself. He has engaged in the
exact same error he has excoriated in others, which is treating
the rest of the world as a mere backdrop to domestic American
political feuds.

And I have some advice for him: Mr. Sullivan, next time you feel
the urge to be clever in public, do us all a favor and ask yourself
how many innocent lives you might be endangering by running your
mouth. If the answer is more than zero, shut up!

Blogspot comments

Sep 11

One year later…

One year ago today, the World Trade Center fell in flames. And that very day, just a few hours after the event, I wrote the following:

QUOTE BEGINS

Some friends have asked me to step outside my normal role as a technology evangelist today, to point out in public that a political panic reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attack could do a great deal more damage than the attack itself.

Today will not have been a victory for terrorism unless we make it one. If we reward in any way the Palestinians who are now celebrating this hideous crime in the streets of the West Bank, that will have been a victory for terrorism. If we accept “anti-terrorism” measures that do further damage to our Constitutional freedoms, that will have been a victory for terrorism. But if we learn the right lessons, if we make policies that preserve freedom and offer terrorists no result but a rapid and futile death, that will have been a victory for the rest of us.

We have learned today that airport security is not the answer. At least four separate terror teams were able to sail right past all the elaborate obstacles — the demand for IDs, the metal detectors, the video cameras, the X-ray machines, the gunpowder sniffers, the gate agents and security people trained to spot terrorists by profile. There have been no reports that any other terror units were successfully prevented from achieving their objectives by these measures. In fact, the early evidence is that all these police-state-like impositions on freedom were exactly useless — and in the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center lies the proof of their failure.

We have learned today that increased surveillance is not the answer. The FBI’s “Carnivore” tap on the U.S.’s Internet service providers didn’t spot or prevent this disaster; nor did the NSA’s illegal Echelon wiretaps on international telecommunications. Video monitoring of public areas could have accomplished exactly nothing against terrorists taking even elementary concealment measures. If we could somehow extend airport-level security to the entire U.S., it would be just as useless against any determined and even marginally competent enemy.

We have learned today that trying to keep civilian weapons out of airplanes and other areas vulnerable to terrorist attack is not the answer either — indeed, it is arguable that the lawmakers who disarmed all the non-terrorists on those four airplanes, leaving them no chance to stop the hijackers, bear part of the moral responsibility for this catastrophe.

I expect that in the next few months, far too many politicians and pundits will press for draconian “anti-terrorist” laws and regulations. Those who do so will be, whether intentionally or not, cooperating with the terrorists in their attempt to destroy our way of life — and we should all remember that fact come election time.

As an Internet technologist, I have learned that distributed problems require distributed solutions — that centralization of power, the first resort of politicians who feed on crisis, is actually worse than useless, because centralizers regard the more effective coping strategies as threats and act to thwart them.

Perhaps it is too much to hope that we will respond to this shattering tragedy as well as the Israelis, who have a long history of preventing similar atrocities by encouraging their civilians to carry concealed weapons and to shoot back at criminals and terrorists. But it is in that policy of a distributed response to a distributed threat, with every single citizen taking personal responsibility for the defense of life and freedom, that our best hope for preventing recurrences of today’s mass murders almost certainly lies.

If we learn that lesson, perhaps today’s deaths will not have been in vain.

END QUOTE

As I reread the above, it does not seem to me that we have yet learned our lesson. We have taken steps towards arming pilots, but not passengers. Tiger-team probes of airport security have shown that the rate at which weapons can be smuggled through remains 30% — unchanged since before 9/11. A year later, therefore, the frisk searches of little old ladies and the no-sharp-edges prohibitions have bought us no security at all.

The scorecard is not entirely bleak. Al-Qaeda has not been able to mount another successful mass murder. Post-9/11 legal changes through the Patriot Act and related legislation have been troubling, but not disastrous. And the war against the Taliban was a rather less complicated success than one might have expected — civilian casualties minimal, no uprising of the mythical “Arab Street”, and Al-Qaeda’s infrastructure smashed. Osama bin-Laden is probably dead.

Still, the war is far from over. Islamic terrorism has not been repudiated by the ulema, the college of elders who prescribe the interpretation of the Koran and the Hadith. The call to violent jihad wired into the foundations of Islam has not yet been broken or tamed into a form civilization can coexist with. Accomplishing that is the true challenge that faces us, one greater and more subtle than merely military victory.

(Yes, I wrote the above in 2002. Some glitch in the blog software gives it a 2003 date. I don’t know why.)

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Nov 14

Conspiracy and prospiracy

One of the problems we face in the war against terror is that al-Qaeda is not quite a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It’s something else that is more difficult to characterize and target.

(I wrote what follows three years before 9/11.)

Political and occult conspiracy theories can make for good propaganda and excellent satire (vide Illuminatus! or any of half a dozen other examples). As guides to action, however, they are generally dangerously misleading.

Misleading, because they assume more capacity for large groups to keep secrets and maintain absolutely unitary conscious policies than human beings in groups actually seem to possess. The history of documented “conspiracies” and failed attempts at same is very revealing in this regard — above a certain fairly small size, somebody always blows the gaff. This is why successful terrorist organizations are invariably quite small.

Dangerously misleading because conspiracy theories, offering the easy drama of a small group of conscious villains, distract our attention from a subtler but much more pervasive phenomenon — one I shall label the “prospiracy”.

What distinguishes prospiracies from conspiracies is that the members don’t necessarily know they are members, nor are they fully conscious of what binds them together. Prospiracies are not created through oaths sworn by guttering torchlight, but by shared ideology or institutional culture. In many cases, members accept the prospiracy’s goals and values without thinking through their consequences as fully as they might if the process of joining were formal and initiatory.

What makes a prospiracy like a conspiracy and distinguishes it from a mere subcultural group? The presence of a “secret doctrine” or shared goals which its core members admit among themselves but not to perceived outsiders; commonly, a goal which is stronger than the publicly declared purpose of the group, or irrelevant to that declared purpose but associated with it in some contingent (usually historical) way.

On the other hand, a prospiracy is unlike a conspiracy in that it lacks well-defined lines of authority. Its leaders wield influence over the other members, but seldom actual power. It also lacks a clear-cut distinction between “ins” and “outs”.

Prospiracy scales better than conspiracy, and thus can be far more dangerous. Because anyone can join simply by buying the “secret” doctrine, people frequently recruit themselves. Because the “secret” isn’t written on stone tablets in an inner sanctum, it’s totally deniable. In fact, members sometimes deny it to themselves (not that that ultimately matters). What keeps a prospiracy together is not conscious commitment but the memetic logic of its positions.

As an exercise (and to avoid any appearance of axe-grinding), I’ll leave the reader to apply this model for his or herself. There are plenty of juicy examples out there. I’m a “member” of at least two of them myself.

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