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July 31, 2005
American Hero - Brian Chontosh
This site talks about Marine CPT Brian Chontosh, and his heroic actions on the drive on Baghdad in 2003. While the site focuses too much on an anti-media crusade, and too little on CPT Chontosh, the story needs to be told. The Marines tell it better. America still makes heros, we still find men like this among us. Thank all the gods that be that it is so.
(hat tip: My Pet Jawa)
Posted by jeff at 8:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBackJuly 30, 2005
Blogrolling
Gerard Van der Leun expands on the concept of blog communities I talked about earlier, and Dave Schuler adds his analysis as well. Both hit upon blogrolls. In a further display of the amazing synchronicity that this topic has been generating, it so happens that one of my current TODOs (too long ignored) is to port MT Blogroll to work with Postgres as its backend database (different schema from MySQL, which is where MT Blogroll is targeted).
I think that blogrolls are an under-exploited feature of the blogosphere. As Dave notes, most people set up their blogrolls with their blogs, and seldom alter them thereafter; and when they are altered, it is mostly additions. I treat mine a little differently: I maintain it actively, both adding and deleting, and move blogs around in the list frequently as well. This is because my blogroll is who I actively read. But there's a problem: it's too big, and so the bottom 2/3 or so of the blogroll is seldom read. That's a shame because there is some excellent material down there.
But for most people, the blogroll seems almost to be a statement of community by its mere existence, which means that it becomes stale quite quickly. (How many blogs still link to BBB, which has been dormant for over 2 years now?) And there's really no need for this, except that there's not a good, universal blogrolling tool. Blogrolling.com is useful, as is MT Blogroll. These tools will become more useful as they add new features, and particularly as they are incorporated into blogging tools.
What this all presages is the concept of communities of blogs, koinonia, becoming more easily detected and more commonly understood. I will contribute what little I can by creating a definitional framework. In the definitions below, the "central blog" is the one that forms the starting point for discovery or definition of the community.
Neighborhood: A central blog's neighborhood consists of all of other blogs to which the central blog links in its blogroll, and which also link back to the central blog in their blogroll.
Koinon: A koinon is the intersection of a set of neighborhoods, containing at least three blogs.
For example, taking myself as the central blog, ZenPundit, The Glittering Eye and American Digest are all part of my neighborhood, because I blogroll all of them and they all blogroll me. In addition, The Glittering Eye and ZenPundit blogroll each other, which means that the three of us form a koinon.
Do those definitions work, or are they too broad, too narrow, or not useful?
I should note, by the way, that these definitions are in part meant to be specific enough that koinons and neighborhoods could be discovered automatically, either with crawlers or with reference to Technorati and the Ecosphere.
UPDATE: Actually, I've thought of a better definition, more expansive of what a koinon is. The definition of koinon above should be for a "family" or "cluster" of blogs. A koinon, then, could be the intersection of a set of neighborhoods, where at least three members of each neighborhood are common. By this definition, then, the koinon would represent a larger order community, with a more diverse spectrum of members, which is what I believe was first intended by the term. For an example, see here.
July 29, 2005
Gatekeepers and Keeping Score
American Digest has a thought-provoking essay on how blogs are becoming more like traditional media: we're evolving gatekeepers that strongly influence what's covered in the blogs. Well worth a read, and too much good stuff to excerpt. I think that Gerard Van der Leun's thesis is right, for a large part of the blogosphere: it's necessary to have someplace to go to find out the gist of what's going on, and sites like Instapundit (it's that near the top of my blogroll for a reason) and Kos are great places to find that. It should be noted, though, that this is primarily true in the politically-obsessed part of the blogosphere, which is already, and will become more so, a shrinking part of the total blogosphere.
But I think that even the political blogosphere has more to it than that. Perhaps Van der Leun is speaking only within the context of media and political blogging - both of which he is a part of - and to that extent I have no alteration to make. But even within that world, it's not that simple. There are three factors that the blogs have that are critical: depth, breadth and reconsideration.
Depth comes from there being so many blogs. While there are a top tier of maybe 1000 right-wing and perhaps 200 left-wing blogs (drawing roughly equal traffic between the groups) and a few dozen centrist blogs that draw high traffic, there are a lot more blogs sitting below the surface. These blogs tend to form koinons, which discuss certain topics and matters amongst themselves. When these reach a critical point, or become part of a larger context, the big blogs take note and incorporate those elements through the magic of hyperlinks. And this draws more people into those lower-traffic koinons, as they are discovered by new readers.
Breadth comes from the fact that many blogs require many authors. Each of those authors has a particular life story, particular training and particular skills. I am, for example, an expert on identity management, information security, directory services, UNIX systems, and enterprise-level systems integration; and as an IT consultant for several years, I've worked with a wide variety of companies and people in a wide variety of places. I have some hobbies and areas of interest that intersect with other blogs (in fact, I originally became interested in blogs because of Transterrestrial Musings (mostly about space) and became determined to blog by reading Steven Den Beste (mostly political analysis, and sadly dormant). I am a husband, and father of four boys. I was born in Okinawa and spent much of the early part of my life in SE Asia and Europe. All of this taken together gives me a particular voice.
There are experts on so many areas, and people who live in so many places, who write blogs, that any issue has an instant set of experts to comment on it. These, too, find their way into the top-traffic blogs as the relevant issues arise. These people all have their own voices, such as the Christian pastor who used to be in the military, or the gay, Republican author of computer books or my wife (who mainly writes about homeschooling and family issues, with a more active comment section than mine).
The third feature of blogs that is critical is reconsideration. This just means that issues can be - and are - revisited over time. Issues don't entirely die in the blogosphere until and unless there is consensus, which as far as I can tell will never happen. What this means in real terms is that reputations are sticky, and in part they are based on people's willingness to change their minds when they figure out they were wrong. People look at the partisan blogs, but generally only if they really agree or really disagree with them. I'd rather read Winds of Change or Balloon Juice, which which I sometimes agree and sometimes do not, than read the partisan blogs. Part of the reason is that the partisan blogs are stuck on their positions as premises, and rarely change them, except when it's politically expedient. The reason that reconsideration is critical, though, is that except for the partisan blogs, issues will eventually gravitate to one or two opinion sets (eg: CBS used obviously fake documents in Rathergate because they were out to get the President and couldn't be bothered to be responsible journalists; or CBS used obviously fake documents in Rathergate because they were duped by a source they trusted). In other words, as new evidence comes in and those who are not emotionally invested in a position change their minds, over time there is a coalescence around a generally-accepted set of facts.
I do think a lot of people are overly obsessed by traffic: what matters to me, though, is not traffic but comments and discussion. I care about comments. I care about trackbacks. (And thanks to Technorati and the Ecosystem - when they work - it's possible to find other people talking about the same topics, but who don't have trackbacks from their sites.) Right now, I'm engaged in a wonderful discussion about polytheism on a post I did on the pantheism and Wiccan cosmology. That matters to me. Others are, of course, welcome to obsess over how many visits per day they get (I checked, and I get about 1500 visits a day on average, which is just utterly wonderful).
UPDATE: Francis Porretto has observations on the same essay.
Oh, and I fixed the spelling of Gerard Van der Leun. Mea maxima culpa.
Media Credibility Goes Boink
Ever since the end of major combat operations in Afghanistan, just a few months after 9/11, there have been two major media themes: the US is failing in the war on terror because of George Bush, and the US is failing in Iraq (which has nothing to do with the war on terror) because of George Bush. But the media has a serious problem now, because of two developments with the latter theme. The first development is that the US has apparently turned the corner in Iraq: we could be reducing troop levels in Iraq next year, and without the country falling apart. The second development is that the terrorists keep insisting on linking their terrorism to the "provocation" of Iraq, as once linked their terrorism to the "provocations" of East Timor, the Gulf War, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of Andalusia (hundreds of years ago).
As the Iraqi political process moves forwards, and the terrorists continue to be beaten down or driven out, and the US begins drawing down troop strength in Iraq, the media will have to report these things, even if they put a decidedly negative spin on events. (If? Of course they will!) With the war in Iraq clearly being won, there will be no way to look at the media coverage of the last few years and see how it happened. How did a series of negative events, coupled with a few minor successes (like the January elections), lead to a positive outcome? And there will be, at that point, a huge drop in media credibility.
Let me pause here for a moment, because there's something that we in the blogosphere frequently forget: we aren't normal. Most Americans don't follow news obsessively, and don't seek out multiple alternative sources of information to tease the strands of truth from the mass of reporting available. Most Americans barely watch the evening news. For the vast majority, news comes mostly second hand. And so only the surface flows of the news story make a real impression on most people. While the non-news obsessive public has already been discounting much of what the media says, and their credibility has already been dropping, this will massively accelerate with events so obviously opposed to the media narrative.
And this will cause the second part of the media template to bite: how will the media be taken seriously on their pronouncements of how badly the war on terror is going, when the media was so wrong on the war in Iraq? And the media will have a hard time pulling the two apart, because the terrorists themselves are linking Iraq to their actions.
So the most dangerous theater of war for the US - public opinion as formed by the media - may not be a danger for too much longer.
UPDATE: This kind of crap doesn't exactly help the media, either. Far too many reporters (not the one named in Mark's piece) are ghouls, and far too many MSM news organizations feed off of the ghoulishness. And that's going to haunt them (no pun intended) in a world where they no longer have the only loud voice.
July 26, 2005
Hanoi Hussein Jane
Let me just say that Jane Fonda is a waste of oxygen and can bite my ass.
UPDATE: Speaking of people who can kiss my ass....
July 25, 2005
Defense in Depth
One of the things that really bugs me is that people tend to think very thinly - even supposed experts. Sometimes, I suppose, that is simply a result of not being willing to say what they really, think, because it would be unpopular. I prefer to think that people are Machiavellian, rather than dumb. (Evidence suggests I'm probably giving too much credit.) A key example, the one that got me writing this, is immigration.
I am a strong supporter of immigration. I think that it should basically be legal for anyone (with a few exceptions, like terrorists or organized criminals or people who have been expelled) to come to the US, for any or no reason, with next to no requirements except that we know who they are and where they are, so that we can get hold of them if we need to. I think that to make this possible, it should be very, very easy to immigrate legally to the US. Would this lower our standard of living? Temporarily, it undoubtedly would, as labor supply overbalanced labor demand, particularly at the low end.
On the other hand, if we have really open trade policies and minimal subsidies (for example, if we had only reciprocal tariffs to balance tariffs and subsidies from particular places), then the balance would be quickly struck with the rest of the world, and we'd grow in synchronization (as we do internally in the US, for the most part). This would be good for all concerned.
With all of that taken into account, we don't live in that world. And it's true, whether we like it or not, that our immigration policies are such a mess that it's easier to get and stay here illegally than legally. This will last until shortly after we figure out that coyotes smuggled a group of jihadis over the border, and they afterwards carried out a mass casualty terrorist attack. But for the moment, the proponents of illegal immigration (however much they deny it) have the field.
OK, but we have these laws about immigration, and as a matter of curiosity, I'd like to think about how we could enforce them, to prevent the aforementioned terrorists from getting and staying here. And here's where the bad thinking comes in. Most people I've been able to find recommend that we go after the employers, or that we build a wall on the border, or some other magic bullet method. Here's something that I've learned about magic bullets in my life: there aren't any. Perfection simply isn't attainable except in very, very limited areas for very, very limited times. Try going to the store to get something, and see how many times such a simple trip goes wrong due to a flat, or the store being out of stock, or forgetting your credit card.
The only kind of defense that works is a defense in depth: it is necessary to put so many different layers between your core and that which you want to stop, with different characteristics (both strengths and weaknesses) in each layer, that one of the layers will catch any given attack or effort. If we want to stop illegal immigration, we need to do all of these:
- Make legal immigration easier for non-criminals and non-terrorists (or terrorist supporters). This includes such efforts as guest worker programs, as well as dramatic reductions in the wait times and paperwork necessary to come here.
- Patrol the borders much more vigorously, land and sea.
- Make deportation of non-citizens who do not have legal documents illegal unless they make a valid claim for asylum.
- Make that deportation fast.
- Make deportation ironclad: do not release illegals from custody until they are in their destination country.
- Heavily fine any employers who hire illegal immigrants.
- To catch such employers, offer a conditional amnesty: the first illegal immigrant who turns in a particular employer, provided they are otherwise eligible to be here (ie: would not be kept out if they applied legally to immigrate), gets citizenship short-circuited, while the rest of the illegals that work there are deported.
- Do not give automatic citizenship to children born in the US: only if their parents are here legally should they be given citizenship.
- Require proof of legal residence before issuing any government identification or providing any government services.
- Hold liable, and fine, anyone who knowingly aids an illegal immigrant in remaining in the country.
There are more things we could do, really, but this would go a long way towards fixing the immigration problem.
If, that is, we cared about fixing the immigration problem. My hunch is that we, as a society, don't.
UPDATE: Mark in Mexico notes one part of the problem that I mentioned above: illegals who are caught get released with an order to appear before the court for a deportation hearing later. Guess how many show up?
Denial - It's not Just a River in Egypt
Marc at American Future excerpts a Guardian commentary by Osama Saeed, spokesman of the Muslim Association of Britain. The core of Mr. Saeed's argument is that fighting terrorism is Britain is Tony Blair's job, not the job of the Muslim community.
The position of Muslim organisations and mosques has been consistent for years. Killing civilians is murder, and a crime in Islam. We have consistently said that Muslims must help the police to track down those responsible.This is why I've found it strange that many Muslim leaders have offered to look deep within our community now. It's a tacit admission of negligence that I simply do not accept. The prime minister has of course welcomed this attitude. Indeed he has led from the front, ratcheting up the rhetoric against Muslims, laying the responsibility solely on us. "In the end, this can only be taken on and defeated by the community itself," he said last week.
[snip]
By putting the onus on Muslims to defeat terror, the prime minister absolves himself of responsibility. Muslims are not in denial of our duties, but who are we meant to be combating? The security services had no idea about all that has gone on in London, so how are we as ordinary citizens to do better?
[snip]
Unfortunately, a handful of individuals have eschewed this to carry out the attacks in London. You can regard these acts as part of Islam, or as an irrational reaction to injustice taking place in the world. If it's the former you have to explain why this started only 12 years ago and not 1,400. To us it is evident that it is the latter, so we're batting the ball back in your court, Mr Blair.
The commentary is full of denial, finger pointing, tu quoque and so forth. It's not so much an apologia (though there's some of that) but a complete and utter deflection of blame away from Islam and Muslims. And that's OK, in one sense: Saeed is correct that it is in part Tony Blair's job to fight terrorism in Britain. It is also every Briton's job, because every person in a society - at least a free society - has a stake in defending that society.
Now, Saeed may simply be saying that Blair's responsibility is greater, as the society's elected leader, than that of any particular subject of the Crown. That's fine. The alternative, of course, is that Saeed is saying that Muslims are not inherently British nationals, even if they've acquired the status in a legal sense, and therefore not bound to defend the society.
But Saeed should be careful what he wishes for, because there are three options open to the British government: surrender, accommodation of the terrorists, and elimination of the terrorists. But given that the jihadis' goal is elimination of the society, there is a certain point at which accommodation is simply no longer possible, and only surrender or fighting are possible. Assuming that the government does not go very far in accommodation of terrorists before fighting, a safe assumption in Blair's case, then the only two real alternatives are surrender or fighting.
Britain is not going to surrender: there'll always be an England. But how will the British government fight against terrorists hiding in Britain's Muslim community? Most likely, the British will make a determined effort to tackle the problem as criminal, by finding and arresting known jihadis and their enablers. But that will always be a reactive strategy, because it is always possible to hide some, not all, small cells, particularly if the local Muslim population is sheltering those cells. This implies that attacks will continue as long as the treatment of the attacks is as reactive law enforcement.
It's possible, of course, that the jihadis could run out of agents in Britain. But that is unlikely: Marc has an analysis of a survey of Muslims in Britain that suggests that as many as 100,000 of them at least tacitly support the attacks. If even 1% of these tacit supporters - 0.25% of Muslims in Britain - are willing to actively aid or carry out attacks, that still leaves 1000 potential terrorists. Given an average of 4 attackers and, say, 10 supporters (bomb makers, safe house operators, financiers, etc) per attack, and a death/capture rate of, say, 8 terrorists per attack, somewhere around 125 attacks could be made before the jihadis exhausted their pool, and that assumes no one coming in from outside or being recruited given the inevitably greater interference from police. At an average of 20 Britons killed per attack, that's some 2500 dead Britons over a period of a few years. And those are all pretty conservative numbers: odds are you could multiply those final numbers by a factor of 5, given the results in Iraq and Israel, and be nearer the mark.
But treating the attacks as law enforcement is not a stable state with casualty rates like that: no free government can stay in office with its subjects being regularly killed. And the pattern of jihadi activity everywhere it's taken hold is to grow for a while, making statements that are ignored; then to begin small attacks; then to escalate those attacks. At some point, British tolerance with attacks will be surpassed; then what?
Then, it becomes a military fight, and the British will go after not just those who have committed or attempted or helped commit attacks, but those who are likely to commit or attempt attacks. At that point, a very easy method to justify is deportation of the population thought to be most risky. That would be an early step: the English have a backbone of steel, and an immense national pride, and will do anything necessary to defend England, when it comes right down to it. And the community that will be affected by those actions is Mr. Saeed's community, the one he says bears no responsibility to help. (If he's lucky, it will be the British government coming after him: the Brits after all invented football hooliganism, and I would take the British young men over the Muslim community, if it came to a fight.)
Well, I suppose it's up to Britain's Muslims: responsibility now or suffering later.
One paragraph in the article deserves to be fisked point by point:
Mr Blair has attacked the idea of the caliphate - the equivalent of criticising the Pope.
You know, if people were killing innocent civilians in the name of the Pope, I'd be criticizing them pretty strongly. The caliphate is an idea, though, not a person: people are killing to bring about the caliphate. A more reasonable comparison would be terrorists trying to turn Britain into a Catholic nation. Ask the IRA how that went.
He has also remained silent in the face of a rightwing smear campaign against such eminent scholars as Sheikh al-Qaradawi - a man who has worked hard to reconcile Islam with modern democracy.
You mean this guy? Yeah, he's a moderate all right, working to reconcile us to acceptance of unequal rights for women (including ritual female genital mutilation), the establishment of a theocracy, and the killing of homosexuals. He's against democracy, and thinks that terrorism is just fine, as long as it's against non-Islamic states. Big moderate, yeah. Now why would PM Blair defend such a person? Why would any person who loves freedom and self-determination defend such a person? Why do you, Mr. Saeed, defend him?
Such actions and omissions fuel the suspicion that we are witnessing a war on Islam itself.
No, but it's certainly the case that there's a danger of that. If, for example, organizations like the Muslim Association of Britain keep telling us to trust that Islam is a peaceful religion, so Muslims of course wouldn't attack innocent civilians, and so we should ignore the evidence of our lying eyes, there will come a point where this will become a war against Islam. And at that point, I would not give Islam a snowball's chance in Hell: have you read anything about how the West fights when it feels its survival is at stake? Or, heck, when it just thinks it would be nice to live in Oklahoma (ask the American aboriginals about that one).
If there is any thought that Muslims are fine but their religion can take a hike then Mr Blair should know that we will never be in the corner, in the spotlight, losing our religion.
If Islam does not reform, and work actively to eliminate the terrorists who kill in the name of its god, then it is only a question of time until Islam is destroyed. Your call, Mr. Saeed, no matter what you think. If you and your fellow "moderates" are unwilling to accommodate us, to worry about our street opinion, to control your worst elements, then it is a matter of time before we will do what is necessary.
I'm sure that some future Prime Minister would issue an appropriate apology.
UPDATE: And via Mark in Mexico, read this editorial from Youssef Ibrahim. That is what we need to here from Saeed and his ilk.
July 24, 2005
Ethos
Lee Harris has a masterful reflection on tradition, ethics, and cultural survival. I cannot excerpt it sufficiently to do it justice, so put aside some time and go read it. (hat tip: Steph)
July 23, 2005
The Mechanics of Madness
Well, Representative Tancredo has certainly set off quite the firestorm, by suggesting that it would be a good idea to bomb Mecca and Medina in the case of a nuclear, biological or chemical attack on the US. Those commenting notably include: Rusty Shackleford, Baldilocks, Zenpundit, riting on the wall, Francis Porretto, The Glittering Eye, Donald Sensing, Hugh Hewitt, and James Lileks. Good: it's a debate we need to have now, rather than in the immediate aftermath of our response to a nuclear, biological or chemical attack on the United States.
My take on it starts with my moral center: "Do what thou wilt, an harm none." This is the Wiccan Rede, the center of Wiccan morality. Essentially, what it means is that it is your right to do what you will, so long as you, in the process, cause the least harm. (Thermodynamics makes pretty clear that entropy increases, so doing no harm is simply not possible; the idea instead is to balance and minimize the harm done.)
So from this we take away a few questions about when it is possible or even necessary to take another's life. And this requires that we put values on lives. (Note: not a value on life, because all life is most definitely not equally valuable.) It is clear that the life of an innocent outweighs the life of a murderer: the murderer is actively causing harm, and so his life has a lower value than one who is not actively causing harm. It is clear that the life of a person advancing human happiness outweighs the life of a person advancing human misery. So, say, Jerry Springer's life would be valued above that of Osama bin Laden, and below that of Hernando de Soto. But such calculations are not easily made clear when the lives being worked with number in the millions: we have to simplify.
If the United States is attacked with nuclear weapons, or to a lesser extent chemical or biological weapons, the deaths and grievous injuries will be legion. Taking revenge by obliterating Mecca and Medina, or Tehran and Damascus, or anywhere else would be morally vile: murder does not pay for murder. The question has to be on how to minimize the number of deaths and injuries, and that puts the question in a very different light, because it brings up a very serious question: are the jihadis deterrable?
If they are, then threatening to obliterate Mecca and Medina in such a case, provided we were to follow through on it, would be useful. The same goes with threatening to obliterate Tehran and Damascus. If such a threat, credibly issued, prevents a nuclear attack on the United States, it is useful. However, the problem is that once a nuclear attack is initiated on the United States, we must then follow up with the nuclear attacks we pledged as collateral, or we invite further attacks. The enemy will not back down when faced with an empty threat, only a credible threat will be meaningful.
But this assumes the enemy to be deterrable. If the jihadis cannot be deterred, then even a massive response will be meaningless in preventing future attacks (unless we happen to hit all of the enemy's supply of nuclear material). If the enemy cannot be deterred, the only way to prevent the deaths of millions (assuming the enemy gets nuclear weapons) is to kill or capture the enemy first. The problem is that this is very difficult: the enemy hides easily in the midst of non-combatant Muslims (a better formulation than "moderate" Muslims, since many of the Muslims sheltering the terrorists are anything but moderate), and separating out the immediately dangerous jihadis from the less dangerous collaborators and the not at all dangerous Muslims is terribly, terribly difficult.
Any response, any strategy, has to take into account how to minimize both the number of people the enemy kills or injures, and the number of innocents we kill or injure in attempting to prevent the enemy from acting. Multiple approaches will be needed, and multiple approaches are being taken, to prevent a nuclear attack from occurring in the first place. But what if they fail?
Well, if the American people perceive the enemy as deterrable, we will likely engage in measured escalation, isolating radical Muslims (hope to catch all the jihadis in the process), overthrowing jihadi-friendly governments (Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, etc), ignoring the sovereignty of countries like Pakistan that are unable to deal with the jihadis in their midst, and so on. A strong President could make a case for something less than genocide, even in response to a nuclear attack on America, and make it stick.
But a weak President, or a public perception that the enemy cannot be deterred and so will strike repeatedly, means a three conjectures world, and that inevitably means genocide.
Me? I hope the enemy is deterrable, or that we are lucky enough and good enough to keep the enemy from acquiring nuclear weapons. Because if we are not, the results will be appalling.
UPDATE: Francis Porretto said it better, of course:
As your Curmudgeon has already written, the secret to deterrence is discovering what the enemy values more than the damage he plans to inflict upon you, and holding that hostage to his good behavior. It's chancy, prone to miscalculation of several sorts. More, when "the enemy" is not a decision-making monolith, there's always the possibility that your threat will deter some but not all -- and that the undeterred segment will act against you despite all your disincentives. But these observations fall far short of proof that Islamic terrorists cannot be deterred, particularly since history says the opposite.
Posted by jeff at 1:59 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
July 21, 2005
Terrible Claw
Dr. John Ostrum has died. It was Dr. Ostrum's discovery in the early 1960's of Deinonychus ("terrible claw"), and subsequent work, that utterly changed the modern conception of dinosaurs. We now believe that the dinosaurs, at least the therapods, were warm-blooded (or some similar physiology), smart, fast and agile. In addition, it was Dr. Ostrum's work that established the link between dinosaurs and birds, and his work had an enormous influence on the book "Jurassic Park". Interestingly, while the Deinonychus has not, so far as I know, been found with fossilized feathers or imprints, other dromeosaurs have, much much later than Dr. Ostrum's theories about bird links to dinosaurs having become accepted. Dr. Ostrum was a treasure of the human race, and we are poorer for his departure, but richer for his having lived.
UPDATE: Political Animal also takes note, but of course the commenters cannot resist the temptation to bash the free market, young Earth creationists (which is, well, appropriate in this context) and Dick Cheney. Bah! Just remember the man for what he was; not everything has to be political.
Flooding the Area
Wizbang points to something interesting, in relation to today's attacks in London: the BBC reporters' notes are available online. This brings up two very interesting points, in fact.
The first is that I wish reporters would always do this, would always show the raw material. These are the reports, as opposed to the stories. The stories - in the newspaper, on the radio or on TV - are built from these reports; they are a synthesis. But in with synthesizing the points into a coherent narrative, a point of view is also inserted, and it is from that that most media bias arises. In fact, it is possible to draw multiple narratives from most large sets of reports about related incidents, and by making the raw reports available, a person can read the reports and synthesize their own narrative understanding. This is a good thing.
The second point is that this is what the blogs cannot yet do: flood an area or a sector with reporters and gather information. Blogs are more like the editors who put together a story: they gather information from a variety of places, then inject their own viewpoint and form a narrative structure around the component reports. But there is no coordinating structure to gather the information in the first place, which puts bloggers at the mercy, largely, of the traditional news media for gathering information. But when only the parsed stories are available, not the raw reports, the information gathered can be partial and presented in a biased way. Developing such a capability is far more important to the ability of blogs to bypass the mainstream media than anything else blogs could do. Particularly because, since people with access to computers are just about everywhere, bloggers could potentially develop a news source much more vast than any conventional news organization. But again, this requires a system to coordinate the gathering and dissemination of information, and we don't have that yet.
July 19, 2005
Pottering Theories
A few theories I've had about what Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was doing below the surface, and many I hadn't really considered very deeply, are recounted here. (Major spoilers there!)
One theory I've had for a while, that for me was "confirmed" by the DA, is that the book will end with Harry being offered the position of Professor at Hogwarts, teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts - and whom better? This didn't come out in the site I linked, so I figured I'd throw it out for consideration.
Constitutional Lesson Plan
Mark Lerner is creating a Constitutional Lesson Plan. Here is lesson one: Our Constitution is one of liberty or negative rights.
Worth following.
The Best You've Got?
OK, let me make sure I'm up to snuff on the Wilson/Plame thing: the current set of allegations, once all of Wilson's lying and the media's resultant sensationalism has been taken away, is that Karl Rove confirmed a reporter's prior knowledge (and apparently common knowledge on the Washington social circuit) that Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA.
Come on, guys, is that the best you've got after six years of relentless digging into President Bush's campaign and administration?
Perhaps you have information on how the President's wife profited enormously from investing someone else's money in futures? No, wait, that was Hillary.
OK, but surely the President and his wife bought some waste land that somehow became quite lucrative? No, that was the Clintons again. Give me a minute here.
Didn't the President receive immense contributions from foreign countries, including one that considers us its "main enemy", during his campaign? Didn't he then make sure that missile technology could be exported to that country? And didn't he lie about that? No, sorry, Clinton again.
OK, certainly there must have been some kind of situation where the President was trading access to the White House and top government administrators in exchange for campaign cash? Darn it, that was Clinton, again.
Firing non-political staff members to replace them with cronies, in violation of Civil Service rules? Nope, still Clinton.
Surely, surely, you have something on the biggest scandal of all: the President perjuring himself (that is to say, illegally lying) in front of a grand jury, and then attempting to obstruct the investigation into that perjury? Nope, still Clinton.
Taking FBI files and "losing" them, only to be found once certain investigations were completed and the files could no longer be used as evidence? Nope, Clinton.
How about the Agriculture Secretary accepting bribes and committing fraud. Wait, no, that was Clinton's Agriculture Secretary, Mike Espy.
Attacking fringe religions with armed force? No, that was Janet Reno. How about taking children from their relatives and sending them to tyrannical a communist dictatorship? Oops, Clinton and Reno again.
Pardoning campaign contributors? No, still Clinton.
There has to be something we can get the President on. How about putting a price on the head of political enemies, helping criminal organizations to launder drug money, bribery and fraud, obstruction of numerous investigations, trading promotions for sexual favors, or fabricating charges against political opponents at critical times in order to derail criticism? Those were all Clinton, too.
The Democrats really need to get on the ball here. They're starting to look like pikers at generating scandals.
July 18, 2005
The Enemy's Strategic Problem
The enemy has a very serious problem strategically: they attacked too late, and they picked the wrong form of attack. From the beginnings of widespread access to network television to the mid-1990s, when talk radio became powerful enough to get disputes with the mainstream media into people's heads, opinion was by and large shaped by about a dozen people at two newspapers and three television networks. It is common perception that the news networks drove (and largely still do) their coverage based on what the New York Times was covering. There was no effective alternate voice, and since these dozen or so über-editors were from similar backgrounds, there was basically one narrative in American opinion.
The talk radio shows, Fox News Channel, and later the blogs have changed that: there is once more a competing set of narratives in the US, as it was when we depended upon newspapers and magazines for our news. This onset of choice has led to, gasp, a better-informed public (scary though that can be) and a fragmentation of opinion. This has, in turn, led to a reduced ability to scare the US (and to a lesser extent, Europe) into a stampede, which in turn has made us stronger.
The reason we are stronger for this is that our military is unbeatable in any practical exercise. Even the Chinese admit they would lose a conventional war with us, which is why they recently declared their willingness to use nuclear first strikes to prevent US intervention in any Chinese attempt to take Taiwan. The only way to beat the US is for the US to give up from lack of will. And compelling the American will now requires more than stampeding the dozen or so mandarins that used to push the rest of us along. There is still an American herd, but it is increasingly smaller than the American pack.
So into this comes the enemy, attempting to shape our will. Why? Because the enemy's intermediate goal is a caliphate - a theocracy claiming authority over all Muslims - in the entire Middle East. To get that caliphate, local governments have to be overthrown or co-opted. To overthrow the local governments, the West must not have troops in the Middle East, nor the will to use force to support local governments (particularly Israel, which is not subject to the slow process of jihadi conversion, nor to being driven out, and so must be destroyed in place). And since the only forces with any decisive and intransitive power were the Soviet Union and the US, those two had to be driven out.
The Soviets broke on a combination of Afghanistan and poor leadership (Brezhnev took two years to die after he became incapable of rule, and his two successors served short and uninspired terms). The Soviet will broke, and soon thereafter the USSR literally disintegrated. It should be noted that the Soviets were unable to win militarily, but they were not beaten militarily, either: the Soviets only committed about 90-100,000 troops to Afghanistan at any one time, a small fraction of their force. (And appallingly, some 484000 of the 642000 or so Soviet troops that served in Afghanistan were casualties, mostly to diseases like typhoid and hepatitis!)
That leaves the US, which is similarly unbeatable militarily, and due to the increasing fragmentation of opinion, unlikely to be scared into submission. There were (and remain) two means of altering US will to support the regimes in the Middle East: direct attack and co-option.
The enemy could try to break our will to support the regimes - pretty much all some flavor of appalling totalitarianism - through attacking us in the Middle East and elsewhere abroad and, eventually, at home. The idea was that by terrorizing the population, we would force the government to withdraw into a shell and leave them alone. An attempt to co-opt, on the other hand, would look like South Africa or India: resistance that is, or can be portrayed as, the non-violent struggle of people for equality and decent treatment.
It's an interesting question whether a strategy of co-opting our will could have worked: as it is, a shockingly large percentage of the Western Left is ready to be co-opted even in the face of massive violence against the West and anyone in the Middle East seen as "not Muslim enough". It's telling that the Left is not scared away from arguing the jihadis' case by attacks - real, physical, brutal killings - of women and homosexuals and children, shutting down schools by bombing them, and so on, sacred objects of the Left at home. Given that, and a prominent realist strain in US policy, it's possible that a co-opting strategy could have driven the US out of the Middle East utterly. The sticking point would have been Iraq, but I can think of a few ways that could have been worked around, including by enlisting the US to help jihadis overthow Saddam Hussein, as the mujahideen overthrew the Soviets in Afghanistan.
But the enemy was impatient, or felt it had a better chance with violent attack, or maybe just didn't understand the power of ANC appeals in the West. Whatever the reason, the enemy chose violent attacks. And that presents them with a paradox: since the Western will is, by and large, stronger than it used to be (particularly in the US), attacks more often strengthen Western will than weaken it (London, 9/11, Bali, as opposed to Madrid). So to break the West's will, it is necessary to attack targets more and more sensitive or innocent. I believe that Beslan presages attacks in the West, and it would surprise me not at all to see hospitals, day care centers and so on attacked with suicide bombers. The point is, to break our will, the enemy has to get our attention. Short of nuclear or chemical weapons (and the resulting genocide of the Arabs), this means more spectacular attacks. But those attacks, as I noted, are actually driving people away from the enemy.
It's probably too late for the enemy to switch to a full-on attempt to co-opt our will: who would believe them who is not already effectively arguing for surrender? But the enemy cannot continue to attack us without eventually building our will to a point that, if the Western governments do not crack down brutally on Muslims in the West, the mobs will. That is not a best-case scenario for us, but it's pretty much a worst-case scenario for the innocent Muslims among us.
I'm sure some President would apologize for our behavior, in a couple of decades.
But the enemy cannot retreat, either, because an obvious systemic defeat (as opposed to defeats in specific campaigns, like Afghanistan or Iraq) would undermine the central tenet of the jihadis: God sent them. And if their god didn't send them, or won't help them, then who would follow them?
So the enemy has only one real option: ratchet up the violence in the West. And they have to do it before we pull the rug out from under them by co-opting to democracy or imposing democracy by force of arms. And they have to create a sufficient level of fear and panic to cause us to run, but not a sufficient level of fear and panic to cause us to rise up and destroy them in the West, along with the innocents they hide among.
Our options are not great, but I wouldn't trade strategic situations with the enemy: their options are dismal.
July 17, 2005
Saddam Charged
John Cole shares some good news: the first formal charges against Saddam Hussein have been filed. He will apparently stand trial before the end of the year.
July 16, 2005
The Memory Hole II
Think about how, say, just about everyone on the Left is constantly saying there was no link between Saddam and al Qaeda. Then note that this is an ABC report, from 1999, detailing those links. (I've seen this in several places, so I'm not sure whom to credit.)
But I suppose, once the news becomes politically incorrect, it, too must go down the memory hole.
July 15, 2005
...and That's a Good Thing!
Our enemies are complete wimps. Cowards we knew - who else would strike primarily at unarmed civilians? Bastards we knew - who else would slaughter children? But wimps? That is new.
It's pathetic, really.
Taiwan
QandO (especially see the comments), The Glittering Eye, and ZenPundit are all discussing the recent statements of Chinese General Zhu regarding Chinese strategic posture towards the US over Taiwan:
“If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China's territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” said General Zhu Chenghu.Gen Zhu was speaking at a function for foreign journalists organised, in part, by the Chinese government. He added that China's definition of its territory included warships and aircraft.
“If the Americans are determined to interfere [then] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University.
“We . . . will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds . . . of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”
Having lived in Taiwan for 4 years, it is a particular interest of mine. (I do not claim particular expertise, merely interest.) General Zhu's comments, clearly, are primarily a statement to the US of how seriously China takes the Taiwan issue, since China seems to perceive the US as supportive of Taiwanese independence, at least as long as President Bush is in office; and to Taiwan that China is prepared to sacrifice greatly to prevent Taiwanese independence. It is, in other words, part of China's deterrent effort to ensure that the situation remains static.
Brian Dunn is convinced that China will attack Taiwan on the eve of the 2008 Olympics, while the world is not willing to upset the Olympics over the issue. I am not. It has been the position of the American defense establishment - more particularly, the position of the title X guys - since the end of the Cold War that China was the next emerging threat. In large part, this is "fighting the last war", particularly now that the war we are in is against 4GW threats like al Qaeda.
China would put up with a lot, even economic collapse, to take Taiwan if it felt it could. And China probably could take Taiwan with its current amphibious, army and air capabilities (though at great cost). But the US could retake Taiwan - even prevent the attack from succeeding with enough forewarning.
Put simply: the US has sufficient conventional capability to beat China in China's backyard in a major war, and China knows it; hence, China has to have some way of credibly threatening the US in order to maintain the status quo, and thus this threat.
But "China" in this case is the government, not the people. China has, recently, been really opening up internal markets, and private property and private enterprise are growing rapidly in importance - it's one of the reasons China is even a contender. And the Chinese entrepreneurial classes would simply not stand for the inevitable result of war: blockade. The US would shut off all sea routes into China, and the land routes out are sufficiently poor and through sufficiently hostile territory that China's economy, which depends upon exports, would collapse in short order. The Chinese government maintains its rule by the people's belief that the government has the mandate of Heaven, and that belief would collapse with the economy.
In other words, even without a direct US counterattack to retake Taiwan, or just to punish China, our naval blockade would force the Chinese government out of power in short order, to everyone's benefit except the CCP.
I see this warning as deterrence, not a serious threat.
UPDATE: Brian Dunn weighs in.
The Shortest Path to Heaven
When you hear someone say that suicide attacks have nothing to do with religion, that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, it would be well to remember that some who attempt suicide bombings fail and survive the attack. Here is one who was interviewed:
"How did you feel when you heard that you'd been selected for martyrdom?" I asked."It's as if a very high, impenetrable wall separated you from Paradise or Hell," he said. "Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise — it is the shortest path to Heaven."
[snip]
I asked S to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. "We were in a constant state of worship," he said. "We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life."
"What is the attraction of martyrdom?" I asked.
"The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward," he said. "Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, 'What if the operation fails?' We told him, 'In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.'
"We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity. We had no doubts. We made an oath on the Koran, in the presence of Allah — a pledge not to waver. This jihad pledge is called bayt al-ridwan, after the garden in Paradise that is reserved for the prophets and the martyrs. I know that there are other ways to do jihad. But this one is sweet -- the sweetest. All martyrdom operations, if done for Allah's sake, hurt less than a gnat’s bite!"
[snip]
None of the suicide bombers -- they ranged in age from 18 to 38 -- conformed to the typical profile of the suicidal personality. None of them was uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded, or depressed. Many were middle-class and held paying jobs. Two were the sons of millionaires. They all seemed entirely normal members of their families. They were polite and serious, and in their communities were considered to be model youths. Most were bearded. All were deeply religious.
I was told that to be accepted for a suicide mission the volunteers had to be convinced of the religious legitimacy of the acts they were contemplating, as sanctioned by the divinely revealed religion of Islam. Many of these young men had memorised large sections of the Koran and were well versed in the finer points of Islamic law and practice. But their knowledge of Christianity was rooted in the medieval crusades, and they regarded Judaism and Zionism as synonymous.
Nope. Nothing at all to do with Islam.
Posted by jeff at 2:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Let's Play a Game
Democrat or French?
The insurgency cannot be overcome easily by either United States military forces or immature Iraqi security forces. Nor would the situation be eased even if, improbably, the United Nations, NATO, our European allies and Japan choose to become seriously involved.
In other words, no victory is possible over this unbeatable enemy; we must surrender. The quote is from John Deutch, Undersecretary of Defense and Directory of Central Intelligence in the Clinton administration.
I got this from Rusty Shackleford, and this gist of his post is that al Qaeda fights the way it does because it's worked for them in the past:
Terrorism, as a tactic, is chosen because terrorists believe those tactics will work.Goal: U.S. Marines out of Beirut.
Tactic: Suicide car-bombing.
Result: U.S. Marines out of Beirut.
Lesson learned: Terrorism works.[snip]
Why would they think they can defeat us in Iraq using geurilla warfare?
Goal: Soviet military out of Afghanistan/imposition of Islamic law.
Tactic: Guerilla warfare.
Result: Soviet military out of Afghanistan/imposition of Islamic law.
Lesson learned: Geurilla warfare works against super-powers.But Afghanistan was not the only place where this lesson was learned.
Goal: U.S. military out of Somalia.
Tactic: Guerilla warfare.
Result: U.S. military out of Somalia.
Lesson learned: Geurilla warfare works against super-powers.So, what will happen if we pull-out of Iraq? Can our long-term national interests be met using this tactic?
Goal: U.S. military out of Iraq/imposition of Islamic law.
Tactic: Guerilla warfare.
Result: U.S. military out of Iraq/civil war possibly leading to Islamic law.
Lesson learned: Geurilla warfare works against super-powers.If we truly wish to win the second war in Iraq, we cannot abandon her to our enemies. If we do then the lesson they will learn is that the U.S. can be beaten. And if the U.S. is beaten in Iraq, then the U.S. can be beaten elsewhere.
That is a lesson we cannot afford our enemies to learn.
Posted by jeff at 2:08 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Perspective
John Cole of Balloon-Juice has a point that needs to be made:
While it is fair to characterize the over-the-top hysteria from some quarters on the left regarding Rove as, well, over-the-top hysteria, some perspective should be offered. If it turns out that someone in this administration really did 'out' an agent, I want their head on a platter. That it might have been done for petty political revenge just makes it even more odious.
Yes, exactly. I have not to this point see convincing evidence that a government officer "outed" a clandestine agent for political reasons, but if it happened, such a person should be fired, prosecuted and reviled.
But, it is worth examining- What if this had happened during the Clinton administration? What if it was Paul Begala or someone like him who was accused of outing a CIA agent? What would the right be doing?If your answer is anything other than what the left is doing, only louder, you are fooling yourselves. Rush Limbaugh would have talked about nothing else for 3 years, and unlike 2004, this WOULD have been the chief issue of the election.
Yes, that is pretty much the case on the Republican reaction. Neither party has clean hands. The Republican partisans were bat-shit insane when Clinton was in office, and that was before blogs were available to amplify their voice.
But something interesting about the election of 2004. Since 9/11 happened before that election, the major point of the debate would have been the same as in the real election: the administration response to 9/11. And this issue would have been a talking point, but a minor one.
More on the Rove/Wilson/Plame/MSM Kerfuffle
What is the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame story about anyway?
Initially, the kerfuffle was that someone in the Bush administration had "outed" CIA covert operative Valerie Plame in retaliation for her husband, Joe Wilson's, op-ed in the New York Times criticizing part of Bush's rationale for going to war. Revealing the identity of an undercover agent, knowingly and purposely, would be a crime, i.e., someone in the administration may have commited a crime. Apparently, the source was Karl Rove. But did he "out" an undercover agent, which is what this was all about in the first place?
According to Joe Wilson on CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "My wife was not a clandestine officer the day that Bob Novak blew her identity."
So let's see, Novak blew her cover, but she didn't have a cover to blow when he did it.
So what's this story all about again?
Well, for the media, their tack has certainly changed. If you read their questions, it doesn't even matter whether Rove commited a crime. All that matters now is if he even dared mention her name, because, you see, Bush said he would fire anyone involved in this matter, and Scott McClellan said Rove, among others, was not involved in this matter. The only problem the MSM seems to have, is remembering that this matter was "outing" a covert agent, not simply acknowledging her existance as a CIA employee.
Posted by Brian at 1:35 AM | TrackBackJuly 14, 2005
An Insightful Point from QandO
QandO makes a fantastic comparison of London to Oklahoma City.
Political Game Show
TheOtherBlogger called to tell me about a "man on the street" thing that a local radio station was doing: how many justices on the Supreme Court, and who are they.
I was telling Steph about this, and she was seeing how many she could name. I mentioned that I could name the British Defense and Foreign Ministers, and 1/3 to 1/2 of our cabinet, and Steph said, "There has to be a game show for people like you."
"C-Span?", I suggested.
Just thought it was funny.
The Karl Rove/Valerie Plame Kerfuffle
I am already sick and tired of this non-story! For those of you unclear on the particulars, let me sum up, because I don't want to talk about this again, barring an actual story emerging.
In the 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush uttered these words: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa .” (Interesting to note, Bush wasn't basing this on Joe Wilson's report, but on British intel. Some good info in the link under the "The Senate Intelligence Committee Report" and the "We No Longer Believe" headings.)
A little over five months later, Joe Wilson wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times saying that a year earlier the CIA had sent him to investigate the claims of Saddam trying to buy uranium in Niger, and that he could find no evidence to support the claim. (Interesting that it took him five months to publicly dispute this part of Bush's speech...)
A few days later, according to Michael Isikoff's story in Newsweek, Time's Matthew Cooper contacted Karl Rove and had a brief discussion in which he asked Rove what to make of Wilson's op-ed piece. Rove corrected a misinterpretation brought on by Wilson's article. Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or by Dick Cheney (as some were claiming at the time), but instead had been authorized by Wilson's wife 'who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues'. (Note, Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame was a CIA analyst. There is no way you can infer from Cooper's purported e-mails to Time's editors that Rove knew she was anything more than that, specifically a covert agent. In fact the first mention I can find of Valerie Plame as a "covert" agent comes from this New York Times article, almost a month after the Rove-Cooper conversation. Bob Novak used the term "operative", but when looked at in context, he is simply referring to her CIA work on WMD [actually counterproliferation] which wasn't covert, and never called her a "covert" operative, as the Times erroneously states.)
So there's the story. Karl Rove, while setting the record straight, mentioned Wilson's trip was authorized by his wife. There is no evidence that Rove knew she was a covert agent or that he was intentionally blowing her cover. Thus, there appears to be no illegality in Rove's conversations. Thus, there is no story here (at least no Rove is a criminal angle). This is nothing but blind partisanship of the left and their willing accomplices in the (we're not biased!) MSM, notably NBC's David Gregory and ABC's Terry Moran.
Now excuse me if I stop paying attention to the MSM's latest anti-Republican obsession.
Posted by Brian at 1:04 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBackTSA Log #1
CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
Last Sunday, a traveler at the airport who worked for the FAA noticed an unattended bag at curbside and alerted TSA to its presence. Excellent! A short time later, I learned one of the Skycaps saw the shuttle bus driver put it there (presumably mistaking it for the luggage of one of the people getting off) and drive away leaving it there. He did not inform us. Not good! Anyway, I watched the bag, while one of my co-workers called upstairs to our supervisor, who contacted DPS.
Now, what troubled me was the behavior of passersby in the 20 minutes or so it took DPS to respond. Only two times did any individuals seem to take any overt notice of the bag and look to tell someone, and one of those times it was fellow TSA employees. I can understand no one taking note when there were vehicles or people next to or near the bag. It could easily have belonged to those people. But there were several times when nobody was near that bag, when I was the closest one to it, at least 20 feet away. And invariably cars would pull up and park right next to it, or people would walk right by it, without ever seeming to notice it, even though it was so conspicuously alone.
Keep in mind, this was just three days after the attacks in London!
Folks, this is not good! Please, please, be more vigilant. That innocuous bag may just contain a bomb. Especially be wary in transportation facilities and around large groups of people. And if you see something suspicious, please report it.
Posted by Brian at 12:37 AM | TrackBack
Farscape meets Stargate SG-1
I love Farscape. I have no interest in SG-1. SciFi canceled Farscape after acquiring SG-1 from Showtime. This made me unhappy, to say the least.
But it's time for a new season of SG-1 starting tomorrow. And lo and behold, MacGyver is gone, replaced by none other than Farscape's Ben Browder. Fellow Farscape alum Claudia Black is scheduled to do six episodes as well.
Like I said, I have no interst in SG-1. I don't care about the show's past eight seasons. But I do enjoy Ben Browder and Claudia Black so I guess I'll have to give it a try.
Posted by Brian at 12:13 AM | TrackBackJuly 13, 2005
The Fire Brigade and the Fire
A suicide bomber today in Iraq detonated his car bomb in the midst of children who had come to talk and get candy from US soldiers. The media are shocked. Apparently, this is only because they do not want to remember that this has happened before. This is not a time for neutrality between the fire brigade and the fire; this is a time to name our enemy, to call them out for what they are. The difference in this war is that the Japanese and German soldiers were by and large innocent; it was their political leadership and a particular few soldiers that were responsible for the inhuman parts of their behavior. In contrast, our enemy today are monsters.
For a normal person not to realize that is problematic but understandable; a large number of people in the US can't even name the Vice President. But for the media to not understand this is inexcusable: it is willful blindness, or taking the side of the enemy. It cannot be claimed to be ignorance.
UPDATE: Joe Katzman is thinking along similar lines.
Ending Jihadi Terrorism
Background has begun to come out on the terrorists who committed the 7/7 London attack. Wretchard, of course, is all over it, with his usual insightful analysis. Wizbang, Danny Carlton, Captain's Quarters, and My Pet Jawa all have more. There's one aspect of this story that I haven't seen much addressed, though: the tradeoff between freedom and safety.
If you wanted maximum safety, to make sure that no suicide bombings were ever carried out by domestic terrorists, you would have to be able to do a few things: identify the terrorists before they could commit a terrorist act; ensure that you didn't miss any terrorists; take the identified "proto-terrorists" out of circulation before they committed a terrorist act; vigorously follow up any terrorist act netting anyone who was likely involved. This is a non-trivial set of tasks.
To begin, how do you identify the potential terrorists? If you look at the known information on the London terrorists, and the 9/11 terrorists, and the numerous other terrorists that have operated outside of predominantly-Muslim countries, you find that they are by and large middle-class, educated, not particularly rigidly observant, young Muslim men, entranced by the ideology of particularly rigidly observant and intolerant old Muslim men. There happen to be a large fraction of the immigrants to Western nations (particularly Europe) who are middle-class, educated, not particularly rigidly observant young Muslim men who are not entranced by the ideology of particularly rigidly observant and intolerant old Muslim men. So how do you separate out people whose only distinguishing characteristic is what they believe and whom they follow?
Cast the net too narrowly, and terrorist attacks will be carried out by native or immigrant terrorists living freely in society. Cast the net too broadly, and you sweep up a great number of innocents along with the guilty - a much greater number, in fact, than of the would-be guilty, let alone the actually guilty. But in order to distinguish the would-be terrorists, you would have to be terribly, terribly invasive of your citizens' rights: shadowing them as they attend religious events, planting agents in domestic religous places to observe the worshippers, secretly invading their homes to search for evidence while they weren't there (lest you accidentally arrest a not-guilty person). This would not be tolerated by the public at large, and for good reason. And even were it tolerated, you would still miss some.
So you have to cast the net more broadly, to avoid being overly invasive or missing potential terrorists. But this means that you will, as noted above, be netting more innocents than terrorists. After a very few incidents of this come out, casting the net broadly is right out, and for very good reasons.
But let's say that you somehow managed to figure out a way to get more or less all of the proto-terrorists without getting so many non-proto-terrorists that the backlash ended all of your efforts. How, then, do you keep these men out of circulation? You cannot charge them with crimes they have not committed, nor (particularly if they are citizens) can you hold them without charge. And if they are citizens, you cannot expel them. Would the courts revoke a person's citizenship on suspicion that they might, at some point, commit terrorist acts domestically? I certainly hope not! Because if they did, we'd already be at the point of no longer being a free society.
I suppose you could wait until you could catch the terrorists red-handed, but that runs into a problem as well: you will often be too late to catch them. Look at the furor over the ill-named PATRIOT Act, which does little to prevent terrorism, but does make it easier to investigate terror attacks and round up the cell mates who weren't killed or captured in the attack: this mild measure allowing for some domestic surveillance has raised intense (and often ill-informed) anger. Would any system actually capable of detecting preparations of a terror attack be allowed at all? And if so, could you catch every terrorist after they had incriminated themselves enough to be convicted in court, but before they had carried out their attack? Not likely.
So it's inevitable that even the most vigorous possible attempts to detect terrorists and prevent terrorism will fail, and some terror attacks will be committed by native or immigrant terrorists. At least you can clean up afterwards. Big help to the victims and their families, but maybe you can prevent future attacks. I suppose, but the problem there is that you still have to convict the conspirators, and that has proven remarkably difficult. Terrorism is designed to fit into the holes in our system: it frequently leaves too little evidence to overcome reasonable doubts, particularly amongst the planners and agitators, as opposed to the attackers and bomb makers.
And I haven't yet covered the "useful idiots" of the terrorists, who do everything possible to help the terrorists win, for noble or (mostly) ignoble reasons, including simply that the wrong political party is in power. (And there are enough buchananites that it's likely a Democrat administration would face the same kind of opposition.)
So in the end, it is simply impossible to prevent domestic terrorism. How, then, we deal with terrorism? There are a few options: surrender, retreat and accomodation, engagement and accomodation, and genocide. Which we choose depends on the enemy's goals and his means, as well as our will.
The enemy's strategy and goals are clear enough: the jihadis intend to establish a unified theocratic Muslim state (Caliphate) in all Muslim majority countries, then all Muslim minority countries, then all countries. His means are currently limited to small arms, infantry weapons and crude artillery (mortars and rockets), improvised bombs and suicide attacks. The enemy can move more or less freely in democratic countries, and fundraising is only somewhat impaired, due to the Western unwillingness to see Islamic charities for what they are. Similarly, conversion is unimpaired, due to Western unwillingness to interfere in religions or to target jihadi ideologues, planners and sponsors who are also religious figures. State sponsorship is somewhat available at present, but at the point that the enemy gains control of a Sunni state (as opposed to Shia Iran, which distrusts the Sunni jihadis who are after all always preaching that the Shia are apostate, though they allow the Shia are probably not infidels as such), the enemy's means will expand exponentially. The jihadis already seek chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; once they have a state under their control, they will almost certainly get those weapons in short order.
Given those characteristics, surrender is unthinkable. Surrender would mean converting to Sunni Islam, and adopting its most stringent tribal or philosophical forms (Wahabbi or Pushtun or Silafist); overthrowing our entire cultural and religious heritages; adopting strict Shari'a law (including such fun characteristics as stoning adulterers and homosexuals, treating women as chattel, accepting total theocratic regulation of every aspect of life and beheading those who don't go along with all of this); ending most representational art, music and non-religious literature; giving up on science because it might discover things that contradict the Koran (I've seen one Saudi science teacher explain that oxygen and hydrogen come together to make water if god wills it!); and totally submitting to the most reactionary, extremist, and illiberal ideology extant in the world today.
But surrender is not only unthinkable: it will not bring peace. Ignoring the casual violence of the Muslim world, such as killing your daughter for dishonoring the family by getting raped by her uncle, there is still the problem that even the most extremist Islam - the jihadi sects - is not unified. There are differences between the different groups, as there are differences between Sunni and Shi'a. And if there's one thing that the jihadis don't do, it's tolerate differences. Even after we surrender, those differences would lead to the kind of blood feuds and raiding that is common in tribal Muslim societies. Give a bit of credit to the Communist pan-Arabists: they did at least dampen these tendencies in countries where they took hold, though it was at the cost of, well, becoming Iraq and Libya and Syria and Egypt and the Arab areas of Palestine as we know them today.
If even surrender will not bring security, what about retreat and accomodation? This is what people are recommending we do when they say that we should pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, stop supporting Israel, stop supporting Arab dictatorships and the like. This amounts to geographically-defined surrender: we will give up on all Muslim-majority countries, and let the locals fight it out, while we deal with the spillover attacks in Western countries (whether London-scale or 9/11 scale or really anything short of nuclear attacks - and maybe even then for people like George Galloway). The problem with this is that it's how we got here: we tried in the 1980s and 1990s to take a very even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; we defeated the Serbs who were killing Bosnian and Albanian Muslims; we tried to help the starving in Ethiopia (really Eritrea) and Somalia; we stopped the Israelis from completing their conquest of the PLO in Lebanon; we kept Saddam Hussein from holding Kuwait. All of these led to more and more brutal attacks, which we promptly ignored. Which led us to 9/11, when we finally decided that was enough. There is no evidence that retreating now will do anything other than embolden the jihadis to attack us even more strongly in the future.
Worse than that, it is very likely that a policy of retreat would lead to genocide as the Israelis defended themselves in a world where all their neighbors were once again literally gunning for them and where they had no assurance at all of outside support.
So we come to the position of the Coalition: engagement and accomodation. The idea here is to overthrow the governments most supportive of terrorism, replacing them with representative governments. Since the jihadis are, so we are continually assured, a "small minority" of Islam, that should theoretically lead to countries that are basically free and considerably more prosperous. And basically fre