With Saddam out of our way, America needs to decide our long-term strategy for fighting terrorism - not just how to beat Al Qaeda, but how to prevent such threats from arising again. The most detailed proposal I’ve seen yet is a nine-part essay by Robert Wright for Slate.com. He laid out a top-level strategy based on specific premises, resulting in a new global governing structure to prevent new terrorist movements from forming. I re-read that again after seeing some of his comments on the Iraq war, and I think I’ve sorted out why I disagree with him.
Wright summarized his strategy with a list of propositions describing the causes of the current war, and explaining how he derives
a set of policy prescriptions from them. I agree with the listed propositions but not the prescriptions that follow from them. I trace
the disagreement to some unstated propositions that drove his analysis:
A. People hate America because we do nasty things to them.
B. Nobody but the terrorists benefits from America being harmed
My alternatives to these are:
A’. Islamofascists hate America because they are losing the competition between cultures, and act on it because we look
weak.
B’. Nations wanting to increase their status benefit from America being weakened (reduced from superior to equal).
Those propositions are just shorthands for how we view how the world works - whether it’s a basically good place where people are nice unless abused, or one where evil is always present and most people will grab for their own advantage even if it hurts someone else. In Mead’s terms, Wright is probably a Wilsonian, and I’m a Jacksonian. In the future I hope we will reach the state where everyone in the world realizes the advantages of cooperating for mutual benefit, described in Wright’s book Nonzero, but I think we’re farther from reaching that point than Wright does. In the meantime we have to protect ourselves from people trying to play negative-sum games with us, whether to improve their own status or for less fathomable reasons. Otherwise we’re adopting the "Blind Trusting Fool" strategy for the prisoner’s dilemma, and even those who would have cooperated to avoid punishment will attack us.
Rather than tackling all of Wright’s strategy essay, much of which I agree with, I’m just going to pick out a few pieces to discuss. Readers wanting to review all of the essay should begin at Day One.
Day 3 comments:
Back during World War II, when Rumsfeld came of age, enemy civilian casualties had essentially no bearing on America’s national security. Now they increase the chance of American civilians dying in the future.
This is the proposition A dispute - saying that foreigners would never attack America unless they’re driven into a rage by American cruelty. The statements of terrorist groups focus much more on the "immorality" of Western culture and the destruction of their way of life. From their point of view, they’re correct. Their static culture is losing people who adopt Western ways and will eventually wither away if they don’t stop the competition. Since they can’t make their way of life more appealing, they’re trying to destroy the temptation. So suicide bombers are sent against Western targets to force the West to retreat into isolation or, ideally, accept sharia law.
When we fight back against those attacks we do what we must while minimizing the harm to innocents. We have to fight back to project an image of strength to the world. "Oderint, dum metuant" ("Let them hate, as long as they fear") is a real aspect of human psychology and must be included in our policies. History shows waging such campaigns increases our security. Even when we’ve killed civilians in wholesale lots no terrorism has resulted - no Germans, Italians, Japanese, Koreans, or Vietnamese were among the 9/11 attackers. Likewise, propping up dictators has spawned no Latin American suicide bombers.
[F]ew things drive terrorist memes farther and faster over their new electronic conduits than doing an ill-thought-out job of neutralizing people already "infected." Seen in this light, some American anti-terrorism policies appear if not clearly wrongheaded, at least more dubious than before.
A meme can be countered by three methods:
The best method depends on the actual meme we are fighting. The "America hurts innocents" meme is best fought with the kid-gloves approach Wright recommends so we can provide evidence of our good intentions. The meme "America is weak and easily frightened away" must be fought by ruthlessly pursuing our enemies whether they hide in remote mountains or behind the skirts of innocents. Al Qaeda’s internal propaganda stresses the second meme.
Anti-American memes are not all the same. Some encourage people to kill Americans where ever they can be found, others lead to votes against officials who cooperate fully with America. Weakening the first at the expense of strengthening the second is a good trade.
This particular mission - to confront a group known as Abu Sayyaf - had little relevance to the war on terrorism anyway. . . . Abu Sayyaf is basically a small group of thugs who kidnap for profit.
Attacking weak targets such as Abu Sayyaf may not produce immediate major victories, but they are still worth going after for:
We mounted a "show of force" - something that may work when you’re trying to intimidate a potentially aggressive nation but that may backfire when the enemy is, in part, Muslim resentment of American power and arrogance.
In regular wars inconspicuous force is often used (infiltration/sabotage/special operations). In the war on terrorists conspicuous force is essential for discrediting memes. "America is weak"/"America won’t keep fighting"/"Al Qaeda can win" all require American force to be seen as part of discrediting them.
Bush made no counterbalancing demand of Israel . . . . The speech’s conspicuous asymmetry had in some intangible but real sense reduced America’s national security.
Bush’s asymmetry helped discredit the meme "Terrorism will make America force Israel to make concessions." This strengthens our security.
Day 5 comments:
A basic law of nature is that young males will seek status and recognition through locally available channels.
And old men seek to maintain or improve their status by eliminating competitors or by improving the status of the heirarchy they’re a part of. This is part of the proposition B disagreement. For someone at the top of the local heap, the only way to improve his status to change the relative status of the groups. Hence France and Russia’s attempts to hamper American efforts against our enemies. Jacques Chirac is benefiting enormously from making himself "alpha male" of "those opposed to America." No diplomatic negotiations will make him give that up - we’re just going to have to live with some people trying to benefit themselves at our expense.
Policy Prescription No. 6: Draw Islamic nations - and for that matter all nations - into the web of global capitalism.
To incorporate muslim/arab nations into the world economy would require dropping trade barriers on our part (hard, but doable with compensation to those affected) and eliminating corruption and political restrictions on enterprise on theirs (impossible without changing or replacing governments). Currently the Arab world produces almost nothing but oil. With the oil facilities run by Western expatriates there’s no work for the native population, and the government actively discourages new ventures. To overcome this would require introducing rule of law in place of the current dictatorial systems. I don’t know how to do that without wholesale regime changes.
Day 6 comments:
Policy Prescription No. 8: To blunt some of globalization’s sharper edges, carry political governance beyond the level of the nation-state, to the transnational level.
Successful governance at all levels has checks and balances, and is responsible to the will of the people. Existing transnational institutions lack these features because most of the nations in them also lack them. The sentence "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" describes what is needed for a successful transnational government.
If those scruffy leaders of anti-globalization demonstrations could be put in suits and turned into lobbyists, that would be a major advance. But they can’t be transnational lobbyists unless there’s transnational policymaking to lobby.
The scruffy leaders are protesting the existing transnational institutions they could be lobbying - the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. Those institutions are already hip-deep in lobbyists, representing not voters but governments and businesses. The protestors have no clout because they have no way to prove they’re representing a block of voters or other interests, as opposed to being self-selected gadflies who should have no say in policymaking discussions.
The United Nations is also lobbied, and has given these lobbyists active roles in the "NGO forums" attached to many UN events. But the UN’s power is held by states, and to have an impact the lobbyists have to convince one government at a time. This can produce results - the treaty banning land mines was created this way - but there’s no way to prove that this is connected to the will of the world’s people. The landmine treaty has been rejected by governments containing half the world’s populations, but many of the governments on that list allow their population little or no impact on such decisions. Many of the countries signing the treaty also don’t reflect the will of their population. So a transnational success story has been accomplished in a completely undemocratic way.
Today, free-trade purists will similarly complain that even modest transnational regulation would slow the wheels of commerce. And it presumably would - but it, too, would have a stabilizing effect.
There are two causes of discontent here:
Countries undergoing rapid growth such as the asian tigers have not produced many suicide bombers or other terrorists. The 9/11 terrorists are from countries that have been stagnating in everything but oil production. If there’s going to be discontent it seems better to have it be change-driven than poverty-driven. Ireland is a good case study of country where rapid globalization and economic growth has reduced the amount of terrorism practiced. The economically stagnant Arab states have produced many terrorists - even Saudi Arabia, which distributes wealth without providing any productive work for young men to do. A real job rather than makework seems to be the best way to steer people away from terrorism, even if supplying that job disrupts existing social structures.
Preferable to [sabotage or trade barriers] is letting [labor and environmental activists] channel their energies into transnational governance. By participating in global politics, acting in concert with peers across cultural borders, they form some of the sinews that will make a true clash of civilizations less likely.
Those wanting to slow things down should be balanced against those who benefit from the changes. Decision-making by those with no stake in the outcome is an invitation to fads, diversions, and the other problems of absentee ownership. A large number of activists prefer stasis as an end in itself - they won’t allow the growth that will bring people out of poverty, and that we need to reduce terrorism’s recruits.
Day 7 comments:
Invite allies to participate more fully in the conspicuous application of violence. Let their planes drop more bombs.
Many of our traditional allies have been effectively disarming. Britain and Australia have some high-tech weaponry, but the rest of NATO is falling behind. The most advanced weapons and logistic support are all US-flagged. Since it hasn’t kept up with the advance of technology, a UN vote is almost all France has to offer. How much blame will that draw on them?
There’s also a trust issue. French planes in Afghanistan refused to carry out ground attack missions they were assigned, placing American troops at risk. Why should we give more opportunities for meddling to people who don’t have our best interests at heart?
The free riders don’t acknowledge that they’re free riders; European nations don’t believe - or at least don’t admit to believing - that they’ll benefit from a war against Iraq. But if Saddam Hussein is indeed as clear a threat to the whole world as the Bush administration claims, then this predicament arguably reflects a failure of pedagogy and world leadership on Bush’s part.
Wright’s suggested cure for the free rider problem is to let Iraq/Al Qaeda/et al. develop and deploy WMDs in the hope that they’ll use them on France first, and that France would learn from this to pull its weight.
Careful inspection revealed no signs that this was intended as humor.
So let me get this straight — I should put my baby daughter at risk in the hopes that France will be attacked first, instead of supporting action to ensure that neither America or France will be attacked? Absolutely not.
The “free rider” problem is not always solvable. In particular, it may be easier to solve the problem while towing the free riders along than to convince them to pull their weight. “Free rider” doesn’t even describe France’s attitude to the war on terror, or at least war on Iraq—it’s more of an obstacle or brake. This is an unfortunate example of how the quest for status can drive people into negative-sum games. France may be hurt by islamofascists, but if America is hurt proportionately more France’s relative status will increase as America weakens.
Conversely, the successful attack on Iraq could boost America’s standing above its current “hyper-power” level. In the zero-sum game of international power relations all other nations would feel demoted by that.
When this dynamic arises the other player must be treated not as a free-rider but as another opponent, though certainly a less dangerous and malicious one. Islamofascists are not the only people who are happy at harm done to America—this is the proposition B dispute in a nutshell.
After all, the reason America is terrorist enemy No. 1 is that we keep doing things like invade Iraq.
None of the 9/11 terrorists came from countries we’ve invaded. Nor have countries that we’ve invaded produced suicide bombers. This is the Proposition A dispute, assuming that terrorists only act in reaction to America’s actions instead of having motives of their own. Al Qaeda’s complaints are discussed above, and they would still complain about our “cultural pollution” even if we kept all our troops at home.
The administration fears the ICC because it thinks the court would become a channel for worldwide anti-Americanism—that ICC prosecutors would unfairly single out Americans for prosecution. Yet one major source of this anti-Americanism is that America keeps refusing to do things like join the International Criminal Court.
The biggest problem with the ICC is that countries such as Syria, China, etc. can appoint judges, file charges, and generally use it as a means of attacking their enemies, with no checks, balances, or bill of rights. As the power least vulnerable to direct attack, America is the main target of this kind of political maneuvering.
If we don’t let rapists and murderers vote, we certainly shouldn’t let them sit as judges over us.
Where else could the Bush administration have [Osama bin Laden] tried — in the International Criminal Court? But, actually, an ICC trial would better serve American interests.
If the flunky of some petty dictator sets Osama bin Laden free to give Uncle Sam a thumb in the eye, how do we recover our position? “Global civilization” includes a lot of barbarians, who prefer seeing the cops too busy to bother them. The ICC’s judges are chosen by a process similar to the one that put Libya in charge of the UN Human Rights Commission, and kicked the US off. How can we possibly trust it to do justice instead of power politics?
Yet it’s the Bushies who are the inept game theorists. They’re failing to defend America against the parasitism of free riders.
I’m much happier seeing Bush destroy our enemies than wasting his time trying to get France, Germany, et al to do it. “Free riders” are not the most important problem—survival is.
This also assumes that France is a free rider, rather than an enemy trying to subtly obstruct our attempts to defend ourselves. A year ago I did class France as a free rider, but now I’m not so sure.
Day 8 comments:
Various Bush officials, in justifying an attack on Iraq, have suggested that weapons inspections aren’t reliable.
Iraq has fooled several inspections efforts, both before and after Gulf War I. Inspections resisted by the host government will be ineffective. A country is a huge place, and laboratories are small. There’s too many ways to obstruct searchers. Finding secret laboratories requires local knowledge and is best handled by or with local police who have the confidence of the people. James Lileks presented a detailed example of how obstructionism can work.
All nations are being policed effectively enough so that it would be very hard for non-governmental agents to make such weapons.
That’s a pretty serious world government if no Somalias, Zaires, or Myanmars are allowed to exist. I doubt a government with that much clout could be formed consensually. Would this government allow any country to have 4th amendment protections against search and seizure?
Any nation plausibly alleged to have biological weapons would be subject to short-notice inspection by an international body.
"Plausibly alleged." Saddam Hussein could allege that nerve gas is being stored in the White House and there are governments that would find it plausible, or at least in their interest to say so whether they believe it or not.
A good system of inspections needs trustworthy judges issuing search warrants, not flunkies of dictators. If it’s not subject to democratic checks and balances it will be corrupted by the first dictator who figures out how to game the system.
Policy Prescription No. 12: Use the World Trade Organization as the fulcrum for ensuring compliance with international weapons-control law. . . . When WTO members violate a treaty . . . impose an automatically escalating set of penalties . . . that culminate in expulsion (with expulsion understood to be a likely prelude to war).
So the WTO would take over the war-authorizing function of the UN Security Council. Rather than five powerful nations and ten random others needing to agree, we would have to get a consensus from a one-nation-one-vote assembly of 146 nations, with the genocidal dictator of a postage-stamp-size country carrying as much of a vote as the representative of a large democracy. None of the countries would be required to have popular support to cast a vote in favor of a war.
This is not a good way to create and enforce a policy. If we want to replace the United Nations we’re probably better off starting from scratch.
Possession of equipment that lacked such recorders, or whose recorders had been tampered with, would be a felony.
Rigid restrictions inhibit progress. We need to keep as large a lead in biotechnology as we can to defend ourselves from secretly developed bioweapons. Otherwise we have no fallback and need an impossible 100% effective inspection system.
Researchers need to be able to create new tools and tinker with existing ones. If any change has to be approved by a government agency, with disapproval meaning prison rather than loss of funding, progress will slow to a crawl. Commercial developers and investors depend on privacy to protect their ideas long enough to make a return on their investment, and won’t pursue areas where their research can be made public. The recording features suggested would violate patient privacy, which would also be a block to developing beneficial medical applications. These handicaps would slow our progress in biotechnology and related fields to where a secret project could gain a dangerous lead. (A good example of how unrestricted development outstrips government-supervised projects is how the NSA fell behind commercial technology despite its history and resources.)
"Open" development gives us better protection. With many researchers (both amateur and professional) covering all avenues the chance of a secret lab making a surprise breakthrough is almost eliminated. If a bioterror attack is launched free-to-innovate researchers will counter it faster than ones limited to government-approved tools. Salon magazine presented another view of how to handle this problem.
If international inspectors can swoop down and inspect an American medical school, then, yes, America has in some sense lost sovereignty. But if a few well-educated terrorists working out of Amsterdam can easily start an epidemic that kills 500,000 Americans, then America has also in some sense lost sovereignty.
We all give up some sovereignty. I’m in Los Angeles, which is not sovereign against San Francisco, Texas, or Maine. I’m content with that because I don’t think the people of Maine have any desire to destroy LA. With reasonable rules I’d yield sovereignty to the British or Japanese, the kind of rules embedded in the US Constitution. Let Bashar Assad or Kim Jong Il have a say over our fate? Out of the question.
If we don’t let murderers and rapists vote in our elections we shouldn’t let them vote in world decisions binding us.
The good news for ardent sovereigntists is that often the solidification of international law won’t much affect American law (and, strictly speaking, will never supercede it). As we cajole other nations into tightening their policing of money laundering, or their policing of hackers, we’ll largely be converting them to policies that already exist in America.
The Constitution remains supreme over treaties, so the US can’t obey a treaty that violates the Bill of Rights. That’s why we can’t join the ICC - it violates the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th Amendments. And the 9th and 10th, for that matter.
Day 9 comments:
One reason is that there is a small subset of people whose fortunes are inversely correlated with ours: people like Osama Bin Laden, people who have already committed their lives to terrorism.
The "inversely correlated" set is much larger than that. Other members are:
America has to deal with all of these opponents while defeating the true enemies. If we can convince some of them to help us in defeating others, great, but we must not sacrifice our security to other’s goals.
Summary of the Policy Prescriptions
I agree with:
Prescription No. 1: Take your bitter medicine early.
Prescription No. 5: Support free expression and, ultimately, democratization in authoritarian Arab and other Muslim
states.
Prescription No. 6: Draw Islamic nations - and for that matter all nations - into the web of global capitalism.
Policy Prescription No. 7: Emphasize trade at least as heavily as aid in fighting the kind of economic deprivation that
breeds terrorism.
The ones I disagree with are:
Policy Prescription No. 2: The substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly
accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse.
Recognize that increasing fear can be a net gain for us as potential attackers are discouraged by the fear of defeat and retribution.
Policy Prescription No. 3: The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads
to a net reduction in terrorism memes.
Memes can be shattered by killing or defeating their advocates. As Osama bin Laden says, "When people see a strong horse and
a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."
Policy Prescription No. 4: In a war on terrorism, applying force inconspicuously makes sense more often than in regular
wars
Looking strong is an essential part of fighting the "paper tiger" meme.
Policy Prescription No. 8: To blunt some of globalization's sharper edges, carry political governance beyond the level of
the nation-state, to the transnational level.
Transnational governance fails if felons are allowed to vote.
Policy Prescription No. 9: Honor President Bush's pledge - make America a humble nation.
Being humble makes us look like an easier target. We’re the number one nation and have to cope with these responsibilities.
Policy Prescription No. 10: Share the blame.
Our allies can’t pull an equal load - there’s no one to share the blame with.
Prescription No. 11: Develop a serious international inspection system for biological weapons.
Openness is a better approach than restrictions.
Policy Prescription No. 12: Use the World Trade Organization as the fulcrum for ensuring compliance with international
weapons-control law
The WTO lets felons vote - it’s not useful for enforcing law. A transnational government must be one that "takes [its] just powers
from the consent of the governed," or I and others will take up arms against it. The United Nations is tolerable because of its
ineffectiveness. A strong government that behaved that way would have to be destroyed.
Policy Prescription No. 13: Imagine how biotechnology would have to be policed in all nations for the United States to
feel secure 20 years from now; implement and then continually refine that policing strategy in the United States, while
beginning the long, laborious task of getting every other nation on the planet to eventually adopt a comparable system.
Our current system is the best way to handle biotechnology - an open system where people are encouraged by the market and
academic prestige to push technology ahead as fast as possible. Getting other nations to adopt that policy requires them to lift the
restrictions they place on individual liberty. Iraq seems to be the starting point for that.
Conclusion
Wright’s grand strategy for fighting terrorism is well thought out and contains many useful suggestions. Most of the assumptions behind it are spelled out in detail and the logic is clear and persuasive. I disagree extensively with the policies he recommends because my assumptions differ, but I think it’s a very valuable exercise to look at the big picture and try to identify what our long-range goal should be.
The assumptions we disagree on are ones that can be examined and debated, and the policies following from each are clear. We should try to encourage more discussion and tests to find which assumptions are closer matches to the real world. With clear strategies identified for each set of assumptions, once we reach a consensus on them we can have a true national strategy. Perhaps no consensus is possible, but we should at least have a majority vote behind this decision. Hopefully this will be confronted in the 2004 elections, instead of evaded.
I’m very glad Mr. Wright wrote his essay. I think it’s an extremely good starting point for that debate.
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In Osama bin Laden’s words : "We experienced the Americans through our brothers who went into combat against them in Somalia, for example. We found they had no power worthy of mention. There was a huge aura over America -- the United States -- that terrified people even before they entered combat. Our brothers who were here in Afghanistan tested them, and together with some of the mujahedeen in Somalia, God granted them victory. America exited dragging its tails in failure, defeat, and ruin, caring for nothing."
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"It would be manifestly contrary to the objectives of those who created the Constitution, as well as those who were responsible for the Bill of Rights - let alone alien to our entire constitutional history and tradition - to construe Article VI as permitting the United States to exercise power under an international agreement without observing constitutional prohibitions. In effect, such construction would permit amendment of that document in a manner not sanctioned by Article V. The prohibitions of the Constitution were designed to apply to all branches of the National Government and they cannot be nullified by the Executive or by the Executive and the Senate combined."