Winds of Change.NET: Mexican Stand-Off: The Dangerous Paralysis of Civilization

July 7, 2006

Mexican Stand-Off: The Dangerous Paralysis of Civilization

by Demosophist at July 7, 2006 5:41 PM

It's "deja vu all over again". Apparently the ideological tie that afflicted the US Presidential Election six years ago, and the deadlock that Thomas Mann has been writing about for a number of years, isn't just an American thing. If Europe is becoming less convinced of its cultural bet on appeasement, as a result of recent events, that may simply mean the impasse is spreading. In the US the primary impact of the Hamdan Decision is to defer to congress certain powers of war-making that the founders intended the executive fulfill, because... while indecision may be bad all the time, it can be downright catastrophic in the midst of a war. We just can't bring ourselves to the point of lifting the burden of our own "Mexican Stand-Off" from the Executive. So, we pass the buck to congress where they can wrangle and bloviate about things while we twiddle and dance. Like, we really have such a luxury.

At precisely the time in history when we need to be decisive, we're afflicted with paralysis. We've got two approximately equal sides, equally convinced that they're right, and in diametric opposition to one another about critical issues that can impact not only whether we suffer a massive attack, but ultimately whether we lose the conflict outright. And, like I said, it's not just us.

So, what's going on?

Well, here's a possibility. Some years ago, in a fit of condescension, the rapping academic, Cornel West, suggested that the real difference between "conservatives" and "liberals" is not the nature of the important variables, but about how various contingencies are weighted. This may be true. In fact, I tend to think it is. If so, here's the problem: the way both sides conduct analysis doesn't take into account the contingent nature of that weighting, and how it's related to reality. We employ methods of analysis, argumentation, and decision-making that, in essence, mix all the uncertainties and certainties we perceive into a big pot. But the recipes we use to dole out the proportions are different.

In fact, it may be worse than that. If one side believes the odds that a particular ingredient will influence the result is less than 50:50 then that ingredient never makes it into the pot at all. The ingredient in that side's dish gets tossed. And then we promptly forget that we tossed it, and why. We act as though everything's tossed into the pot in proportions that are dictated by some transcendent reality that we understand by virtue of simply being human. It's the way we're made. It used to serve us well as hunter-gatherers, but perhaps no longer.

Removing a single variable from the mix changes the very nature of the dish (worldview) that we're left with. In cooking, such a modest shift between, say, salt and sugar, changes the nature of the dish from savory to dessert. In the realm of foreign policy it changes the nature of the decision from war to diplomacy. And the problem is that some people have a built-in taste for one and not the other. The nature of the problem itself is secondary to how it's depicted. We start out with a preference for dessert, and so it's unlikely that we'll toss in much salt even if dessert is inappropriate for supper.

Ultimately, we end up with solutions that aren't all that closely tied to the problems we're attempting to resolve and people sort themselves into approximately equal camps... because we have no really unbiased way of resolving our uncertainties; especially those that co-blogger A.L.'s recent post identifies with the Rumsfeldian insight that there are "some things we don't know that we don't know". (And that set of unknown unknowns may be quite different for the two camps.)

Well, the point here is that this whole "mixing pot" method of analysis and argumentation may be wrong-headed to begin with. It's actually a short cut that people sort of adopted as the mainstream method some time ago, because it seemed to work well enough for many non-critical and non-complicated disagreements. It's easy, but it may also be inappropriate to a critical-path world.

A physicist named Edward T. Jaynes recently wrote a book about a methodological split in probability theory that I didn't know existed: Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. (h/t: Candace on NRO's PhiBetaCon) To make a long story short, it's a book extolling the virtues of Bayesian probability theory, which is a rather esoteric topic for the layman. But the basic idea of Bayesian probability is pretty simple, and intuitively realistic. It's that once an event happens, or we become certain of it's occurrence, it changes the contextual circumstances for the next choice or option in a critical path series of uncertainties or contingencies. That's kind of a mouthful, for the insight that "what happens matters".

For most of us the choices we thought we had prior to 9/11 changed radically as a result of that attack. But more to the point, we could have decided to look at our future some time prior to 9/11 by factoring in the odds that such an event would, or wouldn't, happen--and then have considered the difference between the two probability-sequenced critical paths. The idea here isn't so much about prevention of the attack, but about contemplation of the world such an event would leave us with. It enables us to make better decisions now, but it also does somethig else. It moves us inexorably in the direction of resolution...

Had we employed such an approach prior to 9/11 we might not be in the sort of near-deadlock we find ourselves in at the moment, where we seem unable to resolve whether the revelation of a secret-but-legal intelligence method places us in greater long term danger. How do we proceed to weight the various uncertainties, each of which will impact uncertainties further out or more distant? If we have no idea then we're more or less doomed to simply decide that there are too many uncertainties to deal with "realistically", and we end up with deadlock. And if instead we bit the bullet, and used some sort of critical path method, we still might not agree. In fact, we probably wouldn't. But at the very least we'd tend to know where the disagreements really lie and so could carefully monitor our uncertainties, adjusting the debate to fit the facts and contingencies as they become resolvable.

So, it's all about resolution. It's all about constructing a set of "lenses" for our poor tired society's eyes that correct for both near and far-sightedness at the same time. The bottom line is that we want our vision to improve, rather than degrade, over time.

So what do we need, at a bare minimum, to accomplish this? Well, I can think of two things that seem critical:

1. A "public intelligence system" that is efficiently self-correcting and transparent. That is, something other than mainstream media, which tends to propagate and justify mistakes rather than updating with chronologically-stamped revisions that facilitate decision-making and strategizing. Our current media has an interest in covering mistakes that are part of the critical path. Plus we need to learn to forgive such mistakes to some degree, in the interest of accurately resolving contingencies, so that we don't continue to debate things that have already been largely decided by events.

For instance: we don't need to keep debating indefinitely whether there were WMD in Iraq, and we can move on to a discussion of the significance of various kinds and stages of WMD that we know were there, or that we might find in the future, or that might have been developed had certain events come to pass. And we can dispense with concepts like "operational relationships" between al Qaeda and Saddam (or now the Mullahs) and can talk about contingent relationships between al Qaeda and other state actors that may or may not develop into "operational relationships" as a result of our actions, or inactions.

2. We also need an academic/research establishment that's more oriented toward this critical path/contingent mode of analysis, and is willing to talk in those terms to the public. Such an establishment would "raise the bar" for discourse, and I have no doubt that many of us in the intelligence consuming public would rise to the challenge. We're not as dumb as we look. If necessary we can employ technologies that help us "grasp" what's being discussed.

In other words at least some of the methodological issues that have distorted our social and hard sciences are endemic as part of the way we, as private individuals, do things. And this "two-dimensional viewpont" is embedded in the way we argue and debate issues. Well, often it's not even two but one-dimensional. This, we can't continue to tolerate, for while we get deeper and deeper into this Mexican Stand-off we're fighting an enemy that just doesn't have the same problem. They don't have the problem of paralysis because they're absolutists. Their minds are made up, and their debate, if it ever happened, is finished.

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Comments

#1 from Tim Oren at 7:37 pm on Jul 07, 2006

The juxtaposition re mainstream media and public intelligence is right on point. If we need to at least come up with a set of mutually understand parameters for a probability space (leaving aside the unlikely-to-converge assignment of weights), doing it through the MSM is not viable. Forgetting the issues of out-and-out bias, strapping the discourse to the Procrustean bed of linear, plot point and character driven narrative is a gross distortion, no matter what your views. (Its not about anthropogenic warming, it's all about Al Gore's beard!)

I'm not convinced that conventional (i.e., governmental) intelligence has it much better. Given the long time frames for most strategic forecasts to play out, the day-to-day reward function has more to do with level of attention from policy makers. Given that they also participate in the stand-off, there's a substantial risk that that feedback loop also lacks grounding and correlation with the real problem space.

A tough situation when faced with an opponent that (for better or worse) has reduced its OODA loop to issues of tactics.

#2 from Andrew J. Lazarus at 7:57 pm on Jul 07, 2006

I don't wish to hijack the thread, but I just can't let go uncorrected the emphasized section below:

In the US the primary impact of the Hamdan Decision is to defer to congress certain powers of war-making that the founders intended the executive fulfill, because... while indecision may be bad all the time, it can be downright catastrophic in the midst of a war.

The evidence is overwhelming that the Founders intended for the Congress to fulfill the powers of war-making at issue. The idea that we are in a new type of war against Islamofascism (funny how that's the exact same type of portmanteau word as Judeobolshevism) that requires more power to the Executive is of recent vintage. I mean, let's go to the tape.

The Congress shall have Power…
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water…
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

I don't see, for example, any way one can argue that the President has the authority to overrule Congress's rules for interrogation of prisoners (Geneva Conventions, International Convention Against Torture) in the teeth of such explicit constitutional language.

#3 from Mark Buehner at 8:54 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Sigh. This ring a bell?

_H.J.Res. 64
Joint Resolution

To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.
...

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons._

#4 from Demosophist at 8:56 pm on Jul 07, 2006

The evidence is overwhelming that the Founders intended for the Congress to fulfill the powers of war-making at issue. The idea that we are in a new type of war against Islamofascism (funny how that's the exact same type of portmanteau word as Judeobolshevism) that requires more power to the Executive is of recent vintage.

So far, Andrew, I don't know anyone who routinely uses the phrase: "Commanders in Chief". But you might be the first. My understanding of the delineation of powers is that Congress declares, but the President enacts. Now I realize there's some tension there, but my main purpose is to point out that this tension is being resolved (if one can call it that) in a direction that moves away from the founders' recognition of the need for decisive enactments because we're unable to resolve matters that involve uncertainty.

The Congress shall have Power�
To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations;
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water�
To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

And again, there's some degree of tension between the declaration and enactment function. The only element of the above that seems vaguely relevant concerns the phrase "make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water..." I'm not lawyerly enough to know whether that refers to an exclusive power, but if one interpreted all of the above powers in a broad sense as exclusionary that doesn't leave the Commander in Chief much discretion. As a matter of law you might be right. But I'll let the lawyers settle that.

Again, the point is that the impulse is to restrict, question, obstruct, obfuscate, hamper, question, block, and overturn just about every power of war-making that would make the term "Commander in Chief" meaningful. And the reason for that, it seems to me, is our inability to resolve the problems that brought us to this point. Or to be a tad clearer, we're moving away from rather than toward resolution.

Tim:

I think of problems as a set of flows rather than a "space", so it's hard for me to track what you're saying. Yes, we might not be convergent. In that case West was wrong, and Qutb right.

#5 from Andrew J. Lazarus at 9:23 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Mark, neither I nor the Supreme Court found anything in the AUMF that suspended habeas corpus nor repealed the GC and ICAT. It's cynical in the extreme to think that a general declaration of war (see, I'm not really a moonbat: I'm not going to say the the AUMF isn't a DoW because it lacks some specific phrase) could be allowed to override the UCMJ, GC, ICAT, etc. Any such overriding should be declared specifically.

Demosophist: Laws are enacted by the Congress. The president executes them. The term Commander-in-Chief puts the President at the top of the military chain of command [my emphasis]: "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;" It is not a description of an elected wartime king. Such systems of government are not unknown (I think the Swiss Constitution has something like that) but they are not our system.

Should someone start another Hamdan thread and leave this for something else?

#6 from Dave Schuler at 11:08 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Demosophist, neither of your goals is achieveable. What we already have is as close to a reliable public intelligence system as can be achieved. People will always have preferences, biases, and agendas so the best we can do is listen to the information that's coming in, identify the likely biases, and make a prudent judgment. There's just too damn much information.

The second isn't achievable, either. Academe has its own history, institutions, and entrenched power structures and the ones we've got didn't get where they are by the means you're suggesting and, consequently, they don't have a great deal of interest in uprooting what put the reins in their hands. Further, academe/research is also a human activity complete with preferences, biases, and agendas.

I think the most we can hope for is a labelling law. And even that would be a stretch.

#7 from Demosophist at 11:24 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Laws are enacted by the Congress.

Oh come on, I'm not talking about enacting legislation obviously. Congress declares, and the President "enacts" the declaration. (As in "act out" or "operationalize".) The Congress certainly doesn't do that, and the fact that you're essentially making an argument that "Commander in Chief" isn't equivalent to "King" makes my larger point that we're at an impasse. Since when does entrusting a President to make the basic executive decisions in operationalizing a declaration of war, to include the treatment of POW's, mean we're surrendering to a dictator or monarch? FDR authorized the internment of Japanese Americans in Executive Order 9066, yet we're not willing to give this President the discretion to try illegal combatants and terrorists in a military court?

Well, I meant to say "King Roosevelt", sorry. :-)

Should someone start another Hamdan thread and leave this for something else?

Who insisted on raising this issue in this thread? I disremember. It would be kinda nice if you'd address the larger issue here, though.

#8 from Demosophist at 11:36 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Demosophist, neither of your goals is achieveable. What we already have is as close to a reliable public intelligence system as can be achieved. People will always have preferences, biases, and agendas so the best we can do is listen to the information that's coming in, identify the likely biases, and make a prudent judgment. There's just too damn much information.

Actually we already have the beginnings of an effective public intelligence system with the addition of the blogosphere, and that could become a great deal more effective in the role than it already is. Moreover, I think we have to develop this. If we don't I foresee even worse paralysis ahead.

The second isn't achievable, either. Academe has its own history, institutions, and entrenched power structures and the ones we've got didn't get where they are by the means you're suggesting and, consequently, they don't have a great deal of interest in uprooting what put the reins in their hands. Further, academe/research is also a human activity complete with preferences, biases, and agendas.

And academia acquired its current set of preferences, biases, and agendas by magic I suppose? As opposed to the deliberate institutionalization of the current mindset through the judicious establishment of programs and departments sympathetic, who were then staffed with the "correct" people. (This is the way it happened.)

At the moment there are a couple of groups with an interest in altering that condition, by using the same levers: alumni and parents. And they also happen to be the folks with the money.

And again, we have no choice. The condition has to change.

#9 from Tim Oren at 11:38 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Demo: My hands-on relevant experience is in areas such as text and data mining where one samples a very high dimensional space and knocks down the dimensionality by looking for covariance and other patterns. Granted, all post hoc, which is arguably not so relevant here, but that's how my mental imaging works.

Bayesian systems have a logic of joint / conditional probability built in, necessarily an a priori set of assumptions about causality, perhaps more naturally expressed as flows. I think what you're getting at (in part) is that if one at some point assumed [taking liberties with notation], that P(big terror event | my view of the world) = small, and shoved that assumption onto the back burner (or rubbish heap), and then one morning awake to find out that P(911) = 1., you will be at a loss to respond, having by default failed to think through the consequences of such an event, and the causal patterns that led to it. Quite likely, those with differing views of the world will take advantage while you are struggling to adjust.

Since the chances we can know and model everything are nil, we're always going to be dealing with adding and substracting contingencies to models, however expressed, and changing our consensus beliefs about causal weights. How do we get the feedback that enables us to do so, and what type of societal level OODA loop does that create? Putting the MSM in that feedback is more than problematic, as it systematically distorts the signal. A feedback mechanism that is coupled into a dead-locked political process may produce a system that responds to noise, or nothing.

The Founders very deliberately created a 'low-pass' system of government for us, and it has served us well. It takes a lot of votes and a lot of changed (or replaced) minds to make a fundamental change here. That speed of feedback may be inadequate in a perilous situation. War Powers are one hedge to that: cut out part of the checks and balances in favor of a faster response. It's as close as we get to a dux bellorum, and some amount of breakage of prior norms is almost inevitable (see Lincoln, FDR).

When the perilous situation becomes chronic, then you've got an issue. Hamdan just illustrates we are at that cusp. We've been here before, in 1948, and reached a bipartisan consensus on containment - the Truman Doctrine in all but name. We have not reached that consensus on how to deal with lethal, religiously motivated sub-state actors without committing suicide ourselves. To do it before, it was necessary for one political faction to pass into oblivion. Who will be the modern day Henry Wallace?

#10 from Dave Schuler at 11:50 pm on Jul 07, 2006

Actually we already have the beginnings of an effective public intelligence system with the addition of the blogosphere, and that could become a great deal more effective in the role than it already is.

I think the blogosphere can function as a corrective device for the current system but I can't imagine it supplanting it, at least not in my lifetime.

And academia acquired its current set of preferences, biases, and agendas by magic I suppose?

No they were acquired over hundreds of years of social evolution. Face it: you can't start up a Harvard or Stanford; you can't start at the top. Government, the private sector, and academe itself all hire at least partly based on school reputation and reputation isn't created overnight. Nor is it lost overnight: I know of fields in which employers were preferentially seeking out the graduates of institutions for which the reasons for the reputation had faded more than a generation ago.

I think we'll have to look at both of these things from a networking perspective: the current system will stay in place and we'll have to route around the parts that aren't working. To do that what's needed is additional information. That's why the push should be for transparency.

#11 from Demosophist at 12:25 am on Jul 08, 2006

Dave:

I think the blogosphere can function as a corrective device for the current system but I can't imagine it supplanting it, at least not in my lifetime.

I don't see it being supplanted either. But the point was that an interaction has begun, and that interaction won't leave MSM the same. By "corrective device" you appear to acknowledge it's at least moving in the right direction. I actually don't think in terms of replacement, but in terms of the evolution of institutions. MSM is a tough nut, but I think it has to be cracked. And in your lifetime too.

No they were acquired over hundreds of years of social evolution. Face it: you can't start up a Harvard or Stanford; you can't start at the top.

I'm not from a Harvard or a Stanford. Nor do I necessarily think those institutions are "at the top". I actually came from a much less well-endowed institution that happens to be well-situated to pick up some of the better thinkers in this civilization, and to do so with some rather revolutionary changes in mind. (Think "Patriots" and "Final Four".) But putting that aside, because I do recognize that there are some institutions at the top of the heap, what I'm talking about is the cultivation of programs like this one, which happens to be at an institution equivalent to the ones you mentioned. You know, the transformative power of federalism.

I think we'll have to look at both of these things from a networking perspective: the current system will stay in place and we'll have to route around the parts that aren't working. To do that what's needed is additional information. That's why the push should be for transparency.

I don't disagree with most of that, except I don't see why we can't just route right through those parts that currently aren't working, with our superpowers...

#12 from M. Simon at 3:53 am on Jul 08, 2006

What you are leaving out here is the will to power. The alpha male struggle.

Typically about 1/2 support the alpha and 1/2 are against. Each side then adopts a world view that supports its positiion.

Those world views need have nothing to do with reality or even contingent reality.

The Bayesian view is that there is some underlying reality that can be determined by quantifying prefrences. The real realiity is that such analysis may only quantify the level of dysfunction (the strength of the desire for power).

===========================================

So what do we want in an alpha male?

Some one you can trust.

If we want to replace the apha male we say he lies, he uses his position for self agrandisement, he covers up crimes, he fights wars for personal gain, lacks honor, etc.

We saw this with Clinton, we see it with Bush, we will see it with who ever the next guy/girl is.

Fortunately the other side has the same problem.

=======================================

This is all a left over from the time when the alpha male killed some rivals, banished others, and favored his friends.

Which is why we get frantic all out of proportion to the disagreement. Civilization has not healed our discontents.

#13 from M. Simon at 5:45 am on Jul 08, 2006

Uh, the other side has the same problem.

A universal desire for a caliphate. No agreement on who the chosen one ought to be.

The struggle for power goes on.

#14 from Ron Hardin at 3:40 pm on Jul 08, 2006

It's automatic when the country goes from liberal to conservative, or vice versa, that a bunch of elections will be close for a while.

For democracy, it doesn't matter who wins a 50% election, just so long as somebody does and it's final. take it as a coin flip, when it's too close to resolve easily, and you live with the result. As a result, you get democracy.

It is not fair to say recount until I win, even if in the end you don't win. You'll always claim you did, and that the government is illegitimate.

Democracy requires that you agree to the coin flip in those cases, is all.

#15 from Scott Harris at 5:10 pm on Jul 08, 2006

Your commentary reminds me of some I know who still want to debate State's Rights circa 1860. Even though we fought a Civil War to resolve those very issues, some refuse to acknowledge that the outcome of the Civil War decided more than just the status of slavery in America - it also decided the nature of the relationship between the Federal Government and the States.

If some people still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of the outcome of the Civil War which ended 140 years ago, is it really surprising that others cannot acknowledge that 9/11 really did irrevocably change the relationship between the USA and the rest of the world?

Wishing that 9/11 didn't happen is as pointless as wishing the States still had supremacy over the Federal Government. While the ideas may have some appeal, the points are moot. Would that some people could recognize this.

#16 from Demosophist at 5:30 pm on Jul 08, 2006

The shift toward resolution might well be incremental rather than revolutionary, but it still has to happen. If you're saying it won't you may be right, but if so don't get too comfortable, because things are going to get very dicey. Then again, the shift might just be revolutionary after all. Probably involves a great deal more than just Bayesian probability, though. Also includes the recognition of "complex" (Warfield) or "wicked" (Rittel) problems.

Also, beware of false dichotomies. I recognize the pattern of resistance to "alpha male"ism, but given a certain robust level of self-correction that dichotomy could easily get swallowed up. Just because we haven't broken through yet, doesn't mean we won't.

#17 from M. Simon at 6:00 pm on Jul 08, 2006

#16 Demosophist says:

If you're saying it won't you may be right, but if so don't get too comfortable, because things are going to get very dicey.

Yup.

The only solution I see at this time is a Dem war hawk getting elected. Then about 1/2 the Dems will own the idea and we will be united enough to win. Trouble is that the Dems are not desperate enough to run an Eisenhower (or a Lieberman). Besides Wes Clarke does not qualify as an Eisenhower.

In some ways we are very unlucky that our enemies are so incompetent. They don't even rise to the level of the Italians let alone the Germans or Japanese. If we got an attack per year on the USA we would all be together (just as we were post 9/11 - moonbats excepted).

#18 from David at 6:56 pm on Jul 08, 2006

I think we are being just a tad premature with this kind of analysis. What we are seeing is the slow death of a dominate party (with 28% of the vote) and as it dies if it sorts out 50% to each side then you would be right. I suspect that in the end most will go conservative (as they seem to be big spending social conservatives). It will be a very rough fit which is why they haven't migrated yet.

#19 from Demosophist at 8:32 pm on Jul 08, 2006

Besides Wes Clarke does not qualify as an Eisenhower.

Wes Clarke qualifies as a George McClellan. Some have said that he wouldn't have ended the war, but if it was the Copperheads whose votes and backing got him there, and given his rathe timid constitution, I think there's a good chance the Confederates would have been able to wrangle a compromise that extended slavery.

BTW, the "stalemate" isn't anything new, nor does it derive from disagreements about the war. We've been a politically deadlocked country since the end of the Cold War. The issues which could be resolved by empiricism aren't being resolved, not so much because people are just too stubborn, but because we use methods that tend to reinforce our preferences. They may be "unbiased" in the sense that they can be jiggered by either side, but they're not "objective"... or accurate.

And granted, fixing that situation won't convince most people... but it will end the deadlock, by getting the sand in the hourglass moving again.

#20 from Nate at 11:49 pm on Jul 08, 2006

Dude, read a book about either American or Mexican history. Things are fine right now. Sure, the situation in Iraq sucks. But it's a hell of a lot better than anything we experienced before 1991. Enjoy the peace that comes from global supremacy, and stop looking for threats that don't exist, and that includes blowing up fundamentalist Islam way out of proportion.

#21 from Jim Rockford at 12:04 am on Jul 09, 2006

Nate's comments are exactly WHY we won't get anything done until other outside forces Make us adjust.

The Left in it's hazy romanticism of non-Western people (tell me why exactly the "Divine King" Dalai Lama and his wish to return Tibet to the 10th Century is preferred over Chinese modernity?) ... ignores any threat that does not come in Western forms. Or to be more precise, Karl Rove hiding under your bed is more a threat than the avowed wish of millions of Muslims to slaughter us all and the tacit or overt support of about a billion more Muslims to help in that end.

Can nukes, bioweapons, chemical weapons or even mass suicide bombings kill many (up to tens of millions) Americans? Sure.

It won't change anything other than inevitably precipitating the mass reciprocal slaughter of Muslims by enraged Westerners who possess far greater economies, technical skills, and powers of integrating diverse systems to produce ever-more deadly weapons.

Wretchard points out that when Israel felt existentially threatened (withdraw from Gaza and the Palestinians STILL make war) they responded in kind with War themselves and don't see much of a limit.

What happens if Al Qaeda succeeds in say blowing up a Football stadium around 9/11? What then?

Nate discounts that threat and finds it either justified ("we are not perfect and so deserve it") or unrealistic, the way people viewed flying planes into buildings after the foiled Bojinka and Eiffel Tower plots.

Either way there is a serious disconnect between Nate's way of thinking and the rest of us, looking at the nature, pace, and acceleration of terrorist attacks on the US since 1970. And understanding that the nation founded on "All Men Are Created Equal" simply cannot exist with the idea that there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet (and the Muslim is the natural ruler of the slave kuffar, to kill or abuse as he might wish).

America's imperfect journey to live up to the Declaration, as embodied by the original Constitution, Bill of Rights, Dr. King's re-iteration of the Declaration etc sets it on a direct, inevitable, and ultimately bloody conflict with a religion that holds that Muslims are the superior to all others, and further as part of God's Will must conquer and rule the unbeliever, slaughtering him or converting him to the one unquestioned Caliph, God's Shadow on Earth.

It's America vs. Allah; that conflict won't go away until one destroys the other.

#22 from Jim Rockford at 12:07 am on Jul 09, 2006

I wish to add that Mexico's failure as a nation (it must export it's people despite great natural wealth and the world's biggest market next door) has not been addressed by either Candidate.

Like Nate they wish to avoid the very issue (the opposite of rationality) and don't even offer competing prescriptions for addressing the problem.

Any rational observer would place Mexico as a failed state, nation, and culture. It's not even Argentina. That doesn't mean it can't be fixed. But ignoring the central problem (it can't employ it's people at decent wages) solves nothing. So more deadlock.

WSJ has an article on the Danish guy asking world leaders to concentrate on setting priorities among spending.

#23 from yankeewombat at 8:03 am on Jul 09, 2006

I think the blogsphere has already begun to correct both the intelligence and university problems...this discussion is as good an example as any. Without the blogsphere none of us participating would have had this exchange. This exchange, is just the kind of interaction that constitutes a vastly improved public intelligence system and also is the beginnings of what we call universities. It lacks structure now, but it already has its own traditional heroes. For example, elsewhere on WOC Donald Sensing and Armed Liberal are engaged in learned disputation, productively I think, over what Stephen den Beste wrote about the future of energy in 2002. I think that this discussion probably superior in terms of public intelligence to the the one way communication on energy matters offered us by Al Gore. I say probably superior because I haven't seen the movie. And also superior to a lot of agenda driven research that passes for science in the university system. We already have superpowers and by that I mean we have networked power which Eric Raymond describes in relation to open software development in The Cathedral and the Bizarre - available on line at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

The bottom line, in Raymond's terms, is that the bizarre like Internet brings out the best in the marketplace on ideas a lot better than the hierarchal structure of either the MSM or the universities. We really are only beginning to discover the superpowers inherent in global networking. By 'superpowers' I mean ideas that revolutionize how we think and do things like the invention of movable type leading to superpowers like mass production and interchangeable parts. I think we are just at the beginning of this thing.

#24 from Nate at 6:14 pm on Jul 09, 2006

Question for Jim:

"It's America vs. Allah; that conflict won't go away until one destroys the other."

Where exactly does Iraq fit here, a place where we took out a relatively secular leader and have formed a democratic government that empowers extremist Muslims looking to implement the Sharia? You can't have it both ways.

It is much likely that a potentially bellicose, economically desperate China will be a far bigger threat than militant Islam, which is a discredited, decaying ideology.

#25 from J Thomas at 1:07 am on Jul 10, 2006

tell me why exactly the "Divine King" Dalai Lama and his wish to return Tibet to the 10th Century is preferred over Chinese modernity?

He's not particularly genocidal. If we could turn tibet into some sort of Dalai lama preserve that people could walk out of if they wanted to, it probably wouldn't do us much harm. Tibet doesn't have a lot of resources we need and their traditional culture didn't go in for bombing anybody to establish hegemony. If we could wave a magic wand and persuade the chinese to pull out and just trade with the tibetans whatever marketable goods both wanted to trade, probably it would be just fine. And it wouldn't do much harm to shorten the de facto chinese border with india, either.

I wouldn't pay much money or many lives to get the chinese out of tibet. It's too late to undo the killing. And tibet is never going to have the resources to keep the chinese out while china has a modern economy and wants to move in. But if a bunch of tibetans wanted to live as they liked and it was easy to get the chinese to let them, what's the harm?

Similarly if we happened to have some marginal land we don't need for anything, and we had a bunch of SCAers or somebody who wanted to go play at being subsistence farmers or amerinds or whatever, why not let them? What's the harm? So long as they let each other quit when they want to quit.

#26 from J Thomas at 1:20 am on Jul 10, 2006

I wish to add that Mexico's failure as a nation (it must export it's people despite great natural wealth and the world's biggest market next door) has not been addressed by either Candidate.

Are we down to 2 candidates already?

Anyway, how would they suggest we fix mexico, a sovereign nation?

My own thought would be to invite mexico to somehow join the USA. It would solve the border problem. We'd have official permission to start solving their problems -- probably starting with a legal system that actually encouraged investment and maybe some kind of land reform. It wouldn't be good to make them join us by some sort of military conquest though, that might lead to too many hard feelings.

But how could you put something like that into a campaign platform? It wouldn't bring in votes from right or left or middle. Propose something that nobody wants and they'll think you're crazy. I can sure understand why no candidate has proposed anything like a solution.

#27 from J Thomas at 1:29 am on Jul 10, 2006

FDR authorized the internment of Japanese Americans in Executive Order 9066, yet we're not willing to give this President the discretion to try illegal combatants and terrorists in a military court?

Are you suggesting that Rooseveldt's choice was OK? Or are you saying he was wrong, but it's OK for Bush to do wrong things as long as they aren't as wrong as Rooseveldt?

Consider that we have somewhere between 1 and 2 million iranian-born immigrants and their descendents in the USA. It might come to the USA interning over a million civilians, perhaps as early as this year. Somewhere among that million or two might be a thousand who'd do significant sabotage. Should we follow the WWII example or can we find a better way?

#28 from Demosophist at 2:33 am on Jul 11, 2006

My own thought would be to invite mexico to somehow join the USA.

Well, that's basically the current strategy of the Democratic Party.

#29 from J Thomas at 10:37 am on Jul 11, 2006

"My own thought would be to invite mexico to somehow join the USA."

Well, that's basically the current strategy of the Democratic Party.

No, it isn't. The Democratic party doesn't have a strategy. The closest they come to a strategy about mexico is to let Republicans alienate the hispanic vote, and then say things that they think will get them more hispanic votes than they lose racist votes.

Basicly they're following the Republican approach on everything, but not as much. They're hoping when the Republicans self-destruct they'll be the remaining choice.

#30 from toc at 3:59 am on Dec 26, 2006

Mexico is not a failed state.
The U.S. imports Mexicans, like it imports drugs. It then blames the suppliers for feeding their appetites.

Mexico is not interested in joining the USA.
Mexico is not very interested in the Gringo way of life.
Mexico, like many other countries it is not interested in the missionary complex that is part of the Gringo character that they seem to always want to inflict upon the rest of the world.

Mexico has not had a war in nearly 100 years and that was a revolution. Although the U.S. did find it convenient to concoct the Zimmerman letter as a fig leaf for the U.S. to enter the First World War. The only major foreign conflict in which Mexico has been involved was when the American invaded in the Mid 1800s. The battle for Texas was internal. Texas was part of Mexico.

Mexico has a pretty simple Foreign policy which is enshrined in their constitution, ie. Keep your nose out of other people's business. This might be something for the U.S. to consider mimicking.

The U.S. has a lot of problems internationally that, in their view seem to be caused by everyone but themselves.