NOTES FOR TERRORISTS - CANADIAN VIEW
I give you one piece of advice: Do not incite the American people to war. We in Canada know a lot about the US, and how they think, and how they live, much more than the average person in Bam, Iran, or Tyre, Lebanon, knows. You think that you can use hate as a weapon to build an attack against he US, but you know not what you do. The US has over 300 million people, and they are all soldiers. The US built its country by its own hands, and from the beginning, they all accepted that freedom, liberty, and democracy were not negotiable. If by some miracle, an invasion force of Iranians attempted a landing on US soil, every man, woman and child would be there to meet them. They would not relent until it was finished. On United Airlines Flight 93, a random assortment of 40 civilian Americans was suddenly called to arms in a miniature Middle Eastern war. The ex-policewoman air hostess, the environmentalist, the marketing executive, moved against the Islamists as one, and collectively said, "We are not afraid". Americans did not become timorous, or afraid after 9/11, instead they "got busy on yo’ ass". After 9/11, America did not back down, and they will not back down, because the attack incited individual Americans against every Islamist, and every person who supports Islamists, or gives comfort to them. Americans are not the same as the Russians in Afghanistan, or the French in Algeria. To defeat the US, you will have to kill every one of them, and you do not know how to do that.

You clearly do not understand how rich Americans are, how many resources they have at their disposal, how intelligent, perserverant, and creative they are. Their wealth is enormous, with massive amounts of built structure: large houses, soaring office towers, highways, schools, universities, hospitals, and military bases everywhere, spanning a continent. Honestly, if you had even an inkling of what you are up against, you would cease your pointless reverse crusade immediately.

Within the last century, Americans have become extremely interested in war. They think about it, talk about it, plan for, it and rehearse it constantly. They spend huge amounts on their military every year, building installations and weapons, many types of which you have never even heard about. Tens of millions of Americans have served, do serve, and will serve in their military. We Canadians sometimes stand back and look at the Americans bemused, because one seldom even sees any of the Canadian military presence in Canada, whereas the US National Guard units stationed near Buffalo, New York, alone, have sufficient resources at their disposal to kill every Muslim on earth. Of course the Americans are right to prepare for war, because there is always another one coming, and they know that they will probably be the main target. The US even declared a "War on Poverty" in the 1960's, but thankfully they relented before they began bombing the slums.

People who do not understand democracies constantly underestimate them. Hitler and Stalin certainly underestimated democracies. Many of those living in non-democracies think that in the current situation in the US, with huge internal dissent, Democrats shouting misgivings about Iraq, and Republicans pontificating about treachery, and the enemy within, it may seem that the factions will cancel each other out, or with more Democrat influence, and the whole tide of war will change. Instead, the US is exposing its power to the world, by thinking out loud, disagreeing publicly, and nit-picking endlessly over details in floods of political television programs. The election is over, and, the war on terror will go on, as all previous US wars have done, irrespective of the party in power. To understand US policy, look carefully at what is not said, because that is where they have reached implicit consensus. Neither side is talking about ending the war on terror -- instead they are bickering about the best way to kill Islamists.

For the Middle East, the scale of this war is enormous, which is clearly evident in the reportage of Al Jazeera, which mainly features events related to the war on terror. In contrast, this war has had no real effect on the US whatsoever. It is completely trivial. The US media talks about the war a lot, but Americans are always very interested in war in general, and there are no interesting sex scandals going on at the moment. If JonBenet Ramsay's murderer were to be found, CNN would focus completely on that, and behave for weeks as if the war on terror did not exist. So far, the war on terror has cost the US roughly 6,000 lives since 9/11, while over that same period, approximately 2,000,000 Americans have died from smoking. In the World War II epoch, spanning 1933-1945, about 70,000,000 people were killed, but only about 500,000 of them were Americans, and the US became stronger because of that war. Islamists hope to obtain nuclear weapons (in fact there really are no other weapons of mass destruction). With some luck, and perseverance, Islamists may be able to detonate a nuclear bomb in Times Square, New York, and kill 1,000,000 people, but that is 0.3% of the US population. The remaining 99.7% of the US population would then do to the Islamists what the US did to Japan. Later, in the years that followed such an event, some Americans would regret having turned several Middle Eastern countries into blowing ash, but there would be a reluctant final consensus that after the Times Square bombing, it had to be done, and they would be right.

In the meantime, the US grows stronger each day. Their economy is doing extremely well, providing levels of health and prosperity that even Ali Baba could not have dreamt about. Coca Cola is finally getting to challenge Pepsi in Afghanistan. As a bonus, the US military gets to interrupt its constant war games to practice and train in a real war in Iraq. These are almost perfect training circumstances, with lots of troop rotations, a very low casualty rate, a real but evanescent enemy, and a kill ratio of much higher than 10 to 1. It is a general's dream, and it's an excellent theater to test, develop, and refine weapons and tactics, in preparation for Iran, when that battle becomes necessary.

The most powerful method the US has of defeating the Islamists is already in play, and it will ultimately succeed. We Canadians, as the constant neighbors and interlocutors of the Americans, know their secrets. Only 5% of Americans have passports, and their biggest single foreign travel destination is Canada. The Americans’ secret method is that they do not hate very well. They’re terrible at it. They don't teach their children to hate, they constantly forget who their enemies are, and they forgive adversaries, usually before the last bullet has landed. Islamists, and so many people in the Middle East, cling to hate as an addiction, passing it on to their children, cherishing it inside themselves, using it as the centerpiece of their lives. Hate, quite simply, like other addictions, is a waste of time and energy. Americans can't concentrate very long on hate. They lose interest, or forget what the fighting was all about, or follow up their wars with reconstruction plans for their vanquished enemies. From time to time, they get mad at "Krauts", or "Japs", or "Commies", but the next thing you know, the epithets are gone from the language, and things are back to normal, with Americans welcoming their former enemies into their country as immigrants, and marrying them, if possible.

Therefore, my advice to Islamists is to just give up fighting the US and forget about it. Your hate will not even be reciprocated, and you will probably still be welcomed as immigrants during the conflict. In the meantime, remember it's not the Americans fault that your son wants to play with X-Box, or your daughter wants to wear Prada. If you don’t like Coca-Cola, don’t buy it. By flaunting your hate, you expose your jealousy, and humiliate yourselves. At the end of the war on terror, those who hate will be no better off than they were, while the US, by not hating, will be ever brighter, as "the shining city on the hill".

Oh, WoC crew, I wanted to notify you, if it hadn't happened yet; Monkyboy (our dear, sweet monkyboy of yore) has been banned from Protein Wisdom (by Jeff himself no less!) I tend to think I may have drawn him there (since I can't find anyone else who posted in that period regularly on both blogs) but I somewhat doubt my influence is so great.

Anyway, people tired of his contrarian, punch-drunk sincerity and his irrational fixation on questionable statistics and booted his ass.

lifts a Blue Moon Ale Here's to what's true showing itself true once again.

(Also, I have a blog-type thing at rivercocytus.deviantart.com right now. Its more of a journal of weird River musings of a religiomatics and Jesusology, but it may entertain nonetheless.)

Keep it ups, yall.

And DemocracyRules, great post! Yes, we Americans love kicking the ass. And then we forget about it because we like chillin' and having cold ones too. We're all jazz, mang.

Flip you on the catch side!

Good post, DemocracyRules. There is a very great deal of truth there, often overlooked by those fearing that we will be overrun by the terrible Islamists (or Commies, or Krauts, or whatever).

The picture you paint reminds me of the Instrumentality of Mankind, as described by the great science fiction writer, Cordwainer Smith.

I dunno, man.... isn't it called "The White House" because the folks from up north burned it down?

Of course, we paid the price. No, not in some kind of major defeat by American arms (War of 1812 was a draw). But we were worried about it, and so we moved the capital from York (Toronto) to some festering swamp called Ottawa because we figured it was so crappy that even the Americans woudn't bother. That bit from Graham Greene in the Mel Gibson Maverick remake... he's Canadian, he knows whereof he speaks.

We've been paying for that little move for well over 100 years now - aside from everything else, it's the 2nd coldest capital in the world (Moscow is #3). I think they've left us alone ever since because they're a little sorry for us.

So, my advice to the Taliban is to leave the US alone unless you want to move HQ to some miserable, godforsaken location that.... oh, wait.....

And actually, seems they've been making a special effort to pick on the Canadian troops lately. Call it the latest installment of the Islamists' Madrid startegy.

We'll see what happens, but we're talking about a country whose national sport is hockey. Our original and now co national sport is lacrosse - which is probably more violent than hockey.

Canada has responded by sending Leopard 1A5 tanks to Afghanistan as fire support, and soon CF-18 fighters will be on the way to Kandahar. There are other things we ought to be doing ASAP (buying Mi-17v5 helicopters from a joint Russian-Canadian consortium, plus emergency conversion of our Bell 412/CH-146 Griffons to armed reconnaissance helicopters), but that isn't a bad response.

Unfortunately, the barabrians are winning and will likely win.

Pakistan is now a secure safe haven for them with Musharraf's capitulation and release of 2,500 Taliban/al-Qaeda, and I wouldn't give great odds on that man's survival over the next 2 years. Misguided anti-drug efforts appear to have aligned the heroin traders solidly with the Taliban, adding steady flows of funds to the equation. Pakistan's ISI continues to help the Taliban, and Iran is also working with its own agents to stir up trouble while providing a shipping transit for heroin and sheltering a good deal of al-Qaeda's command structure.

Safe haven + consistent money + state support + major infusion of cadres = very bad news in a guerilla war. Michael Yon began sounding the alarm about this a few months ago saying 2007 will be big trouble, and he's a guy I'm inclined to trust a priori - but the more I look at the dynamics, the more empirical/analytical support I see for his view.

Molon Labe,

It has happened earlier on a number of occassions. I can certainly say for sure that it had happened in 1947 in South Asia.

Today gets counted in the 21st century, yes. But if we by the trends, nothing happened then, and nothing will happen now.

sound of crickets chirping continues

Uncle Sam, better than the Taliban.

You must be very proud.

P.S. You mean, we didn't win in Afghanistan either?

Like Iraq- our problems display violence as symptoms but the underlying failure in Afghanistan has been civilians. We havent provided material improvements for the average Afghan, so why do they give a crap whether its us or the Taliban? Its maddening that we have been so wildly successful militarilly in these wards (which is hard) and so desperately terrible at the things we should be brilliant at- building things, and employing people to do it.

Take the Romans: they were magnificent militarilly, but that isnt what built their empire. Engineering built the empire. Roman cities built the foundations for London, Paris, Bonn- when Rome conquered they gave people something, the new subjects watched as Romans built things in a matter of months that they themselves couldnt do in a decade. Why havent we been able to turn our industrial dominance and engineering prowess to our advantage? Its the single most dissapointing aspect of the entire war.

#7 Mark Buehner
The difference is that we're not trying to be conquerors. In WWII, we conquerored the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. We, as victors, imposed new constitutions and then proceeded to rebuild the countries. At present, we are attempting to give countries back to their owners, the people. We are therefore limited in what we can do and how forcefully we can do it.
Maybe we need to be conquerors again.

Semantics. We're there, we're in charge. We either give the people a reason to tolerate us or we dont.

More than semantics: it is the difference between letting them do things for themselves, and doing things for them, and killing them when they try to stop us.

We're trying very hard not to kill people, but if we change our mentality to that of conquering and subjugating, there will be fewer American dying, and great quantities of Afghans and Iraqis (and Iranians and probably Pakistanis and maybe Syrians and possibly Saudis) dying, and vast areas of cities being devastated. We are doing what we are doing, fighting slowly, to avoid fighting quickly and slaughtering people. We don't have to fight this way; we just prefer not to kill people unless we really have to.

"More than semantics: it is the difference between letting them do things for themselves, and doing things for them, and killing them when they try to stop us."

The Iraqis were not capable of sealing their borders, not capable of launching a crash program to repair their infastructure, not capable of developing their military in a short time to become strong enough to support the government. Therefore we either do it, or we do not. That is the point.

Mark, I think Jeff's point is that without acting like conquerors, we're not likely to have a situation where we can develop their military, repair their infrastructure or seal their borders. I think he's probably right.

#10:

The problem is that there are two forces at work in these nations: powers fighting for control and people who want to be left alone.

The powers that are fighting for control are the coalition, the new government, and the insurgents/terrorists (I believe there are groups which fall into either category).

The people in the country largely want to live their lives: this is how they lived under Saddam, they just kept their heads down and lived. That's, by default, how most people react so long as there is stability. They don't have stability, so since they can't lay low and live their lives they're looking for someone to fill the power void.

And that's the problem. The power void is being fought for by people who want to turn the country back centuries, by people who are corrupt or incompetent (no real democratic experience), and the coalition.

Germany and Italy and Japan failed miserably in their national culture and mentality, so we collectively destroyed large parts of their culture and mentality and gave them replacements. We told them how to properly build a free and fair society, based on democracy and the rule of law. Instead of holding their population entirely responsible for their culture by slaughter or imperialism after the war, we showed them how to be kind by helping them rebuild and treating them fairly.

Europe was destroyed and rebuild, both efforts being accomplished through brute force.

The people in the Middle East, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan, are responsible for their now removed culture and leaders. They allowed tyrants to run their nations and now we're trying to "be nice" and "not kill people" by letting them decide their new government. We're so afraid to be conquerers that we have come, destroyed their nations, and now we're going to leave them in relative tatters.

When a bone breaks, you forcefully reset it, use forceful splints to hold it in place and only then allow everything to grow back into place. We haven't done that.

#7 I agree.

The problem is that despite our efforts not to appear as conquerers our critics and enemies still accuse us of this whilst pointing to our failure to spur development in civilisations that have never known it. One of the reasons why Iraq is the way it is, is because the Americans deliberately chose not to act as 'classic' occupiers.

Western governments need to learn to stop appeasing fringe groups in their own societies because it only results in half cocked measures that either don't work or make progress stunted, allowing your critics to pan you further.

#13 - Davicus

We had the further advantage post-WWII that we were rebuilding largely authoritarian cultures. The German civil service bureaucracy predated the Nazis, and in large measure survived the war. It helped us run the country during the occupation, and we gradually sifted the Nazi elements out of it. I'm less familiar with the situation in Japan -- My impression is that the administrative system was less organized, but the cultural homogeneity and general deference to authority of the culture gave us a free hand to come in and run things.

In Iraq, the real social foundations are religious and familial. Saddam's bureaucracy disintigrated with his fall, and we weren't equipped to fully replace it -- much less do so while disavowing the Baathist regime from the start. With no civil order being imposed from above, rival religious and family power centers began fighting for supremacy.

I tend to agree with this UK Parliament member's assessment -- that we went in without adequate plans for preserving civil order, expecting that deals could be cut and everyone could be brought on board, not realizing just how many power blocs had reason to prefer chaos.

not realizing just how many power blocs had reason to prefer chaos.

Or how many would just assume blow up the adquaducts we built.

WHEW! YOU FOLKS ARE IMPATIENT! Iraq has never had a real democracy in their 5000 yr history, and it will take more than 3yrs to get it going (Many Germans were still eating rats 3 yrs after WWII). The main thing is that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan are actively sponsoring export terrorism, and both counties are trying very hard..

#15 - Interesting feedback, I obviously don't know enough about the various reconstructions mentioned to offer much in terms of a response. Good post.

#17 - Very true, but that's just it. They're fully capable of democracy, not many here will argue that. The concern is that there are many chaotic forces contending for power in the country and nobody is making a clear showing of who's the boss. The people have to be brought on board in order to root out the support or passivity protecting terrorists and insurgents but they just aren't used to that mindset. They trust power and stability and just want to get on with life. This is where the iron boot of an occupier can help establish stability -- when it lands hard and when its victory is unquestioned.

I'm not advocating an iron fist, that's now how our military functions. I'm just saying a little detached Machiavellianism is needed instead of well intended feel-good policies.

I guess I have no right to call them barbarians. I'm what Andrew Sullivan calls a Christianist, which means I have to literally follow Christ's command to throw rocks at people. No wait, it was NOT throw rocks at people.

As a child I learned "ethical monotheism" was the "gold standard" of civilized religion.

The more I see of our Muslim friends at work, the emptier the phrase seems to me. The purer their doctrine and the greater their zeal, the worse their conduct, by and large. They might have been invented as an example by some philosopher keen to underline how little the "monotheism" bit had to do with the "ethical" bit.

If your gods encourage decency, good, and if not, not. Their number, one or millions, has nothing to do with it.

-

By the way, I'm against the "ist" thing with religions.

"Islamist" evades the problem with Islam.

Christianist is awkward, creates a false implication of partial equivalence with Islamism, and again evades the problem. That is, if what you insist on is homosexual marriage, your problem is with Christianity.

I'm hoping, probably in vain, that we can put a stop to this before it gets to "polytheistist". Ist. Ist. 'Cause that will be insufferable.

I would like to add something to the first comment.

Don't anger the Brits, either. It's not that long ago that we fought one of the three other greatest military powers on Earth to a standstill; it's arguable that the main agent for this was a few hundred pilots.

Don't forget that, although there aren't all that many people in our military, a couple of hundred of them are always deep underwater, in charge of weapons that make the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. Get nukes, use one, we lose a city. And you lose yours.

All of them.