tdaxp

Ah, the academy...

Please join us for

A Staged Reading of


_Guantanamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’_

Sunday, September 25


City Campus Union Auditorium


7PM

Sponsored by The Lincoln Bill of Rights Defense Coalition and UNL’s Human Rights Human Diversity Initiative.

Guantánamo: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’ is the work of playwrights Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo from spoken evidence and letters from British detainees to their families. The play was commissioned by London’s Tricycle Theatre, from an idea by Nicholas Kent, in January 2004, and played there and at the New Ambassadors Theatre, followed by amateur readings throughout the U.K. The play has had U.S. runs in New York City, Tucson, Northampton, San Francisco, San Diego and Boston.

This public reading of Guantánamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' is intended to foster local dialogue about U.S. detentions at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere around the world. The U.S. signed on to the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture to join a world community that set standards for the most basic human rights, including humane treatment and the ability to challenge one’s detention in a court of law. There will be a moderated discussion after the reading.

It's not like they were captured on the battlefield fighting for the enemy or anything

tdaxp reader, occasional hero, and NGS intern Catholicgauze quizzles over my head

With bombings like yesterdays in Iraq will 2005 be the first year were Muslims form a majority (or even a plurality) of terrorism victims? Do you know any numbers?

Any answers?

"America's Gangster Auxiliaries," by TM Lutas, Flit(tm), 13 August 2005, http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/archives/005512.html.

Qutong an article on strategy page, TM Lutas discusses how America has established an informal border security system

The Intel agencies have spread the word around the criminal underground that pursuit will be relentless, and punishment harsh and certain for anyone who gets too cozy with Islamic terrorists. It's understood that the criminal gangs will do business with just about anyone (including intel agencies from just about anywhere). But even in this amoral atmosphere, the Western intel agencies have drawn a line of death for the players. At the other extreme, the word is out that valuable favors can be had for any gangsters who pass on valuable info about terrorist operations. Such deals are fairly common, although not given much publicity for obvious reasons (the resulting headlines cause major political headaches.)

This explains a major mystery. Why hasn't Al Queda been going through notoriously corrupt Mexico with their well established illegal immigration system and launched attacks on the US? Such an obvious attack route has led to calls on the right for the militarization of our southern border. The militarization didn't happen but the attacks didn't come either. Al Queda didn't show other evidence of being that kind of stupid so why not exploit a gaping hole in US defenses?

We are managing crime by informally signaling very high prices for actions we don't like, like maintaining minimal prices for crimes that the government doesn't care about (people smuggling). However, TM Lutas notes a fragility to this policy

The safety of the US southern border is thus now under indirect, and not direct, US control. This is tenable, for now, but we might not understand impending failure of the arrangement until two late. Two important failure modes come to mind. First, that Al Queda could inspire greater terror and flip these forces to become their auxiliaries. Second, our own tales of unendurable retribution could no longer be believed and commercial avarice could carry the day.

One might say that this is a stick-heavy approach:

Now the mystery is solved. The coyotes and drug barons who carry on illegal cross border trade have been warned in a manner that has scared them into being US allies on the issue of US homeland defense in much the same way that the Mafia was recruited into our forces for WW II duty as black hat auxiliaries.

But "carrot-and-stick" works best for changing behavior. So what's the carrot?

"Al Qaeda as Warfighting Entity," by George Friedman, Stratfor Geopolitical Intelligence Report, 2 August 2005, http://junkpolitics.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/08/02/stratfor-geopolitical-intelligence-report-al-qaeda-as-warfig.html.

George Friedman, author of America's Secret War on geopolitical analyst recently sent out an email looking at the Global War on Terrorism. His conclusion: bin Laden is losing.

First, Friedman writes that the Global War on Terrorism is a real war

Karl von Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by other means. In order for the United States to be engaged in a war with al Qaeda, three things seem to be necessary.

• Al Qaeda must be an entity that is capable of making and enforcing decisions. There can be no war without strategy and tactics, and no strategy and tactics without a command structure.
  
• Al Qaeda must have political goals that are in some sense practical. Punishing the infidel is not a political goal: It is not intended to achieve a political outcome, nor is it intended to create or influence regimes.
  
• Al Qaeda must have a warfighting strategy that it is pursuing. Its actions must fit into the paradigm of war and make sense from a military standpoint.

In our view, all three of these criteria are met. This does not mean that al Qaeda will or won't be successful; it simply means that al Qaeda's behavior can be properly understood in terms of war.

Second, al Qaeda has achievable goals

Al Qaeda also has political goals. Indeed, it differs from prior groups that used terror tactics by the fact that it embarked on the war with political goals. The long-term goal -- creating a caliphate encompassing all the lands it deems to be part of the dominion of Islam -- was not the immediate goal. Rather, al Qaeda's immediate goal was to increase the effective Islamist opposition to existing Muslim regimes to force at least one successful uprising. The means toward that end were two-fold: First, to demonstrate in the Muslim world the vulnerability of the United States -- the patron of many of these existing regimes -- and second, to force a response from the United States that would increase either contempt or effective hostility among Muslims. If the United States refused combat, this would be a sign that it was a paper tiger. If it surged into the Islamic world, this would prove the United States was the enemy. Either way, al Qaeda thought it would win.

Third, al Qaeda's mistake was assuming that hatred and distrust of America would translate into anti-American attacks

If they made an error, it was only in assuming that genuine anti-Americanism and hatred of local regimes supported by the United States would translate into effective anti-Americanism that could be leveraged to al Qaeda's advantage. Public sentiment matters in democratic regimes; it doesn't matter in warfare very much. Consider: Most of Europe hated the Germans and their occupation during World War II. Anti-German feeling was overwhelming. Nevertheless, this did not translate into effective anti-German sentiment. European states were never in a position to overthrow German power. That required an external intervention. In Vietnam, on the other hand, anti-Americanism proved effective: It turned into a warfighting process.

Fourth, the only place al Qaeda has been close to successful has been in the Sunni Arab provinces of Iraq

Where al Qaeda miscalculated was in assuming that sentiment would turn into effective sentiment. Thus far, except in four Sunni provinces in Iraq, that hasn't happened. But that it didn't happen was neither pre-ordained nor obvious. Al Qaeda knew what it was doing.

Conclusion: America is winning

At this point, al Qaeda is losing the war from the standpoint of its own strategic goals. No Muslim regime has fallen since Sept. 11, save two -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- that fell to the United States. The Iraqi resistance showed extreme promise for a very long time, given American miscalculations. Anti-Americanism had turned effective. However, the shifting calculus among the Sunni elders has threatened to undermine support for al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the Sunni nationalist insurgency -- onto which al Qaeda has clamped parasitically -- has been in danger of disruption. This, coupled with serious breaches in al Qaeda's global system, forced the group into a desperate counteroffensive.

The Euphrates War truly is the central front in the Global War on Terrorism.

"Seuss on Japan," by Curzon, Coming Anarchy, 30 July 2005, http://www.cominganarchy.com/archives/2005/07/30/seuss-on-japan/.

"Dark Diary," by Alan Dowd, The American Enterprise, September 2005, http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleID.18658/article_detail.asp.

In anticipation of the 4-year mark of 9/11, the AEI's magazine gives a chronology of what might have been

January 27-February 12, 2003
Explosions rocked the government district in Amman, and rescue workers succumbed to caustic fumes and blistering skin as Jordan reeled from the deadliest terror attacks worldwide since September 2001. Jordanian sources reported that a cloud of poison enveloped a wide swath of the capital after ten buses exploded throughout the city. At least 4,100 people were killed, with thousands more treated in hospitals and makeshift decontamination facilities outside Amman. Officials estimate between 100 and 200 Americans among the dead. According to the White House, the poison cloud was sulfuric acid.

A video recording by a man identifying himself as Musab al-Zarqawi warned that more attacks would follow if Jordan continued to cooperate with the United States. Washington confirmed that Zarqawi is a Jordanian with ties to both al-Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.

On the same morning that a U.S. medical relief plane was downed over Amman, the New York Times published excerpts from a CIA memo warning about the possibility of Baghdad transferring material to Zarqawi for use against U.S. interests. But according to CIA director George Tenet, “the intelligence was too murky...we just couldn’t connect all the dots.”

King Abdullah was not harmed by Zarqawi’s attack, but his government was toppled. A committee of clerics sympathetic to bin Laden emerged to govern the once-moderate Arab nation. “This is a great step toward our new caliphate,” an aide to bin Laden announced.

...

May 1-5, 2004

Stung into action by the dirty-bomb attack in Chicago, the lame duck Bush administration vowed to begin “an all-out war on terror.” A flurry of activity at military bases all across the nation underscored the seriousness of U.S. intentions. But the buildup came to a sudden halt after two soldiers were killed and 15 injured when an attacker lobbed grenades into a barracks at the headquarters of the 101st Airborne in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. News outlets initially reported that the attack came from a breach of the base’s heavily guarded perimeter, but Army spokesmen later confirmed that the attacks came from inside the sprawling facility. Sergeant Hasan Akbar was detained after the attack, which left the nation paralyzed with fear.

Any hopes of the American people overcoming that paralysis were dashed when bin Laden issued a stunning double-edged threat: “Be warned,” he began, “our martyrs have infiltrated your military. If you attack our brethren, we will carry out more martyrdom missions against your army. If your stooges in Europe attack, we will strike them. And if the Zionists attack, we will rain missiles on their cities. America lacks the will to stand up to our martyrs.”

Checkmated by what he called “an axis of evil,” a humiliated Bush ordered U.S. forces to stand down.

I immediately though of Chirol's and Duck of Minerva's Dr. Seuss series, and in particular a Seuss strip posted by Curzon



It can so easily be flipped to



While sometimes wise, delay can be a bad problem much, much worse. When time is against you -- when the correlation of forces is inexorably sliding from bad to worse -- intervention is needed. In the new version of the comic, Japan let her relationship with the United States get so badly that by December 1941 the only way to not capitulate to American demans was war. By wishing the problem would go away, by hoping that the bath water would somehow cease warming, the Empire guaranteed the water would be scolding hot. Heated by a nuclear furnace.

When the "go slow" lobby cried for a Ramadan truce in the Afghan War, when the "go slow" lobby wanted "more time for diplomacy to work" before the Iraq War, when the "go slow" lobby wanted to delay the Iraqi Elections, these dove Leftists were making the same mistake as the hawk Rightists of pre-War Nihon. They did not realize that time was on the Enemy's side. In this new war on terrorism, despotates are a swamp that terrorism thrives breeds in. Tyranny is like a flame heating a bath. The longer the flame is there, the worse the bath gets. Wait long enough, and the bath will kill you.

And when that "bath" is the war against terrorism, then the only solution will be to never get it -- to capitulate to the terrorist's demands, because you have waited too long.

To change the cartoon once more:



Then what is the solution? When you are cornered, what should you do? How should you approach the bath? What was the right path after 9/11?

First, tactically embrace defeat. If you find yourself in that situation, it is because you have already waited too long. Give into despair that you cannot wait any longer.

Then, rearrange your mind. Embrace the task before you. Want to do it.

Last, realize that caution is your enemy. If you had not waited so long, you could take a slow-and-steady approach. But you have already waited too long, and time is on your enemy's side. And Mao said, "Just act recklessly and it will be all right."

Sometimes, if you don't act recklessly you'll regret it for the rest of your life.

Or the rest of your civilization's existence.

"System Administrator Appreciation Day," by Zonk, Slashdot, 29 July 2005, http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/29/142221&tid=230&tid=218.

Barnett must be pleased...

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day: 'a special day, once a year, to acknowledge the worthiness and appreciation of the person occupying the role, especially as it is often this person who really keeps the wheels of your company turning.' Congratulations to all who keep the electrons of our global networks flowing properly!"

Have your developing country thanked your SysAdmin?

al Qaeda, Christianity, and Conservatism have!

"Peter Nivio Zarlenga on Wow!," by Tom Asacker, A Clear Eye, 15 July 2005, http://www.acleareye.com/sandbox_wisdom/2005/07/i_ha.html (from Orbit Now!, also at New Persuasion).

Tom Asacker has an interesting blog post on brands and business which has obvious implications for the Global War on Terrorism.

To excerpt:

 

"Like when I'm in the bathroom looking at my toilet paper, I'm like 'Wow! That's toilet paper?' I don't know if we appreciate how much we have."

Wow I'm pretty sure that we don't appreciate how much we have. And I'm certain that we're not satisfied with it all. We want more, better, faster, cheaper, truer, funnier, groovier, kinder, prettier, wittier, livelier. Expectations are at an all-time high, and they're headed nowhere but up!

 

Same for terrorism. 9/11 and the Beslan school massacre are now expected. Bus bombs are deadly, but we know what "terror" is. We expect that "terror." Our hearts are becoming hard.

Further:

 

"A company's advertising represents the best opportunity it has to portray its personality."

 

After I cleared my throat and wiped my chin I began to consider those words - and my reaction to them - a little more critically. "Perhaps that's right," I thought. "Maybe we've reached a a point where the quality of the initial point of customer contact - be it an advertisement, sales presentation, webinar, direct mail piece, blog, concert hall, etc. - is the new competitive high bar? Maybe what we're experiencing today is the shifting of Wow! emphasis from post-sale to pre-sale? From customers to prospects?"

 

How does this relate to terrorism? Does this mean that al Qaeda knows that it cannot post-sale "Wow" -- that it can't deliver "Wow" because of a terrorist attack. That it has to advertise the al Qaeda brand, and inspire terror and Wow before (or without) a terrorist attack?

The article continues:

 

Today, when prospects experience any form of marketing communication, they're searching (albeit subconsciously) for two things: relevance and uniqueness. They're unimpressed with "me too" offerings and they see right through the old school, mass marketing b.s. and bribes. Even "new" doesn't mean jack to them. They're "newed" out. So they tune-out most attempts to pull them in for a later Wow! Instead, they must be strategically Wowed!, starting with the very first impression.

 

How relevant are London bus bombs for non-Londoners? Not very. How relevant are the second London bus bombs? Only to the extent they have new WOW action -- a suspect shot dead, a hospital surrounded, etc.

An (in)famous piece of software is Lotus 1-2-3 version 2.0. Lotus 1-2-3 was "Microsoft Excel" before there was a "Microsoft Excel." And the second version, 2.0, wowed everyone. New features were very useful and worked great. It was like nothing else that most people had ever seen.

Lotus 1-2-3 2.0 almost killed the company.

Every version after it was "ho hum" compared to 1-2-3 2.0. People's expectations of improvement were raised extremely high after version 2.0, and when Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't able to turn water into wine again, customers were resistant to pay for a normal upgrade. After all, to them revolutionary changes were to be expected.

9/11 and Beslan may be the Lotus 1-2-3 2.0 of wow. They were so terrible that they are extremely hard to top. al Qaeda can do the same things bigger, or better, but bin Laden has to face the real possibility that more "relevant and unique" attack may be out of its grasp.

Through luck and pluck, Lotus survived its catastrophic success of 1-2-3 2.0. With luck and pluck, al Qaeda may the catastrophic successes of 9/11 and Beslan.

The Command Posts reminds us al Qaeda says, "You Love Life, We Love Death." This is not an idle statement. al Qaeda's philosophy is based on a particularly violent desert militarism. Misery is fertile soil for al Qaeda. Mental misery, moral isolation, alienation, create converts and warriors for al Qaeda. The 9/11 attackers, 3 / 11, the 7 / 7 attackers, the 7 / 21 attackers, were all miserable men. al Qaeda's world is one where life is not worth living --- only the life-after-death is worth living for bin Laden and Zarqawi. al Qaeda wishes others to realize this, so they can live virtuous lives under the Shade of the Korean. al Qaeda grows when it increases the misery in this world, so the paradise in the next seems all the more beautiful.

This creates an internal contradiction: There are five stages to victory: penetration, isolation, subversion (take-over or take-down), reorientation, and reharmonization. al Qaeda's core competency -- isolation -- makes every step straight forward except for reharmonization. Even in areas where al Qaeda is able to almost win -- like Taliban Afghanistan -- al Qaeda has never reharmonzied a population around it. The same tactic that makes al Qaeda strong in the first-half of struggle -- increasing worldly misery -- makes it very weak in the second half.

In the first half, they can convince men to kill themselves and others by saying beautiful women await them in Paradise:

"What Difference Do Nuclear Weapons Make?," by Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, Zones of Turmoil, revised edition published 1996, pg 66.

"Revisiting Questions on Deterrence and Nuclear Terrorism," by Mark Safranski, ZenPundit, 22 November 2004, http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2004/11/revisiting-questions-on-deterrence-and.html.

"The Tancredo Blunder," by Hugh Hewitt, HughHewitt.com, 18 July 2005, http://www.hughhewitt.com/#postid1815 (from Captain's Quarters through private email).

Representative Tom Tancredo suggested that the United States destroy Mecca if there was a devastating al Qaeda attack on the United States.

“Well, what if you said something like — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites,” Tancredo answered.

“You’re talking about bombing Mecca,” Campbell said.

“Yeah,” Tancredo responded.

Hugh Hewitt criticizes Rep. Tancredo, and is wrong on in almost every paragraph

I have been hearing from people who urge that Tancredo is just voicing the updated version of the MAD doctrine which kept the USSR at bay through the long years of the Cold War. That's silly. Destroying Mecca wouldn't destroy Islam. It would enrage and unify Islam across every country in the world where Muslims lived.

Wrong. The purpose of MAD wasn't to destroy the Soviet Union -- that would have been an effect, but not the purpose. The purpose of the Massively Armed Deterrent was to deter the Soviet Union.

More specifically, if the United States knew that al Qaeda had acquired a weapon, we would need a way to compel al Qaeda to give us that weapon.

To go one step farther:

Deterrence against clandestine weapons presents quite different problems from the traditional deterrence relationship with the Soviet Union, even if the analytic structure of deterrence is essentially the same. The deterrent threat is likely to have to be against the individual or small group [or their interests -- tdaxp] that is being deterred, not against a country.

...
It is really "compellence," rather than deterrence, that is needed to deal with the threat... [The United States] would need to be able to compel the threaten to reveal the location of the weapons so that they could be disarmed... Now the democracies need a threat against [the terrorist organization] that will prevent [the terrorists] from retaliating for his own destruction. For some [terrorists], it is hard to imagine such a threat.

So in truth, Tancredo did not go far enough. Not only should we be prepared to destroy what bin Laden considers most holy and special if he severely hurts us. We must also be prepared to do so to avert him from hurting us, or even defending himself, if the circumstances permit.

Hewitt goes on, still wrong:

Let me be blunt: There is no strategic value to bombing Mecca even after a devastating attack on the U.S. In fact, such an action would be a strategic blunder without historical parallel, except perhaps Hitler's attack on Stalin. Anyone defending Tancredo's remarks has got to make a case for why such a bombing would be effective.

Of course it would not grow our power or wealth to destroy Mecca. Of course a radiated Mecca would not be able to be used to preposition aircraft for future conflict. That's not the point.

Mark Safranski pondered this earlier:

No one knows though bin Laden reportedly told the BBC that he had acquired nuclear weapons for deterrence purposes which indicates:

a) That bin Laden understands the concept well enough, and

b) There is something he considers important enough to acquire nuclear bombs in order to deter America from some action.

The question is "what" ? My guess it is to protect Islam's Holy sites.

Hewitt's conclusion is right, at least

I want to be very clear on this. No responsible American can endorse the idea that the U.S. is in a war with Islam.

Of course not. We are at war with al Qaeda. It will be them we will deter and compel, even if there will be collateral damage to to an ancient multicultural temple and Christian church, long shorn of her decorations and venerations.

Elsewhere on the Blogosphere: Stones Cry Out conflates massive armed deterrent with mutually assured destruction. Power Pundit says an attack on measured cannot be a "measured and appropriate response" (whatever the circumstances? -- tdaxp). Point Five mocks hawks. One Hand Clapping started all this.

From the Hawk Right: La Shawn Barber decries weakness in the face of terror. Baldilocks sees nothing new in Rep. Tancredo's words. InstaPunk exhaustively defends the congressman. HCS and Gen both understand theory.

Update: Mark from ZenPundit adds his thoughts

Tancredo's hamhanded, off-the-cuff, bluster looks positively milquetoast next to U.S. nuclear doctrine under Jimmy Carter. The purpose of making terrifying, credible, deterrence threats is to NOT have to actually use nuclear weapons. If a nuclear bomb goes off inside the United States tomorrow, I can just about guarantee that we will use nuclear weapons in retaliation against probably more than one terrorist-supporting country. If we are bombed it will because our enemies disbelieved that we would retaliate, not because we are clear that we will.

Update 2: More thoughts from...
Riting on the Wall:

" the core critique (and there is a secondary critique below as well) here is that deterrence is, at root, a byproduct of rational actor theory. which is to say that all actors within a system will under all circumstances make rational decisions to maximize identified self-interests. these interests can be existential (which is the essential logic of mutually assured destruction) or they can fall to other categories: symbolic, tactical, strategic, etc. under normal circumstances, making a clear and credible existential threat to a defined action would deter such an action (in this case a nuclear strike on us soil) from taking place. all this is well and good under traditional understandings of rational actor theory, but i have to throw several wrenches in the works at this point."

ZenPundit:

In real-world nuclear deterrence logic as it played out in the era of brinksmanship through MAD, rational actor theory was not actually subscribed to by either superpower.

Update 3: While Sahhabh picks up the story, the Saudis have already started Mecca's destruction."

"Comments," by PoliPundit, PoliPundit, 14 June 2005, http://polipundit.com/wp-comments-popup.php?p=8279&c=1 (from MyDD through tdaxp).

"Fatwah," by Chris Byrne, The AnarchAngel, 15 July 2005, http://anarchangel.blogspot.com/2005/07/fatwah.html (from Resistance is Futile through Riding Sun).

"Swarm" it with annoying comments (4GPS2: Network Contestment)

 

So why don’t most other conservative blogs allow comments? Because liberals are jerks. If a conservative blog allows comments, it is immediately overrun by juvenile, illiterate, liberal hecklers who ruin the comments section. We here at polipundit.com have been fighting this ever since I turned on comments, and only ceaseless vigilance has allowed us to keep the comments section open. If a larger conservative/libertarian blog, like InstaPundit, were to start a Comments section, then the blogger would have to spend every waking moment policing liberal trolls.

 

"Denial of Service" it by killing the blogger (4GWS1: Node Takedown)

 

A Fatwah has been issued against me by a known terror group. Corresponding groups have responded indicating that I will be eliminated shortly.

They have my name, address, telephone numbers, and the names and addresses of my friends and loved ones.

The FBI has been unable to tell me of any actionable threat, however they believe that the threat is real. They have warned me to take the standard anti-terrorist precautions, suitable for Bogota or South Africa not Phoenix.

 

The difference between politics and war: in politics you don't get dead.

tdaxp's Question: So how do we fight a pro-al-Qaeda blogger? With 4G Politics? With 4G War? Something else...?