Enemies
I believe it was Frederick The Great who said that God is on the side with the biggest battalions:
not any more. God * (there will be more on that abstraction, I guarantee) is now on the side with the fewest morons. At this moment in the "war on terror" we seem to have stalemate in the moron department.
Actually, I don't have a problem with the latest terror alert, only with the attendant media hype. It seems to me a damn sight wiser to be thinking about al-Qaeda's unfulfilled 2001 goals than to spin speculative webs about what they might do if they just had superpower resources.
First, the West in general and the U.S. in particular has a weakness for overestimating enemies. In the U.S., this goes back to the Civil War, when McClellan's Richmond spies exaggerated the size of Confederate forces by 400-500 percent. The UK and France did the same with Hitler in the mid-1930s. In both cases overestimation, and the result tendency to see the problems rather than the opportunities, resulted in longer and bloodier conflicts than should have been necessary.
Al-Qaeda--like most terrorist organisations-- doesn't reason. Terrorism is a pure act of the limbic system, the old brain, where all questions are black and white and all solutions violent.
Left to its own devices, the old brain will simply repeat an attempted solution until it succeeds or until it is killed. This is how crocodiles hunt, for instance. It follows that al-Qaeda will try anything that has worked (or is on the to-do list) before moving on to something new.
Being alert for unmet al-Qaeda objectives ideas does make sense. What would make even more sense is to cut the flow of new ideas. Rather than scare ourselves silly in public, we should be spinning what-if scenarios in private, and making realistic assessments of what a loose confederacy of terrorists can achieve with limited resources.
It would make sense if we had an administration which didn't think it has more to gain than to lose by maintaining a permanent threat. Regrettably, Republicans can be almost as limbic as terrorists. After all, permanent threat worked fine in the Cold War for domestic social control. There too, we overestimated an opponent who, when we began to play the threat card, would have had to throw turnips at us in retaliation. By the time we finished screwing around, the opoponent's capacities were real.
Follow this link for something missing from what Zbignew Brezinski calls our "pretend war:" a dose of common sense:
http://www.newhouse.com/archive/benson080404.html
not any more. God * (there will be more on that abstraction, I guarantee) is now on the side with the fewest morons. At this moment in the "war on terror" we seem to have stalemate in the moron department.
Actually, I don't have a problem with the latest terror alert, only with the attendant media hype. It seems to me a damn sight wiser to be thinking about al-Qaeda's unfulfilled 2001 goals than to spin speculative webs about what they might do if they just had superpower resources.
First, the West in general and the U.S. in particular has a weakness for overestimating enemies. In the U.S., this goes back to the Civil War, when McClellan's Richmond spies exaggerated the size of Confederate forces by 400-500 percent. The UK and France did the same with Hitler in the mid-1930s. In both cases overestimation, and the result tendency to see the problems rather than the opportunities, resulted in longer and bloodier conflicts than should have been necessary.
Al-Qaeda--like most terrorist organisations-- doesn't reason. Terrorism is a pure act of the limbic system, the old brain, where all questions are black and white and all solutions violent.
Left to its own devices, the old brain will simply repeat an attempted solution until it succeeds or until it is killed. This is how crocodiles hunt, for instance. It follows that al-Qaeda will try anything that has worked (or is on the to-do list) before moving on to something new.
Being alert for unmet al-Qaeda objectives ideas does make sense. What would make even more sense is to cut the flow of new ideas. Rather than scare ourselves silly in public, we should be spinning what-if scenarios in private, and making realistic assessments of what a loose confederacy of terrorists can achieve with limited resources.
It would make sense if we had an administration which didn't think it has more to gain than to lose by maintaining a permanent threat. Regrettably, Republicans can be almost as limbic as terrorists. After all, permanent threat worked fine in the Cold War for domestic social control. There too, we overestimated an opponent who, when we began to play the threat card, would have had to throw turnips at us in retaliation. By the time we finished screwing around, the opoponent's capacities were real.
Follow this link for something missing from what Zbignew Brezinski calls our "pretend war:" a dose of common sense:
http://www.newhouse.com/archive/benson080404.html
posted by Uncle | 00:29
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