| A real war-on-terrorism strategy | 2003-02-26 14:12 4 comments |
 by Flemming FunchRobert Wright, who is the author of Nonzero wrote a series of excellent articles last September titled "A Real War on Terrorism". It is the best thing I've read on the subject. Wright possesses a sense of logic, which seems to be peculiarly absent in the people we elect to run our countries. What we mostly hear is talking monkeys who repeat half-baked political and religious ideas, but who somehow have avoided developing the skill of thinking the whole situation through logically. Wright describes very well how it will only become easier and easier for small groups of motivated, angry, intelligent people to create major grief and death for large numbers of people. It is no longer a matter of what governments support it, or what public support exists for such actions. A small group can, all by its own, in complete isolation, concoct some very bad things in a garage, from ingredients that can be bought openly, that might kill hundreds of thousands. No way you can just cut off the supply. There isn't necessarily anybody to bomb. Doesn't matter if large numbers of people support it or fund it or not. The inevitable answer is that we'll need to change the things that different geographical or cultural groups are likely to become extremely angry about. That is more about memes, about the contageous ideas that travel through cultures, than it is about what really goes on. If certain relatively small and apparently sensible actions, like arresting some trouble maker, make many more people angry, the net result easily becomes more terrorism, not less. The amount of discontent in the world is becoming a highly significant national-security variable. There will keep being reasons for terrorism as long as there are tyrannies and major economic inequalities anywhere on the planet. The United States will be a major target of terrorism as long as it keeps being a major force behind perpetuating these. The answer is democracy, freedom and a free economic market that actually works for most people in most areas. "A few decades from now, there will need to be a 'global civilization' in which both words are literally accurate — a planetwide community of mutually cooperative nations, bound by interdependence and international law, whose citizens are accorded freedom and economic opportunity. This is the goal we're forced toward by some of the creepier aspects of technological evolution: ever-more-compact, ever-more-accessible, ever-more-lethal munitions, and the ever-more-efficient crystallization of interest groups, including hateful ones, via information technology."In other words, the only way out is to make a world that works for most everybody, no matter where they live, so that there is no good reason for anybody being pissed at some unfairly privileged and parasitic group of people living in some other area. I'd probably also go further and say that we need to go beyond the idea of 'nations' altogether. But that's gonna take more work. In the meantime I wish somebody would listen to what this man is saying. |