Saturday, November 01, 2003
Balance and Dignity
For a long while now, the specter of total war as seen in WWI and WWII has defined the intellectual and emotional understanding of warfare in western culture. The total war horror of WWI and atrocity of WWII were certainly more documented and made a more graphic impression on our culture than any prior war did. Coming of age and living as an intellectual has for quite some time meant embracing the belief that acceptance of war meant inviting a repetition of those past horrors and atrocities.
What Roger, Michael, and many others have been forced to confront since the end of the Cold War is the difference between total war and limited war. We are now engaged in a very broad limited war, but not a total war, despite the efforts of various Islamists to make it so.
Roger and Michael are certainly not advocating or in any way calling for a return to the imprecise and contagious total war with its attendant demonization and hypocrisy. They are well aware of the dangers involved with such a course and are now finding their way through what for them is unfamiliar ground, the advocacy of limited violence to accomplish a specified goal. The difficulty of their task is also compounded by the complexity of what they are attempting to accomplish. Any idiot can ask with fervor for unrestrained violence, and many do. It is much harder to strongly support a limited goal that combines humanity, ruthlessness, and diplomacy all at once.
Roger and Michael are doing pretty well, considering the degree of difficulty and the paucity of supporting material from their prior reading. I think they would do well to read a biography of Chesty Puller, a great human who understood these things.
Just Like Old Times
My friend Michael Totten got accused in the comments section of his blog of being a front. The evidence given is that his name was "too normal" and that his views contrasted too strongly with the Left. The accuser tried to pawn off his libel as "honest inquiry" and what was more chilling was that somebody else supported this "inquiry". When I posted that I had known him for years, worked with him, knew his family, talked with him through any number of very long lunches, and so on, my testimonial was attacked. This smells like the old tricks.
This kind of behavior has happened in every major reformist movement since Robespierre made the streets of Paris run with blood indulging it. These are the methods of the communist purge and the national socialist night of long knives; denounce, divide, and destroy. Although it seems unlikely that anybody will send intellectuals from South-East Portland to the Gulag for their counter-revolutionary statements, it looks like denial of service attack is not the only method being used to silence the blogs.
For those of you not familiar with the methods, here's how they work: first, denounce the target as not being true to an undefined ideal. Second, attack the targets defenders. Third, loudly denounce anyone behaving rationally, with integrity, or without fear of the denouncers. Fourth, find old grudges and use them to split apart any community that is not serving you. Add flourishes like secret meetings and tribunals to taste and serve. The targets feel compelled to defend themselves and eventually they will make a mistake you can exploit.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that after spending a couple of years discrediting the kinds of people who use intimidation tactics that they would turn them on us. We don't have to do this in the blogsphere. We are educated, intelligent, and can move quickly. We can communicate these attacks and support each other. We can agree to not fall for the old tricks. We can decide to not be ruled by fear.
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Drug War: Slow and Stupid Is Better Than Nothing
Bureaucrash wants me to surrender in the War on Drugs. I disagree with them on this. I still support many of the aims of bureaucrash and wish to participate, but this is a matter I disagree with. I hope that the others in bureaucrash are comfortable with a respectful disagreement.
I have spent a lot of my life pursuing drug smugglers. While they are not necessarily the worst of humanity, they are better capitalized than most dictatorships. In several instances, the drug producers and smugglers are attempting to become dictators and this does need to be opposed.
I do agree that different methods should be used and a more coherent and effective long term policy should be created. It is a shame that all the best people for this effort are now fully engaged in preserving our civilization from fundamentalist terror, but that is a reasonable priority choice. I have high hopes for some of the new addiction research, and can dream of a day when demand diminishes to the point where the suppliers are bankrupted. That day has not come yet. Until then, I reluctantly must support the continued drug war, unfair and badly directed though it may be.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Partisan Headlines Hit New Milestone
A Cambridge, Massachusetts think tank came up with an estimate of the number of Iraqi war dead during major conflict; Yahoo News reported it as hitting a new milestone on the home page. Moments later they changed the headline on the main page to something approaching a description of the linked story. I regret that I did not get a screen capture of their unthinking bias, but I was operating on the assumption that they had actually thought about the stories before posting them. This was a failure of editorial oversight on a number of levels. I realize that Glenn Reynolds is right to insist on people seeking their news from more outlets than Instapundit; it is nice to have that as an alternative to unthinking bias.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Doing the Math for Real
Two contractors for the CIA, William Carlson and Christopher Glenn Mueller, were killed in an ambush in Afghanistan today. This is a shame and something of a surprise because the CIA was able to release the names so quickly. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of outsourcing the Director of Operations (DO) covert personnel, if so I am all for it. A lot of good people have died in the interests of the United States doing good things and their families never knew why. It also indicates that the DO is operating with a level of transparency that is of value to the free people of the world.
The math on this is kind of fuzzy. It appears that the ambushers lost at least 18 people to our two. Actually a nine to one ratio is not quite good enough for the long haul. We would prefer to have at least ten enemy killed to one of our troops, that is the minimum that civilized people can readily trade for barbarians. A better number would be an order of magnitude greater; one hundred barbarian warriors for every civilized soldier. With the 100:1 ratio, barbarians tend to depopulate themselves and learn toleration through attrition. It is difficult to sustain vendettas when you cannot repopulate your tribe. Polygamy can recover some of this, but unless the wives of the intolerant are continuously pregnant with triplets, the sense of powerlessness batters its way through the prejudice. The whole 72 virgins for killing an infidel promise only works while fewer than 72 martyrs are required to hit the lottery.
The other end of this math is also fuzzy, there were 18 that were claimed dead and probably at least sight verified. There is no accurate count of enemy wounded or missing. The missing number is important because after a 500 pound bomb is dropped, a lot of dirt gets thrown up. Ambushers hiding behind a rock who get buried don't get counted in the casualties list. My father was buried for an hour after a mortar barrage in Korea; it is only because he was a Marine and they do not leave their people that he lived to tell the tale and become claustrophobic. (More importantly from a personal standpoint he also survived to sire your humble author, an act for which I am eternally grateful.) Mujahadeen bugging out under air attack are not known for their concern for those who died for Allah. They are also not known for great medical treatment.
What is important about this is that the civilized people of the world are continuing the fight and engaging the enemies of civilization. We are sending good men into the mountains to risk their lives and we are supporting them with modern equipment. This is not like the shadow wars of the past against communism. We are not being coy or playing games. It is getting on to winter in Afghanistan, and supplies for the Mujahadeen have to be interdicted. It is a tragedy that Carson and Mueller died, but I thank them for going in harm's way and am glad that they did not die unremembered.
Doing the Math
My greatest disappointment with the Left is that thirty years after the advent of inexpensive calculators, twenty years after the availability of powerful computer spreadsheets, and two years after 9/11, they refuse to do the math. There are extreme complexities in the world that are not readily approachable with inexpensive computing devices and simple accounting methods. The variables of global economies and climate, for instance, are so profoundly complex that they challenge the human capacity for understanding with any tool, method, or philosophy. The motivations of the brutal, the ignorant, and the rapacious are not a complexity of this order, however.
It is a shame that so few people on the Left will do more than roll their eyes up at the next paragraph. Literally, peoples who wish to make a coherent point that is worth talking about should be ashamed for unwillingness or inability to pay serious attention to verifiable facts. Those who wish to compel the world and the leadership of the nation to follow their policy should be able to coherently understand simple math. Criticizing numbers without a willingness to discuss the import of those numbers is despicable.
The Gross Domestic Policy (GDP) of the United States in 2002 was ten point four trillion dollars ($10,400,000,000,000). The per capita (per person share) of that was $36,700) Last year was a bad one and the US GDP only grew at a rate of two point four five percent (2.45%), increasing our GDP roughly $254,000,000,000. The GDP for Syria was fifty-nine point four billion (59,400,000,000), with a per capita GDP of $3,500. Iraq's GDP last year was fifty-eight billion (58,000,000,000), with a per capita of $2,400.
While economics is a complex study with many exceptions and often outright lies, there are certain basic assertions that can be made. An order of magnitude is a significant indicator, when something is ten times larger than another thing there is a substantial difference. The average person in the US is more than ten times more productive than a person in Syria or Iraq. On the basis of the above figures, it appears that being a fascist and exporting terror is not very good business. Furthermore, asking a nation burdened with the poison legacy of fascism and a terrorist campaign to accept ruinous loans is churlish and indefensible.
If you would like to dispute my conclusions and assert your own, it will give me great joy to check your sums.
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