How bin Laden Won

In the transcript for John Derbyshire's Friday podcast, you can find some wise observations on the War on Terror. I can do no better than simply quote him. I think of them as a succinct explanation of how bin Laden won. Here are his words (I hope it goes without saying that this does not constitute an endorsement of John's views on any other subject):

Mid-morning on September 11th 2001, as I was watching the Twin Towers burn on my TV screen, I got a phone call from Kathy Lopez at NRO. Could I give her eight hundred words on what had happened? I said I sure could, and went to my computer and knocked out a column, and emailed it in to Kathy. It's there in the NRO archives somewhere, and on my own website.

Here's part of what I wrote, quote:

This is not an easy enemy to confront. This will not be a matter of great troop movements, of trenches and fleets and squadrons and massed charges. This will be small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged. But is the same enemy, the same truth, of which Kipling spoke: evil, naked and proud: "a crazed and driven foe." This is what humanity has faced before, since our story began to be written down. This is civilization versus barbarism.

Last Sunday's mission, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, was precisely the kind of thing I was predicting: "small teams of inconceivably brave men and women, working in strange places, unknown and unacknowledged." That's the right way to conduct a War on Terror.

Our government had other ideas. We sent great armies into Afghanistan and Iraq. We spent colossal sums of money — well over a trillion dollars to date. We sacrificed thousands of our military personnel — four and a half thousand in Iraq, one and a half thousand in Afghanistan. Still it goes on: we've had eight combat deaths in Iraq this year, seventy-two in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden once boasted that his 9/11 operation was the most highly leveraged investment in history. It cost him $500,000, he said, but it had cost the American economy $500 billion — a return on investment of 99,999,900 percent. He was speaking of the operation's effect on Wall Street, on the stock of airline companies and so on.

If you look at the numbers I quoted a moment ago, though, they are just as embarrassing. Those 19 dead martyrs of his led to three thousand American civilian deaths and six thousand military. That's a rate of return of nearly fifty thousand percent. Taking the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan so far as one and a half trillion dollars, that's a return on investment of three hundred million percent. You see why I'm not cheering?

If we had stuck with operations like last Sunday's— the operations I foresaw on 9/11 — supplemented by the kind of diligent intelligence work that makes such operations possible, and further supplemented by the kind of remote drone attacks that have decimated Al Qaeda's senior ranks, there'd be cause for unrestrained jubilation at our victories. As it is, those victories are glowing lights in the shadow of much waste and folly.

Anti-Scanner/Grope Civil Disobedience

The other day, as my class was discussing Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" a student raised the concern that Thoreau's method was not very practicable as a means of changing the law. I mentioned the possibility of refusing to go through airport scanners as a means of stopping their use. I later learned of Opt-Out Day, the day before Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving morning, I saw a report on Fox News gloating that Opt Out Day was "a bust" because travellers accept the judgement of the government, that these measures are "necessary" to "keep us safe" against (in a clip of Cong. Peter King speaking) "an enemy that's out to kill us." This AP story takes the same line.

The TSA is bragging that there were virtually no delays on Opt Out Day because the public accepts their policies. Meanwhile, traveler on their Twitter accounts blogs are indicating that this is basically a lie. There were no delays because a great many of the scanners were turned off. (See also this.) As usual, the mainstream press takes the government line, but there are a few local stories about local airports that give the same impression.

A lot of protesters are ticked off that the government did not give them the opportunity to opt out.

If this is so, the campaign of civil disobedience was a success of sorts: it provoked the TSA to back off for one day.

It was also a devastating admission on the part of the TSA.

If, as TSA chief John Pistole alleged (see "update" at the end of this article), the Opt-Out Day idea was "irresponsible" then turning off the scanners was much more so, and for all the same reasons. Imagine turning off security measures on the busiest flight day of the year, measures that are "needed" to "keep us safe," simply in order to avoid some slow-downs and some embarrassment to themselves!

It actually shows that they do not believe their own alarmist propaganda: they don't believe that, in any straightforwardly literal sense of the words, that this is necessary to keep us safe.

What is Terrorism?

Joseph Stack's suicidal attack on the Austin IRS offices last week sparked an interesting debate about what terrorism is. Opinion is divided on whether Stack was acting as a terrorist. Here is my take.

Scenario #1: There is some act, A, that I want you to do. I approach you and a friend. Your friend is "innocent" in the sense that they are not responsible for your not doing A. I draw a gun and point it at you, threatening to kill you if you do not do A. This is coercion.

Scenario # 2: Same as above, but I initiate our conversation by drawing my weapon and blowing your friend's brains out, right before your eyes. I then point my weapon at you. You are terrified and demoralized. Your capacity for rational deliberation has been more or less wiped out. Whatever I do next, you are much more likely to do A than you were a moment ago. This is terror.

[Hat-tip: For these examples I am indebted to professor and dissertator Mohamed Abed.]

Terror is a non-coercive use of violence, though typically it is part of a wider coercive plan. Another sort of violence, quite different from both, is revenge. Coercion and terror are both cases of strategic behavior (aimed at altering future behavior on the part of someone else) while revenge is non-strategic. In revenge we inflict harm as an end in itself.

Revenge is retrospective and despairing. It redresses an evil in the past, not by making the future better, but by adding another evil. Terror is prospective and optimistic. The terrorist is trying to steer the future in a good direction. Terrorist suicide bombers do not commit suicide because they see their lives as hopeless: quite the reverse.

Some people have argued that Stack cannot be regarded as a terrorist because he was not part of a conspiracy, such as Al-Qaeda. If you accept the above view, this is quite irrelevant to whether he acted as a terrorist or not. Terror is defined by motive and method, not by social context.

Others have pointed out that his suicide note said he hoped that his attack would spark an uprising. I am inclined to think that this is evidence that his act was terrorist in nature. At least, it suggests that his behavior was strategic.

Still others have said that the fact that he burned his house down is evidence that his behavior was not terroristic. That may well be right. This seemingly pointless act of destruction suggests that his motives were pure hatred and anger, and that his act was non-strategic, belonging in the category of revenge and not terror.

Others have said that the only reason he is not universally regarded as a terrorist is that he was white. I rather doubt this, as his act was genuinely ambiguous. It really depends on which aspect of his act you take more seriously.

Unless someone gives me a good reason to think otherwise, I currently lean toward thinking of Stack as a despairing, vengeful nut and not a genuine terrorist.