The Usual Suspects
What's remarkable about Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Laureate Tom Schelling, and Hassan Nasrallah is that they probably agree with Keyser Soze, the legendary fictional villain of The Usual Suspects on one subject. Part boogeyman and part urban legend, Soze was a near-metaphysical example of implacable retribution. Soze's presence exists entirely offscreen until the final scene, but his legend is created in a an early bit of movie dialogue.
Verbal Kint: He's supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was German. Nobody ever believed he was real. Nobody ever knew him or saw anybody that ever worked directly for him. But to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew; that was his power. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. One story the guys told me, the story I believe, was from his days in Turkey. There was a gang of Hungarians that wanted their own mob. They realized that to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't. After a while, they come into power and then they come after Soze. He was small-time then, just running dope, they say. (We see all of this in flashback) They come to his home in the afternoon, looking for his business. They find his wife and kids in the house and decide to wait for Soze. He comes home to find his wife raped and children screaming. The Hungarians knew Soze was tough, not to be trifled with, so they let him know they meant business.
(Flashback: Hungarian cuts one of the children's throats) They tell him they want his territory, all his business. Soze looks over the faces of his family. Then he showed these men of will what will really was.
(Soze shoots two Hungarians, then shoots his children and his wife as the last Hungarian watches in surprised horror) He tells him he would rather see his family dead than live another day after this. He lets the last Hungarian go, waits until his wife and kids are in the ground, and then he goes after the rest of the mob. He kills their kids. He kills their wives. He kills their parents and their parents' friends. He burns down the houses they live in, the stores they work in. He kills people that owe them money. And like that, he's gone. Underground. Nobody's ever seen him since. He becomes a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night. "Rat on your pop and Keyser Soze will get you." But no one ever really believes. (We see a shadow-encased figure of Keyser Soze walking towards the camera in front of a huge tower of flame as Verbal speaks about the process of revenge.)
Agent Kujon: Do you believe in him, Verbal?
Verbal Kint: Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well, I believe in God -- and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.
The dramatic screen dialogue is matched by the mathematical precision of the game-theoretic concept of commitment for which Tom Schelling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Nobel press release said in part:
Schelling showed that a party can strengthen its position by overtly worsening its own options, that the capability to retaliate can be more useful than the ability to resist an attack, and that uncertain retaliation is more credible and more efficient than certain retaliation.
What this means is explained by notes from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which summarizes Schelling's lectures. First described is the basic notion of commitment, which communicates to the enemy that you will do what you undertake. Commitment makes deterrence credible and credibility is the essential problem. "The most difficult part is communicating your intentions to your enemies. They must believe that you are committed to fighting them in order to defend" what you say you will defend for them to take you seriously. As Verbal Kint put it "to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't." To accomplish it no matter what. Schelling taught that threats are more credible if you "burn your bridges or ships" thereby making it clear that you have only one option: fight. When the Hungarian mob invaded Soze's home to intimidate him into submitting, he simply killed his family first, illustrating Schelling's point that to truly be believed “you must get yourself into a position where you cannot fail to react as you said you would”. Such is this power that when the fictional Kaiser Soze demonstrated absolute commitment he ceased to be simply a man and became a force of nature.
Tom Schelling's key contribution was to establish on a sound mathematical basis the role of will -- expressed as commitment -- in war. Deterrence was not simply a matter of possessing advanced weapons. That was only half the equation. The other half was to establish that you were absolutely ready to use those weapons to your purpose. And given a choice between superiority in weapons and ascendance in will, weapons always came in second. Die Welt relates the experience of an Israeli officer who fought Hezbollah during the early 1980s. Israel had artillery, tanks, airplanes to Hezbollahs guns and knives. But Israel was a liberal democracy and Hezbollah a ruthless criminal organization. The overmatch in will made knives were more powerful than tanks because Hezbollah was willing to use them unhesitatingly. "Hezbollah’s barbarism is legendary. Gen. Effe Eytam, an Israeli veteran of that first Lebanon war, tells of how--after Israel had helped bring "Doctors without Borders" into a village in the 1980s to treat children--local villagers lined up 50 kids the next day to show Eytam the price they pay for cooperating with the West. Each of the children had had their pinky finger cut off."
None of the weapons in the IDF arsenal could level this disparity in will. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in a speech before the Harvard class of 1978 explained how weapons simply became "burdens" to those who lacked a belief worth fighting for. Authentic belief brought commitment; but relativism could only aspire to fashion. Schelling would have understood. His audience did not and Solzhenitsyn tried to spell it out for them.
No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, then, but concessions, attempts to gain time and betrayal.
The matchless power of inherited Cold War weapons was more than overcome by withering of the very mental attitudes which made them effective. Mark Steyn argued that as a result the West's power shrank in direct proportion to the effectiveness of weaponry because the laws of political correctness always diminished the will to use them faster than their increase in destructiveness. "We live in an age of inversely proportional deterrence: The more militarily powerful a civilized nation is, the less its enemies have to fear the full force of that power ever being unleashed. They know America and other Western powers fight under the most stringent self-imposed etiquette. Overwhelming force is one thing; overwhelming force behaving underwhelmingly as a matter of policy is quite another. ... The U.S. military is the best-equipped and best-trained in the world. But it's not enough, it never has been, and it never will be."
The near panic which gripped Teheran and Damascus in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom was not the result of the fear that America had found new weapons -- the lethality of those weapons were already known -- but that it had found unexpected the will to use them. Today even better weapons are there yet the American force in Iraq is regarded as having become totally impotent, not because it has become militarily weaker; through fixed airbases, experience, new weapons it has become immeasurably stronger than it was in 2003. But it's impotence is due entirely to the perception that it's will has drained away -- that it cannot use its power. That leaves American power weaker than had it never been used. As Tom Schelling taught commitments that are repudiated -- such as by those politicians who now say they were against OIF even before they voted for it -- destroy not only the current commitments but the possibility of future commitments. The cost of escaping one commitment “is the discrediting of other commitments that one would still like to be credited”.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn asked his audience whether man could live without faith and received no answer. Tom Schelling answered, without hearing the question, that man cannot not survive without at least the counterfeit of faith: something called commitment. In game theoretic at least. And as for Keyser Soze, of whom, "to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for", faith and fear run together until finally God is indistinguishable from the Devil. "Well, I believe in God -- and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze."
posted by Wretchard at 8/16/2006 11:48:00 PM
1121 Comments:
Wretchard,
Damn, you're good at what you do. Even when I disagree with your subtext . . . wow.
I do believe with all my heart, that we have not yet begun to fight. I believe with all my heart, that the west is still basically good, and will awaken when it eventually feels the existential threat. I believe it is to our credit that we have gone the extra mile to give the enemy the benefit of the doubt. We are no worse today than when we were isolationist is 1939. Honestly, we have not yet begun to fight. God help you when we rise up in resolute anger. And Israel today will arise from its slumbers and live to be a lion again. It just isnt' that bad yet gentlemen.
P.S. I too honour you Wretchard. You are wise indeed. Thank you.
One of the essential problems liberal democracies face is that our origins come from a time of lawlessness. However, with the rise of police forces, not only has our crime rate plummeted, but the civilian population's ability to cope with violent criminals has decreased.
For the past few years, I have come to the unpleasant conclusion that one key to defeating the terrorists doesn't come from our government at all, but from psychologically arming our citizenry against our enemies. Civilians have one major advantage in this war -- they are not bound by any treaties, laws, or governmental conventions.
If an al-Qaeda operative tries to gouge out the eye of a prison guard, the prisoner is simply confined. If an al-Qaeda operative tries to gouge out the eye of a guard when he is in the custody of a civilian mob, a major opportunity presents itself to teach al-Qaeda that not only do they have no monopoly on barbarity, but that amount of torture and brutality that can be meted out by a civilian mob is only limited by its imagination.
Civilian mobs are protected by de facto jury nullification. Would the federal government dare prosecute an "overreaction" against someone who tries to hijack an airplane? Imagine if Richard Reid had suffered gratuitous punishment from other air travelers.
On a rational basis, I have come to the conclusion that every terrorist attack on civilians that does not immediately result in the death of the terrorist stands as an opportunity to engage in the most vicious torment one can mete out, to the point where the terrorist's relatives are horrified by what has happened to their family member.
There is a strategic reason for such ugliness -- to convince terrorists that they are safer in the custody of police and military than they are in civilian hands. It is very similar to the custom in WWII and Vietnam where downed bomber pilots wished they were discovered by police or military instead of getting beaten up by civilian mobs who didn't like getting their homes bombed from the sky.
I dislike situations where the most rational decision is to become a monster. Yet, it is logic that brings me to such a sadistic conclusion, not my emotions.
We have a massive advantage over both al-Qaeda and Hezbollah. Not only do we have infinitely better imaginations whenever we stoop to sadism, but we also have the advantage of not being bathed within the certainty of a totalitarian environment. That is, insofar as we can introduce cultural, emotional, and physical uncertainty into their lives, we can hurt them.
Fundamentally, I don't regard this war as about "winning over the hearts of minds of the Muslim world". It ought to be about winning over my heart and my mind. This war should be about what I think, not what some mob in Nablus thinks.
To quote Charles Manson, "I've never killed anyone. I don't need to kill anyone. I think it. I have it here [points to head]." Do Islamists want to create an anti-Muslim Charles Manson -- or worse, an anti-Muslim Phoolan Devi?
Bombing Iraq to kill Saddaam never made sense, no more than destroying Iranian infrastructure makes sense to decapitate the regime. We are using nation state tactics against a criminal gang mentality. The tactics of Soze are as old as mankind and used widely by Degenerate Islam. It has been clear for some time that the West has handicapped itself in dealing with Degenerate Islam. There are no tactics too awful for them not to use. They often record their crimes and the CD's or video clips are widely distributed in the ME. They are used to intimidate, recruit and control, not their enemies but their "families". Their enemies do not get to see the videos as the western media censors them. The same media records every deed and misdeed of US forces.
The US military is constantly using greater technology and an evolving “rules of engagement”. Degenerate Islam has shaped the battlefield using their version of Kaiser Soze. It has done so to a ruthless efficiency. The West has chosen to lock itself into a rigid standard of war that is insane and represented by the absurd methods used to screen passengers on airplanes. Our governments and masters cannot even admit the obvious that it is Muslim males who are killing us.
I restate my position. “We know who the enemy is. They told us. We know where they meet. We know a lot about them. It is time to go silent and go dark. No speeches, no threats, no lawyers, no mercy. Isolate and eliminate the radical clerics, financial supporters, politicians, tacticians, academics, theorists, and all supporters of radical Islam.”
Hunt them and kill them one at a time and take all the fun out of the jihad.
Since this has been buried like the Seattle Terror incident by the MSM, I will post it here. Would be nice for the whole country to be aware of it, but as yet, Google search shows only Ynet!
Hollywood stars blast Nasrallah
Some 84 movie stars, film industry members sign statement condemning Hizbullah, Hamas activities in Middle East
Yitzhak Benhorin
WASHINGTON - Heads of the film industry in Hollywood and prominent movie stars have signed a statement blaming Hamas and Hizbullah for terror activities in the Middle East, the war in Lebanon, and for harming innocents.
'Stop terror at any price'
The statement said that if terror around the world is not stopped, chaos will rule and innocents will continue to die. The statement called for terror to be stopped at any price.
Consul General Danoch is continuing with his PR activities, and on Wednesday night he briefed the heads of the William Morris agency on the recent events in Lebanon.
Actor Adam Sandler was present at one of the many briefings the consul general gave this week. At the end of the briefing, Sandler announced that he would personally donate USD 100,000 to the children of the north and south.
---
---
Lebanese officer arrested for appearing in videotape with Israeli soldiers
A Lebanese general was ordered arrested Wednesday for appearing in a videotape with Israeli soldiers who had occupied his south Lebanon barracks during their incursion of the country.
Brig. Adnan Daoud was summoned and held for questioning, Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat said in a statement.
Daoud is commanding officer of the 1,000-strong joint police-army force that had positions in southern Lebanon and was based in Marjayoun. (AP)
I should note that Lebanon is still officially at war with Israel.
They declared war in 1948 and has never ceased.
yonitheblogger.com
And given a choice between superiority in weapons and ascendance in will, weapons always came in second.
That is BS. Courage has not yet stopped a bullet.
They must believe that you are committed to fighting them in order to defend" what you say you will defend for them to take you seriously.
This is true and we do this, but our aims are not what you may prefer - we are a materialistic culture, we seek to defend our economic well being. Nothing more. We judge in terms of cost and benefit, pragmatism is employed wherever possible.
A strike on American soil was a bad thing, steps were taken to demonstrate power in a place where it was percieved to be least costly in terms of other pre-existing interests. With hindsight the info used then was flawed, the Syrians & Iranians & Saudis were meant to be cowed into cooperation but were not. Now new pragmatic calculation is carried out in the cost/benefit of the Iranian nukes, Hezbollah and Kim Il Jong.
Our will is found in our back pocket. If we truly want to eliminate Islamism we need to find a way to make this demise profitable.
Let me tell a fable. It is precisely two days after nuclear weapons have destroyed New York, London and Sydney. And it is 24 hours after the President of the United States, after consulting with the Prime Ministers of Britain and Australia, has ordered a ten thousand warhead strike on the entire Muslim world, followed a second strike using tailored biological weapons.
At that very moment a famous Washington law firm calls the White House with an important message. An attorney for Osama Bin Laden has been instructed to deliver a video tape to the media upon the event of his death, which now appears certain. The entire situation room staff turns on the television and watches the familiar face, greyer and more lined, deliver a prepared speech in curiously triumphant tones.
"Brothers," he begins. "If you are listening to this then I am already dead and what was formerly known as the Muslim world has been entirely destroyed. I had forseen this response when I put into motion the plan to use our only three atomic weapons."
"Only three?" he continued. "Three was all we could afford. Yet with these few devices we had to ensure not only the destruction of your infidel civilization but the perpetual triumph of the uncorrupted and essential Islam". Looking directly at the camera Osama continued. "You have killed more than a billion people. Some of them were fighters. But most of them were children. Up until your magnificent thermonuclear warheads blossomed above their heads they were going to the market, laughing at their silly entertainments, playing games in fields. And you killed them. Killed them in a moment of fear; a moment which became inevitable because you were not men enough to fight Jihadis with your hands; and who therefore you destroyed with your unearthly weapons."
"Never again can such a people as you enter your churches, recite your prayers, read your literature, or pretend to nobility without knowing that it is all a lie. And the more you pray to your Jesus, to your Buddha, to your Yahweh the more hypocritical you will feel, until you give it up altogether. No, that door is closed to your forever by your own fear, cowardice and evil. The first of my goals, which is the destruction of your infidel civilization at its roots, I have already accomplished."
"And you, my brothers, for I may you call you that, are now my true spiritual heirs. More magnificent than those illiterate fighters I gathered in Afghanistan, who knew nothing of science and technology. And yet as evil -- now -- as any of my pupils have ever been. I have shown you your true selves. I have gathered you to my fold. Your are the new Ummah and you know it. Come to prayer. Come to Islam."
None of the weapons in the IDF arsenal could level this disparity in will. -Wretchard
On the issue of will power, I somewhat agree. But, it's more complex because Israel is dealing with the Hannibal Lecter of the Middle East.
Basically, Hezbollah's leadership structure - bottom to top - including Al-Dinnerjacket are psychopaths.
Will power is not an issue when dealing with a mad man. Maybe to failure to recognize a mad man is the issue but it certainly harder when taqqyia is used to fool you.
Further, it is easy to underestimate your enemy.
You set up a blockage only to find out that one of your 3 corvette class ships get hit with a modern missile. That's a big loss.
You roll in with your tanks only to get number of them blasted with modern antitank weapons. That's another big loss.
Basically, Israel was fighting Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah all at once. As Netanyahu said: Israel was basically fighting a forward unit of the Iranian army.
From my view, Israel just was fight a much larger, well financed, and well equipped enemy than first expected.
And, they paid for it.
War is the ultimate business where failure is not an option.
The next time Israel goes into action they will be better prepared (both in terms of material and will power).
Here are is a must read interview of Netanyahu by Atlas and friends:
[Netanyahu talks about the psychotic enemy]:
Netanyahu: ...I think too that it's not merely weapons (unintelligible) military doctrine. It's... an understanding that we... in Lebanon, basically, a forward unit of the Iranian army, basically well trained infantry, equipped with fairly sophisticated missiles, and it has to be deal with.
...they [Islam] all agree that there should be an Islamic empire, and that the western countries like Israel should have no place in it. These are to be destroyed or subjugated. Israel is merely the front line position, and so for Iran that is leading the charge, it has to be eliminated, literally wiped away, as its president Ahmadinejad openly says.
...that particular statement by France's foreign minister was remarkable, saying that Iran is a force of stability in the Middle East. I don't know if he's talking about the same Middle East we're living in, and I'm not sure he's living on the same planet we're living in. But Iran is the single greatest threat to our civilization. It is professing a mad ideology which ... that involves a millennial, suicidal apocalypse which... in which millions are supposed to have gone [or killed] from both sides, and they're quite content with the possibility that their own people will die, because they'll all reach an Islamic heaven, so for that purpose there they're building atomic bombs, and they've already built missiles to launch them...
See Atlas' transcript of Netanyahu's telephone interview 15% down.
Do the Australians have it right?
Perhaps the Brits and Americans should take note?
http://reviews.cnet.com/5208-6130-0.html?forumID=50&threadID=198019&messageID=2128996
SNIP:
A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia and her Queen at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his Ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown. Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state, and its laws were made by parliament. ''If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you'', he said on National Television.
''I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia: one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that is false. If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country, which practices it, perhaps, then, that's a better option'', Costello said.
Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he said those with dual citizenship could possibly be asked to move to the other country. Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should ''clear off''. Basically people who don't want to be Australians, and who don't want, to live by Australian values and understand them, well then, they can basically ''clear off'', he said.
"Do the Australians have it right?
Perhaps the Brits and Americans should take note?"
---
Of course they have it right!
Will we take note?
Of course not!
Doug,
What do you make of Wretchard's fable?
James K's worst nightmare!
Could you please explain it to me?
Did you read the Der Spiegel interview of Iran's Hitler?
I really don't see why the options are passivity or complete Holocaust.
What just occured to me was a blast in the wilderness, followed by demands, then a process of walking the blasts toward Tehran, step by step, until compliance is obtained!
Beats a Holocaust!
---
In the meantime, back in the real world, if we had a real CIC, we'd be dealing with training camps, IED factories, and etc.
Instead we hear Condi say that we'd like the Hesbos to voluntarily give up their arms!
WTF?
(did you see the Lebanese General getting arrested above?)
This is our "solution!"
Bizzaro World, or as Rush says,
The Twilight Zone.
JONAH GOLDBERG: Airport security is being held hostage to irrational concerns.
“ The No-Sense Doctrine ”
Note: We’re not talking about training security personnel to racially profile passengers. Quite the opposite. The ACLU’s problem is with training officers not to racially profile if that training nonetheless gives them enough autonomy so that it’s theoretically possible to take race into account.
What is so infuriating about this is that the ACLU favors policies which discriminate against all sorts of people—old people, women, children and others who, under random searches and other idiotic numerical formulas, are pulled aside for literally no reason at all.
All of this is happening against a backdrop of a war on terror in which roughly 99 percent of jihadi terrorists are of either Middle Eastern or South Asian descent and 100 percent of them are Muslim.
International jurists group to probe Israel-Hezbollah conflict
"There are consequences if one or both sides have violated the laws of war: those responsible must be held accountable, surviving victims have a right to reparation and should the conflict re-ignite, the military methods of those who have violated the laws of war must change," said ICJ Secretary General Nicholas Howen.
Idiocy has no bounds. Keyser Soze will head the investigation. Israel is guilty because their retribution was disproportionate and should have been limited to shooting their own children.
Wretchard,
Please tell me how this fable of Osama's wickedness transcending his death is any different from the postmodernist nihilist's dream?
Can anyone explain how it is that Ibrahim's first son Ishmael has been recruited to rain down death upon innocents in direct contradistinction to what Ibrahim introduced to the pagan world?
How it is that Muslims, in being offended by the excesses of postmodernists in the West have been brought to battle to the death the West's more traditional members? Members who defend her not because of its postmodernist asswipes, but because of all the good that modernity (hated by postmoderns) has to offer?
I'd really like someone to try and come up with an answer to this.
Far as the airlines go, might as well just fly El Al--there you know you're going to get the thrice over, and get where you are going. Only problem is they don't go all that many places.
Sometime ago I was watching a Discovery Channel show on some new wiz-bang weaponry.
I thought "Yeah big deal what good is all this fancy pants hi-tech weaponry when we shrink from actually using it". I even blogged on it over at Blogger Beer (sorry exact url of that exact blog escapes me and I am at the office).
We have an old saying necessity is the mother of invention. Well we in the West have circumvented that old saying we now invent weapons with at most a theoretical need.
Achilles Jones,
Yes, we have not yet begun to fight. However, what will it take to convince our population of the need to fight instead of surrendering? If it took Pearl Harbor in 1941 I would have thought 9/11 would have been motivation enough. Will it take the destruction of an entire city?
LOS ANGELES — A nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach could kill 60,000 people immediately, expose 150,000 more to hazardous radiation and cause 10 times the economic loss of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, according to a new Rand Corp. study.
2164th has it right, but what about our own people that endorse our enemies and ideologically support and enable them?
Doug,
Spiegel's interview requires more words than I wish to expend on the topic in this thread.
"I really don't see why the options are passivity or complete Holocaust."
There are other options. Despite the claims of some, I don't believe I've suggested passivity.
"back in the real world, if we had a real CIC, we'd be dealing with training camps, IED factories, "
Your comment presumes that the current administration wants an end to this. Yet, personally, I believe that the more one looks at things the more this administration would like to carry things on indefinitely. There is simply too much inertia and too much money being made by too many people to let the defeat of our enemies stop us.
5 years on, still no Osama. Still no Zawahiri. Pakistan seems willing to help get bad guys, but for some mysterious reasons that are never quite explained, the two dudes who were, just a few short years ago the most dangerous men on the planet simply can't be found. At what point do you say that they've not been captured because it's more useful for them not to be captured?
When you look at so many other things, as the things you pointed out, that haven't been addressed and could be addressed... when do you give up on stupidity or incompetence as the reasons and let yourself entertain the possibility that the problems remain because they serve a larger purpose?
Why would Rice not want Hezbollah disarmed? Is it possible that the US benefits from a vulnerable Israel? Would an Israel completely at peace with its neighbors be as helpful, compliant, and responsive to our needs as an Israel with the occassional Katayusha flying in?
Always remember that politicians in today's climate are successful only if they can convince people that their efforts are needed. Thomas Sowell often remarks with some amazement how democrats continue to insist on solutions that have been shown not to work. Maybe it's not so illogical. Solved problems never re-elected anyone.
Now, I should stress that I'm just speculating. But I know a great deal about how politics in the West works: it works by rarely accomplishing anything and keeping the interest groups motivated. It works by constantly exaggerating threats of all kinds, from SUVs to Wal-Mart to crime to.. well, quite possibly terrorism.
Terrorism is perhaps the best racket of all. It provides seemingly endless amounts of money, all sorts of cool gadgets. It makes compelling and easy to create news stories. For politicians it means the fun of hob-knobbing with their peers around the world and not dealing with pesky low-class citizens or addressing such boring issues as the deficit and debt or energy policy or industrial policy or health care.
Look at what's been spent on "Homeland Security" since 9/11. Billions of dollars for state and local government and private corporations. All without a SINGLE CONVICTION of ANY Al-Qaida dudes. Is it any wonder that republicans and democrat a like are going to talk this threat up all they can? It's the perfect scam.
As I've said, I do think that there are some nasty islamo-nuts out there who do mean us serious harm. But I believe that due initially to ineptness and later, quite possibly due to less respectable reasons, the threat of terrorism in the US has been blown way out of proportion.
So, prepared to be scanned, fingerprinted, tagged, searched, sniffed, and who knows what else. And don't bring any gatorade on the plane. And be sure to marvel at all the new technology designed to protect you. You paid for it.
I think that Habu's whack job description was too kind.
For more on how politicians hype the threat of terrorism, take a look at the following documentary which the British government pressured the the BBC to take off of the air:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3649090417189127240&q=Power+of+Nightmares
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
The EU will look into a suggestion by French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to set up counter-terrorism expert teams at EU level ready to help countries if needed.
Al Reuters
Whew. This is a relief. A large hole was discovered in France. EU officials are looking into that too.
PeterBoston,
Okay, have it. Prove me wrong.
Tell me, Peter, what kind of evidence can you produce that in any way supports the claims of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, post 9/11, that there were "tens of thousands of trained Al Qaida operatives" in "over 50 countries?" And that many, many were also in the US, just ready to strike.
Perhaps you could show me some spectacular organized terrorist attacks that have been pulled off in the US. It's been 5 years. Thousands of operatives should be able to manage SOMETHING. Or is that our Homeland Security is just so incredibly tight?
Barring that, perhaps you could provide me some proof of some actual Al Qaida cells or operatives who've been convicted preparing to launch an attack in the US. Or perhaps, even caught casing some a vulnerable target.
From Toronto to Miami the best you'll find are some complete buffoons who wouldn't have been able to get anywhere without the RCMP actually delivering explosives to them or the FBI leading them along as much as possible.
Islamic terrorism poses more of a threat to muslims than it does to the West. And the numbers bear this out.
An oustanding post, Wretchard, one of your very best. It's been too many years since I read Schelling, especially as he veered left in his later years. Serious study of game theory should be absolutely required in all colleges - not just the intuitive stuff, but (and this means the kiddies need to learn calculus) the real mathematics of it. But, I digress.
I hope that achilles jones and others are right when they say they believe we are no worse off than we were in 1939. Unfortunately, there is a very bad aspect to that analogy that people need to consider, and consider long and hard: and that is the example of the French in 1940.
While France is considered a military joke, it was not always so. Anyone with any knowledge of history knows the French military was the strongest in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries - through the Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire in the early 19th century, really.
The French reputation only began seriously to decline with their overwhelming defeat by the Prussians in 1870-71 in the Franco-Prussian War. The French then chucked out Napoleon III, cobbled the Third Republic together after flirting with reestablishing the monarchy, and rebuilt their military. They were strong in 1914. Will. Elan - spirit - was the word that was used constantly to describe French doctrine and purpose. And, for the most part, the French fought well in the First World War, even after they realized that massed infantry attackes wearing the red trousers Clemanceau once famously said "They're France!" were futile.
France and the French suffered terribly in WWI, and their victory in WWI led to great war weariness, and ennui and had a much more baleful effect in France than even it did in England, America or Germany. Even the military preparations for further war were primarily defensive and protective - the Maginot Line is the prime example.
French politics in the '30s were notoriously and bitterly divided, with strong socialist and rightist influence - this is a well-known story, but it was indicative of a sapped will in the society. It was far worse than in England or America, where we know it to have been bad.
The French military understood they would have to fight by '38, and by the time Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the French public understood they would have to fight and France went to war.
Of course, as everyone knows, in 1940, once the Germans got serious and launched their attack, France collapsed in 8 weeks. An army with equipment at least as good as the Germans had - sometimes better - and more men, but poor leadership and backed by an evervated society with no will. You don't think the Arabs read history?
Britain, which suffered some of the same war weariness as the French, but was not directly invaded, did not collapse and rallied to fight. That's the example we all always look to - and the example of the US after Pearl Harbor.
Think for a moment, however, how the British who found the will to fight the Germans in 1940, essentially collapsed and gave up the empire after WWII, and after the disaster of Suez in 1956 (when the US was the dog in the manger), had completely withdrawn East of Suez by 1964. They stood their ground in the Cold War only because the US was standing strong.
Now, consider the US. We rallied from our pacifism and isolationism to fight WWII and win decisively, and then, after a brush with war weariness in the late '40s, rallied to defend the West through the Cold War - the very Cold War that occasioned Schelling's work on deterence. Our MAD and deterence generally was credible for only one reason: we had actually used atomic weapons, so when we threatened them, people 'knew' our threat to use them again had to be taken seriously.
Then came Vietnam and our own squandering of will. I won't recount that disaster where we fought bravely, if not often intelligently, and lost not on the battlefield but as a result of a loss of will at home due to the anti-war movement.
We again rallied to win the Cold War - displaying will and credible threats under Reagan - who scared the bejeebies out of the mullahs and the Russians - and again to fight and win Gulf I. But, that was done primarily by government will, because there was division politically. Reagan and Bush I were villified by the Democrats and the far left (not yet then entirely synonymous); the attacks only really stopped (for a while) when we won. And, after the feckless Clinton years, we rallied after 9/11 to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
However, throughout the post 9/11 world, we have had political polarization and sniping against the government's conduct of the war that is at least as bad as what the French faced between the world wars, and the notoriously short-attention-spanned American people are now weary of fighting a war that has not even caused inflation like Vietnam or cost us any really serious number of casualties. Our intial allies like Spain and Italy folded like cheap suits after the attacks in Spain, and the British people are really in trouble, with a huge Muslim 5th column and a population that would like to simply walk away from the whole thing.
So, the question becomes, will we be able, as the French did in 1914, as the British and we did in 1940/41, or will the American people lose their nerve and will to fight in the way the French did in 1940, the British did in the post-WWII era, and the US did after Vietnam? Remember the Carter years? Oh, yeah, that's exactly what we can expect if the Democrats win.
But this is more than about partisan politics, it's about the overall credibility of the society's will to survive. Can we make our military prowess credible? Given the fact that we are not prepared to field the conventional (that is to say people intensive) forces necessary to defeat Iran on the ground by invasion, the answer is depressing: not unless they believe we will use nuclear weapons.
What the Iraq War has demonstrated is that as good as our forces are - and they are very, very good - we do not have the conventional combined arms force-in-being, even if we fully mobilized, which we won't, to take on an Iran successfully. The 500,000+ ground troops we had in 1991 could have done it, but even though the 200,000 or so we could put on the ground in Iraq/Iran are not sufficient. Just not enough boots. Oh, we can bomb them and make life hard, but we can't win in the sense of destroying the enemy's leadership (bunkered up) and eliminating their capacity to make war and trouble around the world for us.
That leaves us with our national strategic means - the old euphemism for nuclear weapons. Does anyone really believe the US would use nuclear weapons against any attack other than a nuclear or very major CBW attack on the US? I don't. And, while I think Bush would respond to a WMD attack on the US with nuclear fire, I'm not sure it would be more than a demonstration attack. Tit for tat. Leading to another hudna. And, that's only the Bush administration. I'm not sure a Democrat could even do that much. So, why wouldn't the Arabs and Iranians wait?
A depressing thought, but my conclusion is that absent our actual use of nuclear weapons in the near future - and I'm agnostic whether a tactical nuke would do, or whether it would have to be a strategic weapon , no one who is making real decisions in the world about whether to confront the US or snipe at it is going to believe us. And, when we're attacked, I'm not even sure we'll have the will.
It will be the French in 1940 or far, far, far worse for civilization, the response of the Christian civilization to the initial attacks in the seventh century, when the bickering and infighting allowed militarily weaker Moslems, who had the will to go berserker on us, to conquer most of the Mediterranean world in less than 100 years.
James, James, James,
..."Barring that, perhaps you could provide me some proof of some actual Al Qaida cells or operatives who've been convicted preparing to launch an attack in the US. Or perhaps, even caught casing some a vulnerable target..."
Every day is binary, you end the day with it or it ends you. Your argument falls apart by the time line between the attacks on the World Trade Towers. If you perch between the dates, you have some very peaceful real estate.
Have some fish and chips at the Pub, take some Jaco sand between the toes. Relax.
In the film Twlight's Last Gleaming, an imprisoned USAF general officer takes over a missile launch complex and insists that the classified transcript of a certain high level meeting from the 60's be released publically.
Mystified, the President has the transcript dug up. And he is horrified to discover that it reveals that the real reason for the Vietnam War was to show the nuclear armed USSR that the U.S. did indeed have the will to go to war and the guts to do brutal things.
As VDH says - and as OIF tends to confirm - at times it is useful to show your enemy that you are just a little bit crazy.
Long ago, Rome had some trouble with Carthage. They had trouble with Carthage until they finally got tired of having trouble with Carthage.
They sent an army which took Carthage. The men were all killed. The prettier women were enslaved and dispersed throughout the empire. Then they leveled the city and spread salt on the ground so that nothing would ever grow there again.
They had no further trouble with Carthage. They didn't have serious trouble with much of anybody for a long while after that.
James
You can twist your brain into any shape you want. Convicting AQ operatives has utilized exactly 32 seconds of my lifetime neural activity - and you get to see them all.
2164th,
Fish n chips at the Pub is only on Friday. ;)
And, I must say, I'm quite relaxed. Perhaps a little too relaxed for those who insist that there are millions of muslims hiding everywhere just waiting to blow them up.
Anyhow, what do you make of Wretchard's fable?
The current situation reminds me of when Grant took command of the Army of the Potomac. Union officers were in angst over what Bobby Lee was going to unleash upon them next. To which Grant said something to the effect of “you shouldn’t be worrying about what Lee is going to do to us but about what we’re going to do to him, get some canon up here.” There is a Grant out there right now. He’ll eventual emerge, it’s just a question of when.
W,
Nobody joins the dots like you.
I'm sure Keyser Soze appalls you. No doubt you know that he will emerge if the Islamists continue.
It is to the credit of the West that we are giving them every chance to evolve from the 7th century.
This dream of evolution is hopelessly optimistic. Nothing to do with Allah, Jesus, Buddah. Their culture is thuggery. What we are seeing as terrorism is just local stand-over tactics gone global. It's all they know. Beat up the next house, the next street, the next town.
All that's missing is the will to name, the will to laugh at them, the will to show them we recognise them for the bufoons they are.
Nobody has voted for the clown in your photograph. Don't you just love the raised finger? Kinda makes what he says so true - yeah.
It won't take nukes, it won't take Keyser Soze, it will take South Park to bring down the mullahs.
But first we must believe it is permissable to call a shit a shit.
ADE
doug,
Some claim that until OBL is proven killed or captured any other mission is a distraction. Indeed, this fairly captures the opinion of many Dems, if the current political campaign is indicative.
You may recall that Hitler was not eliminated until days before the end of European operations. Instead, the US concentrated on destroying the Reich. Actually, that worked out pretty well. Yes, if you cannot find the needle, burn the haystack.
Personally, I think the whole "get Osama first" argument is a cynical red herring, waived about in the absence of a substantive alternative to present policy. This red herring is a favored dish of the Islamofascists and their supporters.
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
We do not have to be crazy. We need to be ruthless and focused. We had a hint the size of a bus during the last few weeks. When everyone thought that Israel would do the obvious and destroy Hewzbollah, the Sunni states could not get out press releases fast enough criticizing Hezbollah. When Israel failed not to disapoint, the criticism evaporated.
Israel and the leadership and decisions under GWB exposed the vulnerablities of modern lethal militaries when used in the actual enviornment in the ME. We do not need country crushing wrecking balls to win the war against degenerate Islam. The allies to win it are arleady there. We need to purge our ideologues that saw a democrat lurking in the heart of every Muslim. It was a desert wraith. We need to establish stability and eliminate the Islamic ideologues in an ignoble fashion. Ruthless methodical patience and no air carrier landings will get the job done. Please get a grip, this thing is so easily winnable.
What Brad said.
If you want ruthless, read up on the crusaders.
For now here is a simple suggestion that will show the muslims we are serious. Amputate the left hand and right foot of all captured jihadists, then send them back to the Mosque that recruited them.
Another efective tool would be making and publishing a list of Mosques that preach Jihad. Then every time there is a muslim terrorist event, the following Friday (prayer day, where all the faithful attend service and hit the collection plate)JADAM one Mosque off that list for every Terrorist attack that took place the previous week.
Do these two things and this latest outbreak of Islamic fundamentalism will be over in a few years.
Will's been around for a long time. Will was absent in the war of 1812. He deserted the North for the South in the Civil War -- Until he was captured by Generals Grant and Sherman. In World War II the Japanese and the Nazis had intimidated and tortured Will until he agreed to serve them. Stalin had sent him off to the Gulag -- to be reprieved when the Panzers approached Moscow. (After the war he was sent back to the Gulag where he met Solzhenitsyn). But Will fought freely for the US Marines and the Third Army of General Patton.
I live in Ohio and get my information from the most open of open sources and am amazed that any one with a knowledge of the region would be surprised by the outcome of the Hezbollah/Israel conflict. It was always going to be a Hez win for one simple reason:
The conflict is actually with Syria and Iran.
Syria claims Lebanon and much of Israel and Jordan as well. So we face Syrian Imperialism and a resurgent Persian Empire clothed in religious garb.
The key to the conflict is the current regime in Iran.
Hezbollah is part of the Persian Empire of Belief -- with terror cells around the world. Basically, its real value: it could drag Israel into any confrontation with Iran and the US. The further goal: to drag the rest of the Islamic world into that same conflict on the side of Iran.
The US goal? To link the rest of the non-Islamic world to the face down of the Iranian regime over its nuke program. This will help neutralize the rest of the Islamic world. Will this alignment be easy to achieve? No. But it is achievable.
Try this for "boat burning." Russia and China and much of the Arab world endorse a NATO strike against Iranian Nuke facilities (as well as its "Regime Protection Elements"). If this happens the major powers will all be united in opposition to the Rise of the Persian Empire of Belief for a generation (they will have "burned their boats"). In fact, the Iranians (with a degraded deterrence) may become "wards" of Russia and China after such a prolonged air war.
This would be a bad outcome for the Iranians. So they may well back down before such a "combination" to play another day. Therefore, the "combination" has a incentive to form.
We should remember the Iran/Iraq war. The Iranians suffered much in those years, and may not appreciate the regime doing it to them again.
The return of Jimmy Carter may not be in the interest of the Major powers until the Iranian threat is contained. Then it will be "Welcome back Jimmy."
2164th,
"We need to purge our ideologues that saw a democrat lurking in the heart of every Muslim. "
The NeoConservatives? Wasn't that their message between late '01 and '03?
"Please get a grip, this thing is so easily winnable."
I certainly don't wish to embarass you in the eyes of some here but I must say that I agree completely with that.
I can handle it james.
The upshot of Wretchard's fable is:
Osama is Dead.
Jihad is Dead.
We live happily for a long, long, time.
Here's an equation:
"Belief that America is too civilized to engage in a war of annihilation"
Plus
"Attacking Pearl Harbor"
Equals
"Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Any more questions?
wretchard said:
Let me tell a fable. It is precisely two days after nuclear weapons have destroyed New York, London and Sydney. And it is 24 hours after the President of the United States, after consulting with the Prime Ministers of Britain and Australia, has ordered a ten thousand warhead strike on the entire Muslim world, followed a second strike using tailored biological weapons.
In reality, we can tailor even a nuclear response to match the terrorist assault and still look at ourselves in the mirror on Sunday morning before Mass. Turkey, Libya, Malaysia and Indonesia aren't in this fight. Only the intractable regimes like Syria, Hezbollahstan, and Iran would need 2000 level sunblock, plus North Korea for supplying them. Have Condi make noises about Mecca and Medina having known, fixed GPS co-ordinates. After that, when we say we want Osama's head, the Pakis will ask if we want it on a silver plate or a china plate. The next time we flash around a picture of a terror training camp in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis will ask if we want them to turn it into a US supply depot or a US helicopter staging area.
And, while I think Bush would respond to a WMD attack on the US with nuclear fire, I'm not sure it would be more than a demonstration attack. Tit for tat.
POP QUIZ:
The USA responded to the destruction of two office buildings on 9/11/01 by:
(a) Destroying two office buildings in the Middle East.
(b) Conquering two nations in the Middle East.
Pop answer:
Please advise Iraq they are conquered and ask them to keep it down.
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
catorenasci said:
Then came Vietnam and our own squandering of will. I won't recount that disaster where we fought bravely, if not often intelligently, and lost not on the battlefield but as a result of a loss of will at home due to the anti-war movement.
I wouldn't call it a loss of will, I'd call it the will to stem the hemmoraging of American blood in a worthless Cause, dying for a South which was half-hearted in their fight for "States Rights" against the Northerners who wanted to preserve the "Union"
Wretchard, thank you for this post
Re: your fable
Bin Landin's metaphysic as you present it (via videotape) could also be presented by the ghost of Hitler who himslef laid a stain on all Being in the Jewish holocaust while goading the west into frenzied killing of women and children at end of WWII. And the answer is well, yes, we will go on with our temples and churches and movies and books and art and games in giant stadiums because we just will, man is man for better or worse (worse being the active word for our purposes here). I think the flaw in your fable is that bin Ladin - or murderous Islam - wouldn't be able to put that final thought over about the destruction of innocents, the children singing or women at market. Hezbollah hides behind them rather than protect them. The Palestinians outfit infants in baby suicide bomb jackets and in Iran they are daily targets. We are battling a consuming fire.
Schelling argued that in a bargaining or competitive situation one economic agent’s framework for rationality is not always necessarily another’s. If, for example, agent A does not act according to agent B’s conventional assumptions about the rules of the game, B will consider A’s behavior “irrational.” During the game, B will be uncertain about the trajectory of A’s behavior. From B’s point of view, A’s behavior is ambiguous and unpredictable. Thus, A’s irrationality might result in A winning the competition. If Agent A is not really irrational—or mad—but is using his/her unconventional behavior as part of a conscious bargaining or competitive strategy, then his/her so-called irrationality is effectively rational in relation to the game’s “payoffs.”
Allow me to quote from Kissinger:
"Nothing in America's behavior would have led policymakers in Moscow or Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, to expect more than a diplomatic protest when North Korean troops crossed the 38th Parallel. They must have been as surprised as Saddam Hussein was when America shifted from the conciliation of the late 1980s to the massive deployment in the Persian Gulf in 1990. The communists in Moscow and Pyongyang had taken at face value the pronouncements of leading Americans that had placed Korea outside the American defense perimeter. They assumed that America would not resist a communist takeover of half of Korea after having acquiesced to a communist victory in China, which represented an incomparably more important prize. They had obviously failed to understand that repeated American declarations proclaiming resistance to communist aggression as a moral duty carried far more weight with American policymakers than strategic analysis.
That America defends principle, not interests, law, and not power, has been a nearly sacrosanct tenet of America's rationale in committing its military forces, from the time of the two world wars through the escalation of its involvement in Vietnam in 1965 and the Gulf War in 1991. Both Moscow and Pyongyang had failed to understand the role of values in America's approach to international relations.
"When Stalin miscalculated...it was because he assumed that his counterparts were also conducting Realpolitik, and in the same cold-blooded fashion as he. These assumptions turned out to be grievously wrong. The United States was not conducting Realpolitik -- at least not as Stalin understood it. To American leaders, moral maxims were real, and legal obligations were meaningful...America resisted these acts of aggression in the name of principle, not in defense of a sphere of interest; America had exerted itself in order to remedy an insult to a universal cause, not over a challenge to the local status quo."
I think you see what I'm getting at. We exhibit Schelling's payoff of irrationality because we actually believe in principles and are willing to fight for them. Oftentimes our enemies take our internal debate and overblown rhetoric as a sign of weakness and and a failure of policy. They hear pronouncements by public officials and by the press that we won't or can't, and they convince themselves that this Gulliver is tied down because they want to be convinced.
Our faith in our beliefs and our commitment to our word is the cornerstone of our "irrational" rationality. Iran will merely be the latest to learn this lesson the hard way.
[1] allen, you're right about that red herring foolishness about capturing Osama.
[2] CatoRenasci, great post. However, this is where Rumsfeld is truly undervalued in my opinion. We have so many people desperately trying to prove how intellectually smart they are and superior to Rumsfeld, while he has accurately assessed our population and our politics and knows he has to find a way to use our massive assets, constrained by limited applicability, to best effect.
That he has done. The incredible lack of casualties in Iraq, the steady nudging of an undemocratic people forward toward democracy while everybody and their mama around the globe tries to cut the legs out from under the effort just so they can say "I told you so!" plus his sheer steadiness will he honored in years to come and all of this lose the peace B.S. will be forgotten as was the case with post-World War II Germany.
[3] hdgreene, it is (IMHO) only our need for TV movie endings that even remotely allows for a claim of Hezbollah "winning" that conflict with Israel. That they live to see another day is not a big deal to me. If, in fact, the real enemy was Iran and Syria all along -- isn't the diplomatic clock running out on both of them? Aren't both of them in remarkably tenous situations with their own populations? There's a regime change a-coming -- in fact, two of them. And there ain't a damn thing the Democrats or Congress can do to stop that.
We've forced them to show their hands in Iraq, and shoot their wad. Still, our advance is clear to see. Who gives a damn if there is internal strife -- it couldn't be any other way.
We've forced the Hez to show their hands and shoot their wad. Hip hip hooray, they think they've won. Israel has been wise to primarily use this conflict as nothing more than an exercise to probe the enemy. I guarantee you, the Israelis have learned far, far more than the Hez, Syria or Iran and are applying that information for the battle next time.
Our transformed and still transforming military, in conjunction with an administration fully cognizant of who we are and what we represent, are advancing the ball while all around them howl.
I'm perfectly content with that. It's called leadership.
Wretchard, I read your "fable" after I had written my historical analysis, which essentially concludes we will not win unless we use nuclear weapons against the Iranians.
Your "fable" suggests you believe we cannot use nuclear weapons, and must fight conventionally. The conventional fight, I would argue, on the analogy of the pre-atomic bombing of Japan analysis of the cost of an invasion of Honshu of 1 million American casualties, would be at least as ugly and brutal - and as destructive to the spirit - as the nuclear elimination of the Islamic threat. The only difference is that we would take huge casualties and kill almost as many Moslems using conventional means.
If you in fact accept the argument in your fable, then we have already lost this war, because, frankly, the West does lack the stomach for a long conventional war. It is the same problem that Truman faced in 1945 - although he had conventional victory assured, it was only the price: faced with an enemy whose will to fight must be eliminated if we are to save civiliation, do we do so with conventional means - resulting is huge casualties on our side as well as theirs, or do we use nuclear weapons in a way that minimizes our own casualties?
If you really believe we are in an existential war - that is that the Iranians will not back down until they are either victorious or overwhelmingly defeated - then your choices are limited to the timing of the war, and the means of fighting. To me, the choice is obvious - use nuclear weapons. The world will not love us any more if our laying waste to Iran is done with conventional weapons at the cost of 50-100,000 American casualaties (or more after an Iranian strike on the US or Israel) than if we nuke them.
Yours is a counsel of dispair and surrender, I fear.
He's a warrior, not a philosopher, but blackfive considers whether we end up killing more children by pulling back when our enemy hides behind their own children.
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/08/on_the_virtues_.html
blackfive suggests: “That we pursue war without thought of the children. That we do not turn aside from the death of the innocent, but push on to the conclusion, through all fearful fire. If we do that, the children will lose their value as hostages, and as targets: if we love them, we must harden our hearts against their loss. Ours and theirs."
he ends with: "We can only do, and pray, that when we are done we may be forgiven."
catorenasci,
Very well done! Thanks.
Those who believe that the ground forces now available are even remotely sufficient to the tasks at hand, are not or have not been in active service within the last five years.
As you know, we have at hand something less than 3 million active and reserve military personnel. What is forgotten, however, about the aggregate number is that for every "boot on the ground" there will be 10 "boots in support". The logistical and administrative tail dwarfs the dog. Therefore, the actual combat focused and ready forces available for deployment to any number of theatres totals, at best, about 300,000.
The nuclear option (tactical or strategic) will be our only option unless there is a major shift in thinking. The armed forces of the Untied States must be doubled, in my opinion, if we are to pose a credible strategic threat to any of our numerous adversaries. Nations resort to the use of such things as poison gas not when they are strong, but when they are weak.
There is no way we are going to nuke the entire Muslim world.
We would retaliate heavily against the regime who sponsored such an attack. We would proclaim that anybody who stands in our way will be destroyed. We would restart conscription. Our economy would be partially or fully appropriated by the federal government. Defense spending would reach the high-teens as a percentage of GDP. Capital markets would be frozen. Prices would be frozen.
And then we would go to war the old fashioned way. Obliterate, occupy, and rebuild. Those governments that wanted to survive would help or make way, those with a death wish would rattle sabers.
The moral of that fable would echo throughout history, that is true, but it wouldn't be a call to Islam.
The Bush administration's weak response to Hezbollah does not require a mysterious conspiratorial need for a weak Israel to explain it. In fact, it is explained by the very problem Wretchard is talking about in this post: our unwillingness to pull out the stops and hit Iran et al as hard as they need to be hit to turn them back and see them overthrown.
What I hope for is a US administration that is willing to pull out the stops and which is willing (and able!) to put in the political/diplomatic work that is needed to stiffen the backbone of the rest of the west as we start beating the totalitarians into submission.
I'm afraid Bush, bless his heart, just doesn't have it in him to do that. He's too much of a spoiled brat himself and has no idea of how to get other people to see things his way. For him, it's half measures all the way out and back.
News about the International Force going to Lebanon:
"France, meanwhile, wants to send a small, purely symbolic contingent to the force, and the United Nations is trying to convince French officials that such a decision would be devastating, a news report said Thursday."
There is more than one kind of crazy, and it makes a big difference which kind you are perceived to be.
Actually Aristides, it would be nothing like that. We would pick an "Offender" nation; let's say Iran. We would Nuke Qom, five or six military targets, and their Nuke Installations. A few nuke bunker-busters to go after the Leadership, and that would be that.
I would expect that the President would inform the Iranian "People" that they should choose their "New" leaders, wisely.
Then, we could spend the next hundred years doing what we "really" enjoy: figuring out how to buy a bigger house with no money down.
Damn! I left out a thought at the end of my post just above:
So long as we are unable to rally the rest of the west around us we are squeamish about taking the really firm measures that are needed to put an end to the totalitarian threat. So we are condemned to dick around for at least the next two years, I'm afraid.