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Connecting a few dots here…
- Terrorism and strategy expert John Robb wrote 10 years ago that the nature of warfare is changing. There are no “front lines” anymore, rather, the enemy is among us, and groups as small as two people can bring an entire city to a grinding halt.
- Demonstrators and rioters have been using peer-to-peer communication such as instant messaging as a means to self-organize for over five years, while the police and other first responders rely on conventional “spoke and hub” communications systems where a dispatcher routes the appropriate response to a disturbance from a central location.
- The “sharing economy” is moving trust away from government-approved organizations and onto our collective shoulders. I trust my Uber driver because I know if he wasn’t trustworthy, he wouldn’t be driving for Uber. The sharing economy also means that people can turn their consumer goods into something that provides more economic security for themselves and their families.
- Firearms ownership is up, way up, in the United States, and personal protection is one of the main reasons behind this increase in gun ownership in our country.
Violent Islamic terrorists and often-violent Black Lives Matter hangers-on are self-organizing through peer-to-peer networks, and as a result, they can strike quicker and faster than governments can manage. Terrorists are agile, while the blue-state model of government is not. Terrorist live in a post-industrial world while our first responders still hobble around in the outmoded, industrial-age shackles of centralized, top-down planning and strategy.
But it doesn’t need to be that way. Thanks to the empowerment of the Internet and the smartphone, we are becoming less and less reliant on central government for how we live our lives. Why, therefore, can’t we use peer-to-peer networking and decentralized response to our advantage? Just as Uber and AirBnB turn our consumer goods into something that helps others, we can turn the smartphone and the concealable defensive pistol into something that protects ourselves and others. We have smartphone apps that can show us the stupid places where stupid people are doing the stupid things that might get us in trouble, and we have apps that will summon help from our friends if we chose to ignore the warning signs and go there anyways or if bad things happen to us despite all our planning. We can carry a portable, concealable means of defending ourselves and our loved ones from lethal force and also carry a portable, concealable means of keeping people alive if the worst happens and lethal force is used against us.
Nature has shown us that the best way to defeat a non-localized attack is with a non-localized response. Our bodies react to the threats of infection and disease with a scattered and yet networked response of white blood cells and other defense mechanisms. The time is long overdue for society to empower a dispersed response to the dispersed threat of modern-day terrorism.
Power to the people. All the people.
Published in General
@HVTs
We may not choose to be at war with radical Islam, but it has chosen to be at war with us. This is not over by a long shot no matter who is in charge.
Unless we continue to refuse to fight, that is. Then it will end the wrong way.
That was Ben Ali. As you apparently know, this led to a revolution, which led to the overthrow of Ben Ali and his replacement by Moncef Marzouki of the Congress for the Republic party in 2011. Marzouki failed to get reelected, so was replaced by Beji Essebsi, of the Call of Tunisia party at the end of 2014.
I think it’s a shame that we didn’t support the Shah more; Iran, Israel, the Middle East, and large chunks of the rest of the world would have been happier and more peaceful if we had. I agree that the feting of Assad was awful. I’m not sure that the impact of the West was to depose Qaddafi so much as it was to make the civil war short rather than long and painful (sadly, there was then a second phase, but that appears to be wrapping up, too). Have you read Hamid’s Temptations of Power? It’s one of the best books on modern Middle Eastern history, about the changes within the MB during the elections. At the height of Obama’s praise, the MB wasn’t running a Presidential candidate because they thought it would be better for Egypt to have a secular ruler. Then it appeared that the Salafists were going to win, and they became the equivalent of Reluctant Trumpers. It’s partly because of the suddenness of that swing that they came up with the awful candidate they did.
Davos didn’t select the Tunisian government. Tunisians did, and it’s a shame that you’re not more familiar with one of the more positive stories of Middle Eastern success in government. They’re a target for terrorism, which is doing awful things to their tourist industry, but they’re a target for the right reasons.
I agree that technology and globalized markets have only changed things, rather than changing them absolutely. My claim, and I believe Kevin’s, was merely that the nature of our enemies encourages us to have a greater focus on self defense on the home front. That’s not because of technology; shooters and bombers don’t generally use anything more complicated than the Nazis, but because of the nature of the struggle. I’m not sure how globalized markets came into the picture.
I don’t understand who you think should have been providing state pensions or running the courts from 2003 to, say, 2010.
The Bill of Rights is stronger in Iraq, where they have a right to bear arms, than it is in Europe. We established Republics full of Muslims because…. well, what else do you do when you have a country full of Muslims? If we left them in any way with a Democratic system, it would have been an Islamic one. It wouldn’t have been (and is not) a Saudi-like system, because Iraq isn’t Saudi. When I worked for the Iraqi government, most of my peers were women and only a few wore burqas. They drove about, had conversations with men by themselves, and generally acted in the way that you’d expect of mildly observant Baptist women in the US (which is to say that they didn’t drink and weren’t slutty).
I agree that it would have been good to have been tougher on the Iranians.
I have no idea what you think the Israelis could have done with Syria. Wiped out the Syrian military and then…..?
You say that, but we still have troops in Afghanistan 15 years later, we won the war in Iraq (there was peace while I was there from 2010 to 2011 and until the ISIS invasion in 2014). There’s now a second war in Iraq that appears to be nearing its end, scheduled for some time in early 2017. We were impatient in Libya, mostly pulling out after Qaddafi fell, but that merely delayed victory rather than causing defeat; ISIS is no longer able to operate as a state in Libya and the government is in a pretty good position to hold its united elections next year. In each of those three conflicts we put far too little effort into civilian aid, the State Department failing to do its part even as Defense excelled at its, but in each eventual victory seems to be the result. The Democrats in Congress lost the war in Vietnam after it had been won and today we have a considerably more patriotic Congress.
I think you underestimate how asymetric this war is (also, that you underestimate ISIS and AQ’s budgets, but you’re right that they’re far lower). America’s economy is trundling along, while ISIS is facing existential budget issues along with other existential issues. This model has proven less sustainable for them than for us. Even after AQ and ISIS are defeated in their Afghan, Syrian, Libyan, Malian, Nigerian, Iraq etc. etc. etc. territorial schemes, we’ll still have to fight them, but it won’t generally have to involve large scale military movements.
You know that AQ’s primary goal is to topple the government of Saudi, right? If we offer to nuke a Saudi city every time they attack, we would be transforming AQ from a losing group with little hope of accomplishing meaningful gains to being the most powerful terrorist group in history, with a very real chance of accomplishing anything they could ask for. The Saudis would have to make each and every reform AQ could ask of them, knowing that to fight the terrorists would be to invite nuclear anhilation.
We toppled the Taliban. It’s true that AQ was successful for a while in Iraq, but they were so uncomfortable that they were mostly driven out; we haven’t had much AQ presence in Iraq for a long time.
I meant win. I’ve been attacked by AQ (in Iraq). My blood was shed (admittedly in very small quantities, but this wasn’t a controlled environment and I could have suffered a serious or fatal wound as easily as I suffered a small one). If I could go back, I would. It’s likely that when the Iraqi political circumstances that prevent me from going out cease to apply, I will.
I think that that was awful, but even while we’ve had a terrible CinC, we’ve seen Muslim armies defeating AQ with American and other Western support in theater after theater. More recently, we’ve seen ISIS being defeated around the world. Also, honorable mention should be made of the Christian Ethiopian military in Somalia.
The nation is about to pick either Clinton or Trump. Both of them have advocated a vigorous commitment to defeating ISIS. Clinton is the more likely to win (60/40 according to today’s 538), and advocates a strong commitment to defeating AQ abroad, too.
No, but, again, I was out there myself somewhat recently and plan to return at first opportunity. When I have kids of an age where they are able to engage in that sort of thing, I absolutely intend to send or encourage them (depending on their age and level of independence) to do things to prepare themselves for a military career that I would be proud for them to have. I’d be proud if they went to a school designed to prepare them for the military, as I did, following in the footsteps of my father and my grandfather. I celebrate the decisions of my closest childhood friend (Navy) and cousin (Household Cavalry) to pursue their vocations. Both have done tours of Afghanistan, my cousin’s vehicle being disabled by an IED, although he was thankfully not one of those killed in the blast.
I’ve shared in the burden, personally, and my family has shared in the burden (even before you start looking at historical conflicts). The draft is an awful idea for a variety of reasons, but your efforts to turn this into an ad hominem issue are poorly grounded.
Terrorism doesn’t have an ancient and a modern variant, unless you simply mean the weapons or tools employed by terrorists today as opposed to some long ago yesterday. But that’s a misuse of the temporal modifier.
Terrorism is a tactic, one employed by the weak to negate the superior strength of an adversary. Radical elements within the vast Islamic world employ this tactic not because they are Islamic, but because they are weak relative to their adversaries.
I’m afraid you missed my point: why encourage anyone to fight in a war the CINC is determined to lose? In which the CINC actively undermines the troops he commands? Why should anyone’s blood be shed in a cause for which our national leaders have no intention to prevail?
I should have thought that obvious enough you would understand that your position could only make sense if you personally had skin in the game. Hence my questions. Apparently you do. It’s illogical, but it’s your life.
Personally, I have an aversion to giving my life for a cause my own leaders are uninterested in winning. And an aversion to leaders asking others to do so. You apparently don’t have this aversion . . . can’t say as I understand it and certainly don’t grasp the logic behind it. I hope you’ll not get the opportunity to face harm over something your President doesn’t want to win, but you don’t need my help making that decision should the opportunity arise. Godspeed.
Why you believe Clinton’s statements about her war aims is a mystery to me. She’s Obama’s third term; Obama claimed AFG was the ‘right’ war to win when running for office in 2008. Lucy is holding your football.
Is it? What knowledge do you imagine I’d gain were my putative ignorance lifted? What is your point about Tunisia vis-a-vis this post?
Who cares?
I know that is one of their goals, the others including killing you and me and our families as Christians. Which is primary, I don’t know.
And I don’t care.
So long as the Islamists are:
1. Not responsible for the energy needs of our civilization,
2. Not messing with us, and
3. Kept at arm’s length,
they can choose to do whatever they like in their sun-kissed sand traps.
You will note that my proposal addresses all of these points.
Under my method, AQ might inherit the Saudi mantle, but they would enjoy it for only as long as they were able to maintain a true peace. That’s not the picture of a successful terrorist group, nor of a caliphate.
Yes? So?
When they’ve nukes, they will no longer be weak relative to their adversaries. So we must keep them weak, make them dead, and make their colleagues quit the fight, before they get their nukes from Mrs Clinton’s sale of uranium to Russia which is transferring it to Iran for processing in the centrifuges about which Mr Kerry and Mr Obama so desperately lie.
Or from Pakistan, China, or the Norks.
These are desperate times and require desperate measures. Whining about the etymology of my term “modern terrorism” doesn’t help.
What I meant was terrorism happening in the modern world. Now. Yesterday. Today. In NYC, in Jersey, Minnesota, Paris and Nice. In Belgium, whose airport and subway I used a year before they were savaged. In Madrid, where I visited Atocha station. In Copenhagen, where I visited Krudttønden. In Boston, where my wife and I dined on Boyleston St Friday night.
Modern terrorism.
I don’t think that he was terribly determined; as the Democrats did with Vietnam, he had it in his power to cause a loss if he wished (he could have withdrawn the troops faster, or withdrawn support for the Iraqi government financially and institutionally as well as being a jerk rhetorically). He could have failed to provide airpower and other support against ISIS. Instead, while he hasn’t been great, he’s done enough that ISIS has now been repelled from most of Iraq. Likewise although he could have followed through on his commitment to withdraw from Afghanistan he put that withdrawal on hold.
I think Obama intends to prevail. At the very least his generals do and he’s not getting in the way enough to prevent them from succeeding.
I think Obama was somewhat surprised on taking office. If you read the accounts of the relevant Cabinet Secretaries he’d been pretty seriously uninterested in the wars when he took office and became only moderately uninterested afterwards. That moderate level of interest was enough to keep enough troops in Iraq to win the first war by 2010/2011, and enough for most of Afghanistan to be stabilized. It’s my understanding that Clinton was generally superior on these issues as SoS; she didn’t get her way all the time, but she was generally arguing on the side of supporting the troops and defeating AQ/ ISIS. I suspect that she’d be a mild improvement on Obama on these questions, as might Trump be. It’s not great, but thankfully the ISIS portions of the conflict appear to be mostly over, so they’ll probably get that right. I’m less hopeful about Afghanistan, but I suspect that Clinton would see the Afghan government through.
Balderdash.
Mr Obama has done as little as he can get away with in order to preserve the illusion that he is on our side, so that his successor and collaborator can be elected and finish the job he started. She’s effectively promised to withdraw all of our troops; on day 2 of that project, ISIS walks back into Iraq.
Most obviously, AQ cares, as do their funders. They’ve been suffering lately and have tremendous budget issues. Making it clear that they would see victory if they could pull off just one serious attack on the West practically guarantees that that attack would take place. As it is, it’s perfectly plausible that AQ will die without a second 9/11 scale success.
Just to be clear, you think that nuking Saudi would help with that? Is this some sort of environmentalist “after oil prices go through the roof we’ll find alternatives” thing? I mean, not that Iran and Venezuela wouldn’t appreciate your support….
Do you mean after the attack you would inspire? Even after AQ get their dreams and start to focus exclusively on regional enemies out of fear of the West, are you under the impression that they’re the only group out there? Heck, AQ making a serious bid for rulership of Mecca would be reason alone for others to want the US to nuke Saudi some more.
I don’t understand how your proposal comes close to encouraging them to do this. It seems to me that there is essentially nothing that would reduce interest in America less than murdering vast numbers of civilians as retribution for something most of those civilians opposed.
AQ don’t claim that they’re a caliphate yet. Putting them in charge of Saudi is one of the few ways that you could rescue that dream for them.
She’s talked about taking out ground troops, but she’s long been a supporter of supporting the Iraqi Security Forces and of using air power and drones. It wasn’t ground troops that stopped ISIS last time and it’s not likely that Iraq would be surprised a second time. Also, she’s been a consistent supporter of more vigorous action in Syria since 2011, and if ISIS is defeated in Syria they’d lack a base from which to attack Iraq.
I agree that Obama has generally tried to minimize his efforts. Thankfully the US military is awesome enough that even inept and half hearted support for it has been enough to avoid defeat (albeit not enough to avoid tragedy and atrocity).
My claim was that ISIS wasn’t defined by nationality. You responded to my claim by suggesting that Tunisia was currently ruled by Ben Ali. It’s not particularly important for the purposes of this thread that you familiarize yourself with Tunisia, but I think that it would be a good idea in general for people to be familiar with the highs as well as the lows in the current conflict.
I do endeavor to do so.
Sure. And a lot of other people.
I’m broadly with you here.
I’m in awe of our government’s ability to keep us safe since 9/11. We’ve had smart engineers fail to blow up planes because of TSA-like restrictions (the shoe bomber, the Paris plot bombers (the guys who wanted to use liquids), and the underpants bomber were each undone by their efforts to circumvent the screening process). We’ve had many, many people keen to kill us in large numbers. Nice reminds us that it’s not so hard. And yet, the biggest terrorist hit on us so far this decade has been Omar Mateen’s 49 dead. If that had happened last decade, it would have been the second biggest, after 9/11. In the 1990s, it would have been the second biggest, after the OKC bombing. In the 1980s, it would have been the third biggest, after the Lockerbie and Beirut bombings. Those weren’t just slightly bigger, but much so. Our military casualties overseas are down pretty heavily, too. “What we’re doing right now” seems like a reasonable response, given that ISIS appears to be being defeated everywhere it exists, and AQ has also been having a pretty rough time of it lately.
If you broaden the question to include BLM, I’d say more “what we did 30-20 years ago”, but I think your focus is more Middle Eastern.
Good night!
You get my vote for slim-reed grasping. I’m inclined to the view that this is another U.S. “decent interval” episode. Ten years from now it will matter as much to the fate of the nation as our inglorious 1975 departure from Saigon meant in 1985.
Who argues ISIS is “defined” by nationality? The opposite is more nearly true.
How from my comment you perceived the ‘suggestion’ Ben Ali is still in charge when the precise point made concerned his political demise . . . that’s mysterious. I was responding to this:
How that all coheres is clearly too sublime for me as I can’t make sense of it. The fact that Tunisia has disaffected radicals despite earnest attempts to build a civilized society … that’s surprising? In North Africa? Where nationality doesn’t involve a “specific set of political/religious ideas”? Huh?
Sketchfactor is apparently dead. Gone from Apple, not on Google Play, company website gone. Shows the power of crowds and disapproval, I guess.
That’s plan B, in which we hire other human beings to implement relatively clumsy procedures and processes. Plan A is immune surveillance and the tumors never form.
I feel like the defeat of ISIS as a state-like organization is a big deal rather than a slim reed. Likewise the improvement in the position of the Afghan government, rather than its collapse.
I feel like the American loss in Vietnam was a very big deal in 1985. Heck, it was a key reason for Bin Laden to believe that he’d prevail in 2001, and for later fighters to believe that they would in Iraq. If we’d had a better 1974 mid-term, the war in Iraq would have been comparatively brief.
I feel like you can most easily answer your question by going back through the thread. I was claiming that this was a key difference between ISIS and Nazi Germany.
I made a present day reference to the government of Tunisia being pretty good and you suggested that that government was the one that engaged in an act that Ben Ali engaged in.
Tunisia is not like Nazi Germany, where America’s enemies controlled the government. Rather, a relatively small minority of Tunisians is still large enough to constitute a significant chunk of ISIS, because ISIS isn’t very big. As such, Tunisia is not our enemy, but some Tunisians are. In WWII, Germany was our enemy, not merely a handful of Germans with disagreeable ideas.
By 1985 Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cambodian communists had killed unknown tens of thousands of the other’s communists starting almost immediately upon our withdrawal. Vietnam was more than half-way through a ten year occupation of Cambodia, which it would eventually abandon since it was accomplishing exactly nothing for Vietnam. Reagan was all warmed up and getting ready to effect his coup de grâce on the brand new (and last) Soviet General Secretary … a man named Gorbachev. China was already well on its way to becoming an economically market oriented fascist state, as opposed to a fascist planned economy.
No one gave a rat’s backside about SE Asia in 1985 save the inhabitants and their neighbors, who—as I said—were on-and-off killing one another.
Bin Laden had plenty of reasons to doubt our resolve based upon more recent actions than Vietnam . . . actions done in his patch not in far off SE Asia.
If we get out of the way, the Shia and Sunni can get on with their first love: killing the other.
Sure; my point wasn’t so much that people cared about the Vietnamese people as that they cared about America being a toothless tiger. The ease with which Saddam was kicked out of Kuwait caused a lot of amnesia about claims that things would go less well, but those claims were not uncommon.
That’s true, but Vietnam was still the gold standard in demonstrations that with patience one could defeat America in a war.
Sunnis and Shia have been at peace with each other for the overwhelming bulk of their history. The continual war myth is more than absurd; there’s a 7th century war and a mid-late 20th century one, but for most of the time in between Sunni were able to rule Shia and Shia Sunni without particular issues. The population of Iraq mostly converted in the 18th-19th centuries to a faith their rulers disagreed with, which isn’t the sort of thing that happens without drama when the rulers have killing as their first love.
In 1985 did Gorbachev consider Reagan a “toothless tiger”? How about Deng Xioping? Your interpretation of mid-80’s reality is, in my view, very narrow and therefore inaccurate. Leadership matters. It turned-around a mid-70s disaster in about a decade.
So, the ease with which Saddam was kicked out of Kuwait demonstrated we were not a toothless tiger . . . Saddam and others miscalculated. Your point is . . . alternative claims were made before that happened? Why is that significant? Those claims were wrong.
Okay fine — have it your way: we’ll return to the sunny uplands of Muslim sectarian harmony. You like thin reeds—hang on to that one. I don’t much care . . . let them do whatever they are going to do, just keep them doing it in sandbox we don’t care about and prevent them from letting it spillover into places we do care about. Obama’s Iran deal—once reversed by Trump—will help allow that to happen. Clinton gets elected and we’re in deep doo-doo.