Over at Slate, an interesting series by Robert Wright has begun, on Terrorism. So far two parts are up, and in them, he makes these assertions (with which I agree completely):
Proposition No. 1: Al-Qaida and radical Islam are not the problem.
Proposition No. 2: For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people.
Go read it, its gonna be interesting. I was referred there by Matt Yglesias, who comments regarding assertion#2:
I think this is basically wrong because at the same time as technology reduces the number of people you need to carry out a destructive attack it also makes it easier and easier for big rich states like the United States to locate their would-be attackers. Admittedly, all our satellites and communications gear may still have let bin Laden get away (though it does seem like he’s dead) but even so they let us find and target rather precisely any number of Al Qaeda facilities that would have taken forever to find without 21st century IT.
Ill respectfully disagree with Matt, simply because of the disparity between the potential number of attackers to monitor and the resources (and level of intrusiveness) necessary to monitor them. Plus, if Im correct (and Wright makes a parallel argument when he says:
This high-tech mobilization of radical constituencies needn’t be centrally orchestrated. Since 9/11, American pundits have griped about the propaganda issuing from TV channels run by Arab governments. But take a look at the free market at work: The new, unregulated satellite TV channelsnotably Al Jazeera, founded in 1996haven’t exactly been a sedative for irate Muslims. The uncomfortable fact is that a free press often fuels antagonisms because people choose channels that bolster their biases. (Which is the most popular American cable news channel? The most ideological oneFox.) Increasingly, “tribes”interest groups of any kind, including radical oneswill be, in effect, self-organizing.)
the overall level of spontaneous, or self-generated terror will increase.
Date: 09/06/2002 00:00:00 AM
I have an acute awareness that I am on the outside looking in. Much of what the Bush administration plans is justified on the basis of secret information. They have a track record of mendacity and extreme opportunism. So what am I supposed to think? (I do not have any information not available to everyone.)The case that Saddam is linked to Al-Qaeda is extraordinarily slender. Atta may have met an Iraqi diplomat once or twice in Prague. It is not certain that he did, at all. And that’s the WHOLE CASE!As for the WMD, when and why did these become a crisis issue? From the end of the Iraq war until 2001, I remember Iraq being a back-burner or middle-level issue. (Cheney was doing business with him at that time.)My suspicion is that two things changed: the American administration, and the American mood. I don’t really think that there was new information. I am amazed at the degree to which liberals, if they talk at all, are willing to argue the Iraq war on Bush’s terms without questioning his evidence. I am not willing to assume that Bush has the facts right on Iraq or is communicating with us honestly. These questions need to be asked. I have markedly worse feelings about this Iraq war than I did about the first one, which incidentally I did not oppose.
Date: 09/06/2002 00:00:00 AM
ziska, you point seems to be: anything they say is a lie, and I won’t buy it. This leads to short discussions…and since ‘they’ occupy the seats of power and you don’t, it marginalizes you and the interests you want to advocate…
Date: 09/05/2002 00:00:00 AM
Sorry, it’s not meaningless. When people with a history of ineptness and dishonesty say something without much evidence, and a very large number of credible people (ideologically similiar to the former) say the opposite, often giving arguments and alleging facts, doesn’t that tell us something.Incidentally, whenever “secret information” is in play, arguments from authority are there. It’s not the opponents of the war who are using secret information. To an unpleasant degree, we outsiders are reduced to asking ourselves who we trust.
Date: 09/05/2002 00:00:00 AM
I have to agree with zizka’s first post, while regarding zizka’s second post as meaningless (logical fallicies detected: personal attack, argument from authority).That said, consider this: if you wanted to build a really huge and destructive bomb, how would you go about it? Where would you buy the materials? How would you conceal your activities from your neighbors?Anyone angry and crazy enough to want to kill strangers will have a hard time hiding his beliefs. Anyone rational and resourceful enough to succeed will be rational enough to carefully avoid implicating himself by employing cannon fodder to carry out the mission. Anyone wealthy enough to manage a real WMD attack has a powerful motivation (his own luxury) NOT to become a terrorist.Tim McVeigh was a very, very rare bird–rational, smart, murderous. It still isn’t clear if he had help from others. Most rich Saudis live in palaces and sleep with blonde prostitutes; OBL is a rare exception. So while I could believe that there might be more “spontaneous” terror, it will probably take the form of school shootings or small abortion clinic bombings or fires started at housing developments–not huge, deadly WMD attacks. Any really deadly attack will require a big supporting organization.
Date: 09/04/2002 00:00:00 AM
Having taken on the role of designated quibbler on this forum (and I still haven’t finished what I wanted to say on an earlier thread either): I think that it is a mistake to overestimate the spontaneity of the 9/11 attacks, as well as to believe that only a small number of angry, disenfranchised people were involved. Go back to my point that Bin Laden is not one of the wretched of the earth, but a rogue near-billionaire who hopes/hoped to rule Saudi Arabia and perhaps the rest of the Middle East.The immediate cost of the 9/11 attacks was small (in the low-to-middle six figures, I heard). But you had to start with 19-20 guys willing to be martyrs who could be trusted to respond whenever the call came. Where do you get guys like that? It’s not as if there are lots of obvious candidates everywhere.Well, you have the madrasas. You have the Afghani Arabs and their support structure. You have the web of Muslim charities. You have a large number of disaffected but very wealthy (far from dispossessed) Muslims. You have an effective network for taking care of the families of the martyrs — in societies where economic provision is not always easy. You finally have a society in which families of martyrs will gain honor, rather than shame, from their deeds. (Not all the families are happy with their sons, but many of them are). Even the much smaller and much more poorly financed Basque and Northern Irish groups are not simply spontaneous expressions of the anger of a few individuals. The Irish groups in particular have well-organized support, notably in Boston. So I guess I more or less diametrically oppose the dystopian view of Slate and perhaps A.L. Terrorist groups are usually not simply a few very angry individuals.
Date: 09/04/2002 00:00:00 AM
The Raelians claim to have raised $7 million dollars. Also, one of their members is a biochemist. We should probably be thankful that they are interested in cloning people, rather than killing them.The members of Aum Shinrikyo, on the other hand, are interested in killing people. In the early 90’s, they sent people to Africa to try to get Ebola. These days, if they have their own biochemist, they can probably just synthesize the stuff.For the foreseeable future, there will be people willing to do crazy/horrible things, and as technology advances, they will find their work easier and easier…
Date: 09/05/2002 00:00:00 AM
I’ll second zizka’s comments. The notion that smaller and smaller groups could do greater and greater harm has some very important limitations. It assumes that they can get weapons of mass destruction, which are very expensive and technically demanding to produce. A handful of nuts cannot produce a nuclear bomb, or weaponized germs, etc. That takes substantial organizational backing, which can be detected and dealt with (if we care to – before 9/11 we didn’t care to, but now we do).