{"id":2875,"date":"2002-09-06T14:35:00","date_gmt":"2002-09-06T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/staging.armedliberal.com\/?p=273"},"modified":"2002-09-06T14:35:00","modified_gmt":"2002-09-06T14:35:00","slug":"grownups-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=2875","title":{"rendered":"GROWNUPS, REDUX"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read Part 3 of Wright\u0092s article<\/a> with glee\u0085while he and I differ slightly (and I think he\u0092s done a much better job of laying out his arguments than I have done<\/a>)\u0085we fundamentally agree that the enemy we are facing is a contagious mindset\u0085a meme\u0085to which I\u0092ll add that this meme is rooted in a philosophical tradition here in the West…which must be addressed.
\nI\u0092ll follow up with an amplification of his points, but want to first address Eugene Volokh\u0092s response<\/a> to him.
\nHere are some key points made by Volokh:<\/p>\n

But I think Wright is missing an absolutely fundamental point: Trying to get people to love us<\/b> — especially the sorts of people who might become suicide bombers, or even cheerleaders for suicide bombers — may actually make them love us less<\/b>. The problem with appeasement isn’t some abstraction about honor or sticking to one’s guns. Appeasement is often in a very basic way counterproductive.
\n\u0085<\/b>
\nSo the brutes end up having a competitive advantage over the nice guys<\/b> (or, to be precise, more of one than they had before). Either the nice guys will turn brutish, or the nice guys will be overrun by the brutes, and it is the brutes, not the nice guys, who will reproduce their brutal culture of terrorist threat. Evolution will help the fittest survive — except in the policy structure that Wright recommends, the fittest (the ones whose interests we’ll treat with the most concern) are the ones who are the most likely spawning grounds of terrorists.
\nWhat then, should be done, given the risk that small groups could kill millions of Americans? I don’t know the answer to that. But I am pretty sure that while technology may have magnified the power of small groups (for good and for ill), it hasn’t repealed basic laws of human nature<\/b>: Behavior that is rewarded, as I mentioned, gets repeated. The violent appeased come to demand more and more of the appeasers, and come to have more and more contempt for the appeasers. And to the extent that willingness to murder becomes an effective weapon in deterring us, the result will be more groups that choose to use that weapon against us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a couple of responses.
\nFirst, that he would be right if in fact Wright\u0092s point was to lavish the potential terrorists with love, instead of threats of violence. But my take on Wright\u0092s point is more subtle. He says:<\/p>\n

The Philippines escapade resulted from taking the phrase “war on terrorism” literally and thinking of the enemy as a finite group of warriors, rather than a contagious mind-set that may spawn new warriors faster than you kill the old ones. We mounted a “show of force”\u0097something that may work when you’re trying to intimidate a potentially aggressive nation but that may backfire when the enemy is, in part, Muslim resentment of American power and arrogance. This suggests Policy Prescription No. 4: In a war on terrorism, applying force inconspicuously<\/u> makes sense more often than in regular wars.<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also suggests:<\/p>\n

Policy Prescription No. 2: The substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and<\/p>\n

Policy Prescription No. 3: The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here he is right on the key point. While you could (and Volkh does) interpret Policy #2 as \u0093appease them\u0094, and some of the actual points made by Wright lead you there, the substance of what he says is simple: our deeds and policies have both physical and \u0091psychological\u0092 reactions. We need to think through the \u0091psychological\u0092 ones carefully, and make sure that the reaction in that sphere doesn\u0092t outweigh the physical effect.
\nNumber 3 is useful because it lets us decide to target the origins of the problem, rather than the symptoms. Now here, as in first aid, we must be aware that the symptoms can kill us, and that they need to be managed. But the simple fact is that the costs of terrorism are so low, relative to the costs of defending effectively against it, that we will be bankrupted (forgetting the moral and political consequences of a tight terrorism defense) if we allow it to continue. We must both find ways to defend ourselves, and simultaneously find ways to carry the attack to the sources of the problem\u0085which may require a war where the weapons are ideas.
\nNumber 4 is critical. It is about the difference between \u0091bluster\u0092 and \u0091threat\u0092. Because we can effectively turn the whole of the Middle East to a glass plain, we expect our to be respected and our desires to be obeyed, or at least considered. But because of the (literally, if you\u0092re a Believer) apocalyptic nature of our response, it\u0092s also clear that there\u0092s a pretty high threshold for triggering it.
\nOn the other hand\u0085does anyone else remember the story in the 80\u0092s about the Russian response to a kidnapping of one of their embassy staff in Beirut? This was when Western diplomats and journalists were being kidnapped and held hostage fairly frequently. The story was, and I remember reading this in the paper at the time, that the Russians had sent over a spetsnaz team, who kidnapped members of the clan who did the kidnapping, and sent several of their body parts in lieu of cash to the kidnappers\u0085who promptly released the hostage, and never took another. We parked aircraft carriers off the beach and sent a bunch of negotiators.
\nWhich was the effective response?? And, in the context of who we are and want to be, how do we duplicate the effect of the effective response? I\u0092m not exactly sure, but it involves small, quiet, probably lethal actions in lieu of the large and loud actions we tend to take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read Part 3 of Wright\u0092s article with glee\u0085while he and I differ slightly (and I think he\u0092s done a much better job of laying out his arguments than I have done)\u0085we fundamentally agree that the enemy we are facing is a contagious mindset\u0085a meme\u0085to which I\u0092ll add that this meme is rooted in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2875"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}