{"id":450,"date":"2004-07-16T01:39:45","date_gmt":"2004-07-16T01:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:40","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:40","slug":"grand_central_and_kitty_dukakis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=450","title":{"rendered":"Grand Central and Kitty Dukakis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, I tip my toe back into blogging (and reading blogs), and I find that Matt Yglesias has once again written the thing that makes me go “Huh?” today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I imagine that after another attack people will still feel, on a gut level, like we ought to retaliate, but there really won’t be anything to be done. Just as Australia and Indonesia didn’t respond after Bali, and Spain didn’t respond after the Madrid attacks, if someone blows up Grand Central Station there’s not really going to be much of anything we can do in response. A lot of people, myself included, would find that pretty unsatisfying on an emotional level, but it’s hard to see any reasonable policy options.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are so<\/b> many things wrong with this…Let’s start. Factually, things certainly were done after Bali and the Spanish railroad bombings – as I assume Matt knows. Some good police work went into arresting Abderrameb Hammadi Afandi, and pursuing Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet until he committed suicide. In Bali, Imam Samudra is awaiting execution for his leadership of the attack.<\/p>\n

So he’s obviously talking about a military – as opposed to legal – ‘something’. And the problem is, on what planet do we imagine that we can arrest these guys and try them faster than they are recruited? Recruited – in large part, I’ll bet, by watching videos of the successful operations carried out by their predecessors. Note that more successful attacks in Israel seem to lead to more attackers; the successful attacks themselves are the advertisement.<\/p>\n

When my kitchen sink is full of ants, killing the ants I see is primally satisfying, but doesn’t do much to stop the colony from sending more.<\/p>\n

At some point, you have to disrupt the system that makes people like this, and the systems that recruit, train, and organize them. That’s difficult to do in general, and effectively impossible to do when they have states that are willing to shelter and succor them.<\/p>\n

That’s the core difference, I think, between Matt’s philosophy on these things, and mine.<\/p>\n

There’s another difference, and simply put, it’s that I see Matt’s success as driven in large part because he articulates – very well – the beliefs and thoughts of a certain group within the Democratic Party and the left. And when I read the quote above, as a Democrat, I cringe. It’s the geopolitical equivalent of Michael Dukakis’ response<\/a> to Bernard Shaw. And I don’t think that’s going to play any better this time than it did then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, I tip my toe back into blogging (and reading blogs), and I find that Matt Yglesias has once again written the thing that makes me go “Huh?” today. I imagine that after another attack people will still feel, on a gut level, like we ought to retaliate, but there really won’t be anything to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450"}],"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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/450\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}