Donate money to a lobbying organization and have the pros work for you. If the EFF is fighting for your opinion, send them a check. THAT is how the system works. Take advantage of it.
If some clever hacker can figure out how to manipulate the system without spending money*, please post it. And don't just say "vote" because sometimes I'd like to affect the system more than once every 2 years.
"Give everyone wireless networked PDA's, and five days to vote on every issue"
Just what I want, I country full of uninformed people spending 10 seconds to decide every important issue.
We are NOT a pure democracy for a very good reason. We are a constitutional republic. We need people who can spend their time learning about the issues. We all can't afford to spend that time or we couldn't get anything else done. If the representatives suck, then it is the fault of the voters. If you think stupid legislation gets through now, wait until those voters start voting directly on stuff before they even finish reading it.
"Every nation has the government it desrves" -Joseph de Maistre
Their mission is the delivery of the new Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM. The JDAM is a gravity bomb guided by an internal GPS sensor. As long as the BUFF releases the bomb fairly close to where it should, the guidance system does the rest. No need to "paint the target." Of course, this assumes perfect maps...
"bundle a small handgun and/or combat knife with every book. Then, drop a load near every village, maybe one for every 20 people in the village"
The CIA already thought of that idea. They called it the "deer gun." A cheap disposable pistol that was to be airdropped over an occupied territory. The idea was that the locals could use the gun to kill occupying soldiers, and then trade up for their guns. The theory being that it would be a lot harder to oppress a group of people that we had supplied with these. Even if not successful at kicking their oppressors out, at least the locals could make the enemy commit a lot more resources to the occupation effort.
And people wonder why the U.S. didn't like the UN's plan require nations to not let "non state actors" have guns. This is a perfect example of why the U.S. took its "unpopular" stand.
deer gun stats
www.securityarms.com/20010315/galleryfiles/0900/96 8.htm (remove the space before the 8)
I like the e-book leaflet idea, but add a reciever so that encrypted updates (current news, proramming, etc.) can be wirelessly transmitted to it.
To answer JonKatz’s questions: Not necessarily. A lot.
Maybe, different people have different expectations. Probably not,
but see previous answer. As I said, a lot. Yes. Sometimes,
it depends on the data. No, you can never guarantee perfect safety.
Yes. Sometimes, it depends on how clever the launderers are.
Yes. Yes, IF it is properly applied. Sometimes. As I said,
a lot but it can’t do everything.
Technology is one way to gain an advantage in conflict. But it is not
the only way. We have a positive asymmetry of technology. In
other words, we have better and more technology than Al-Qaeda. But,
for example, we have a negative asymmetry of means. In other words,
even if terrorists had skyscrapers and jet liners we would NOT fight them
by slamming one into the other to kill thousands of non-combatants.
At least I like to think we wouldn’t. We historically have had
a negative asymmetry of will with these groups. The terrorists were
willing to endure more hardship to achieve victory than we would. That
has changed, as a result of poor intelligence (the military kind) on their
part. They went too far, caused too many casualties; and now we are
much more willing to endure hardship in order to eliminate them as a threat.
At least I like to think we are. Technology gives us one type of advantage
in this conflict, but just as Airpower alone won’t win this war, so
to Technology alone is not enough of an advantage to guarantee victory.
I will address two specific areas of warfare that have been impacted by technology,
psychological operations and the principle of mass.
War is usually a psychological phenomenon. It is possible to eliminate
an enemy by killing every last one of them, but it is difficult. It
is more efficient to either break their will or convince them to join your
side, and so that is what is usually done. The terrorists know this.
They stage their events for maximum media exposure and psychological effect.
Or at least they try to. The technology that gives us mass media and
instant communications thus becomes a tool to break the will of our society.
But our side can use technology for it’s psychological operations,
too. Not just in delivering the message* but in figuring out what message
to send and when to send it. Psychological operations becomes married
with the concepts of Civil Affairs and Grand Strategy. Technology is
more than just machines with blinking lights. Technology includes things
like advertising and marketing techniques (if you don’t think we have
the best marketing technology in the world, watch commercials from other
cultures) and even psychology, socionomy (I refuse to use the term psycho-history),
and econometrics. Everyone focuses on the sophisticated eavesdropping
equipment the NSA and NIMA have, but few people talk about the sophisticated
social, economic, and psychological models that the CIA has. These
models are supposedly just as advanced above their civilian counterparts
as the spy satellites are from civilian imaging satellites. These models
can allow us to understand which groups to target militarily, psychologically,
or politically. This better understanding, both on an intuitive and
an analytical level, of human nature and international politics means the
difference between an overly lethal terrorist attack that unifies its victims
and a slowly built, carefully targeted, well explained coalition attack that
minimizes the number of supporters that are driven to the terrorist’s
power base. It may be hard to think of an academic paper on Disaster
Sociology as technology, but such “soft science” developments
are just as much of a technological edge as their “hard science”
counterparts.
Perhaps the biggest effect technology has had on how war is waged is by changing
the principle of mass. Not mass as in Newton, mass as in a lot of troops
in a small area. Robert Leonhard points out that in ancient times,
when one man, on average, killed less than one opponent it was necessary
to mass troops in order to maximize killing power. Troops needed their
comrades help in dispatching the enemy and if alone would be vulnerable to
massed troops from the other side. When one man can kill more than
one opponent, then mass no longer becomes desirable**. A large tight
group of troops just becomes a juicy target for one of those highly lethal
enemy soldiers armed with high rate of fire, ranged weapons. Despite
the obvious transition point at the 1=1 ratio, this is not a sudden switch.
Some well equipped veteran troops in the War of Northern Aggression
(the American Civil War for you Yankees and foreigners) probably moved
into this “modern” region of the lethality curve. On the
other hand, there are many units in modern armies that cannot achieve a lethality
greater than 1. No one will dispute that well equipped (with high tech
weapons) , well trained (with high tech training and simulation tools, some
of which comes from the entertainment industry), disciplined (with modern
indoctrination methods), Special Forces units supported by quality C4ISR***
(also driven by technology) can achieve a lethality of a dozen or more.
Veteran Mujahideen fighting on well known terrain can probably also achieve
high lethalities. It is likely, therefore, that small, self contained,
dispersed units, supported by high tech logistics, intel, and ranged attack
units will play a key role not only in this conflict, but in all future ones.
* Can anyone think of improvments we can make in the psy-op technology used to reach such people. Leaflets are the primary technology, but we also drop cheap radios tuned to Radio Liberty and the like. Could we combine the two into a thin leaflet/solar-powered radio? One of the advantages of a leaflet is an enemy soldier can hide it (sometimes we print stuff on the back side that allows the enemy to hide a leaflet more easily) and read it when alone, for a radio that would mean including an earphone, which would probably increase cost, mass, and bulk too much to be used on each leaflet. What about an e-paper leaflet with a small computer chip that would allow it to display more information (and even animation) than a conventional leaflet is limited to. What about using the e-paper to make a leaflet that could be reprogrammed by an encrypted wireless signal, so that it could be updated with new informtion. It could be sort of like a "closed captioned" radio. How soon could such a thing be made? Could it be powered by solar energy or otherwise freed from the constraints of battery life? Got any better ideas?
**Like some of Leonhard’s other conclusions, I feel that he has ALMOST
got it but has somehow still missed the mark. The real equation describing
the desire for mass must surely include not only your own troops lethality
against the enemy, but also the enemy’s lethality against yours.
Regardless, it is clear that technology has transformed warfare by greatly
increasing the lethality of the individual, and therefore turning warfighting
principles that were true for thousands of years on their heads within the
last century.
References
Metz, Steven; Johnson, Douglas V., II.,
Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy: Definition, Background, and Strategic Concepts
, ARMY WAR COLL STRATEGIC STUDIES INST, 2001, ADA387381 [http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/fulcrum_main.pl?da tabase=ft_u2&searchid=100264671422011&keyf ieldvalue=ADA387381&filename=%2Ffulcrum%2Fdata %2FTR_fulltext%2Fdoc%2FADA387381.pdf]
(remove excess spaces in urls)
Feder, Stanley A., “Factions and Policons: New Ways to Analyze Politics,”
Studies in Intelligence, vol. 31 no. 1, pp 41-57, 1987
Leonhard, Robert R., The Principles of War for the Information Age, Presidio
Press, 1998, ISBN 0-89141-647-1
"The 2000 election and the SCOTUS decision was a fatal blow against democracy"
Why?
Was it a fatal blow to democracy when Kennedy "won" the election in 1960?
I hate to break it to you, but electioneering, vote fraud, and partisan manipulation of election commissions has a long history in the United States. Both sides pulled out the stops to try and win the 2000 election. If Gore was elected, his victory would have been just as tainted. While I don't agree 100% with the Supreme Court's decision (yes, I read it in it's entirety) it wasn't without merit. And they are, after all, the last word on such things in our country.
We should all work to eliminate vote fraud and electioneering, as it does damage the quality of our society. It is evil and wrong. But I would hardly call it "fatal." If it was, then we would have been dead a long time ago.
I suspect our disagreement on motives may not be a disagreement at all. Perhaps we are are simply using the same words to describe two different groups: the lower level agents of Al-Qaeda and the upper level "prime movers" of the organization. I agree with you that the lower levels of the terrorist organizations and their support groups are motivated by the anti-American factors you mention, which bin Ladin and his top lieutenants use to recruit and motivate them. When I said that I thought that the terrorist attacks were calculated attempts at political manipulation, I didn't mean that the "foot soldiers" that carried them out were not necessarily motivated by emotional or personal reasons. I was referring to the upper levels of Al-Qaeda who, it seems to me, put a great deal of thought into what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it.
Sort of like the difference between the poor infantryman who fights "for the glory of France" versus Napoleon who wages war for the benefit of Napoleon.
In understanding how the anti-American, pro fundamentalist environment came to exist that supplies Al-Qaeda with its power base, it is important to consider the factors you mention. In order to understand what the strategy is behind Al-Qaeda's current and future actions, I think it is important to consider the goals and plans of the "prime movers" of the organization.
Some of their articles have been right on the button. Some of them (notably the claim about China moving forces into Afghanistan) seem to be full of crap.
Yes, I did read it, in High School. It was creepy, I prefered The Gold Bug. I also read The Jungle Book. And I believe that one of the most important Laws of the Jungle is to NEVER lose your temper.
I don't want our gov't to take revenge against the terrorists. I don't want them to take ANY action out of anger or emotion. It is not fit that the King of the Jungle should lose his temper. The terrorists are a problem. The problem should be solved. Coldly. Quietly. Patiently. Solve the problem.
Personally, I am mad. I must deal with my personal anger and desire for revenge, and overcome it. I don't want my gov't acting on such feelings... or any "feelings." I also read The Art of War. We should not be "of choleric temper." That way lies weakness. If bin Laden is really just out for vengence, then GREAT... he is "of choleric temper" and is not nearly as much of a problem that a coldly rational bin Laden* would be.
We should set worthwhile goals, and work to achieve them. That is the proper action for the King of the Jungle.
*The next Lenin? Probably not. But it is best to assume the worst and if you are wrong, then you can be happy.
I am aware of bin Laden's stated reasons for his attacks. I am taking his statements with the same skepticism that you have for the Western Media. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a "hot button" and very symbolic topic for most Arabs. It is my opinion (but I admit I am not privvy to bin Laden's private thoughts) that he knows how emotional of an issue this is with the average Mohammad Sixpack* and is using it as a justification and a recruitment tool. But I doubt that is his real reason for his actions. He has repeatedly stated his desire to establish a unified Muslim empire. His nickname is "the emir." Call me a cynic, but I doubt that this personal ambition is just a secondary goal he wants to accomplish once he has helped out the Palistinians. But if he mentioned this important plan of his as the reason for his actions, I doubt he would get as much support and as many recruits. Claiming that the fight is to save the Palistinians, and avenge the starving children of Iraq is a lot better at recruiting and motivating "throw away" agents than telling them of his political ambitions. Yet his ambitions are quite well documented; in his own words as well as those of his biographers.
Saddam Hussein also claimed at one point that he had invaded Kuwait merely as the first step in his plan to free the Palistinians from Israeli and American oppression. It seems like every time some politician in the MidEast wants to do something, it is to help the Palestinians or hurt the Israelis; it is never to help themselves to something. It is like an American politician doing something "to protect people's rights." Forgive me if I am overly cynical in both cases.
As for his mentioning of Iraq, I am aware that we are commonly blamed for the misrule Hussien has brought on his people. Hussien has also provided some support for bin Laden (including supposedly training on bioweapons for 100+ Al-Qaeda fighters), and I suspect that his complaints about the mistreatment of Iraq are a combination of "playing to the crowd" and also paying back Hussein for his assistance.
Interestingly, bin Laden was one of the 1st to recognize the threat Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia and offered to bring his followers to Saudi Arabia to help fight off Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. So much for Muslim unity.
I got picked on some in the 3rd grade. I "snapped" and beat the crap out of one of the guys who was tormenting me.
By the time we got to high school, the two of us were friends and doubles partner's on the tennis team (which required very good, almost instinctive understanding of what the other guy is about to do). We joked about the incident a couple of times; I'm sure if I had let him and the other's "get away" with their teasing when they were just ignorant little kids then we would not have wound up as friends when we matured.
Considering America's history of treating our old enemies from WW2 with respect and forgiveness, and Bush's emphasis on distinguising between the Afghan people and their leaders, I am very hopeful that within 5 years there will be a great deal of real friendship between the Afghani and American people. At least I hope so. They will be a very useful ally if we ever have a conflict with the ChiComs.
Jane's Newsbrief has a free subscription, and they are good but they usually only tell you enough of the really interesting articles to make you wish you had bought a full subscription.
http://www.janes.com
Click on Free News Briefs e-mail service
I have been monitoring this site: http://www.debka.com/
But I'm not sure how good they are, anybody else have an opinion on this site?
Yeah, I'm sure you know far more about international diplomacy than the Bush administration. (sarcasm)
On the other hand, you are probably right that Al-Qaeda hoped to provoke an over reaction by the United States. I doubt we "played right into their hands." They probably expected we would immediately carry out an indescrimate bombing campaign. It looks like the current administration has a VERY good understanding of how important Grand Strategy and psychological operations are going to be in this conflict, as evidenced by their repeated emphasis that "this is not a war against Islam," the humanitarian aid sent to the Afghan people, the attempts to cooperate with local Afghan opposition groups, etc.
As for chess, I don't give a rat's @$$ how bad he is at chess. If playing chess was what ruled nations, then we should just put Deep Blue in charge and be over with it. I just care how good he is at picking cabinet members and supreme court judges. He seems to have done a bang-up job with the cabinet... A president is a manager; "the administration" is a team effort.
"Especially since the US-aligned Special Operations groups will be using what are, frankly, guerrilla tactics. It's going to be guerrilla versus guerrilla... They are simply trying to kill and disrupt a certain few thousand people"
-- Parent to this post
"'I've come to my conclusion after thirty years in the business,' my old friend Jose Flores said recently, a consummate professional even if he is a sometimes Agency contract merc, 'that we have been wasting our time. There are forty wars going on around the world. I estimate that we could settle most of them -establish real Peace, save millions of lives- if we successfully targeted about a hundred people.'
'But then, Mario, you'd be out of business.'
...
I estimated that incipient civil war could be snuffed out by snuffing out ten key individuals. This wasn't done."
-- Paul Balor in _Manual_of_the_Mercenary_Soldier_
"Well, the oposite choice is to get involved and to risk terrorists attacks as we have been through already (several times)."
This is exactly the choice that terrorists want us to make. They want us to abandon our interests and our allies so that we can feel safe. If we leave the rest of the world to the wolves, though, then WE may be safe but the next generations of Americans will have a much bigger mess to clean up as a result of our isolationism.
The time to crush monsters is when they are small. We should have done it with the Nazis. We should have done it with the Commies. Does that deny other nation's rights to self determination? No. Nations are organizations, they don't have rights. People have rights. The Taliban don't have the "right" to kill women for wanting to learn to read. We should stop this now before we have an entire Middle and Near East controlled by such tyrants.
"We had our chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but as the media said at the time, Bush (Senior) was a wimp."
Bush Sr. was not a wimp. But the reason I suspect that he left Hussein in power may not make him look any better in many people's eyes. I suspect he left Hussein in power because the rest of the Middle East was scared $#!?less of him. As long as he was in power in Iraq, then America would have permission by the other Arab nations to station troops in their nations. Whenever these nations get uncomfortable with their American protectors, then the US or UN inspectors would suddenly find new evidence of Iraqi WMD research.
Bush Sr. was not a wimp. He was devious. He was, after all, ex-DCI. Was it wrong to condem the citizens of Iraq to live (or, for many... to die) under Hussein's rule in order to further our long range plans for stabalizing and Westernizing the Mid-East? Maybe. Maybe it was the lesser of many evils.
"The problem comes in, is that we pretend to be a moderator (unbiased by both sides) to gain international support, but in reality we are still one sided, we still give weapons to Israel but do nothing for Palistine."
Actually, thanks to Bush Sr.'s coalition building amoung Arab nations in that region, we are not as dependant on Israel's friendship as we once were. This has greatly helped the Palistinians. Ironically, the worst thing for Palistine would be for American troops to be driven out of the otehr Arab nations; because we would again become dependant on Israel's friendship and assistance in that region... and we would be in much less of a position to object to Israeli's treatment of Palistinians. We are not "unbiased" in the Mid-East, but neither are we on Israel's side. We are on our side. We very much want a stable and pro-Western Middle East. As Kissinger (who, while Jewish was never one to go easy on Israel) has pointed out, nations do not have friends, they have common interests. It is not an easy problem to solve, and whoever can do so certainly deserves a Nobel prize for it.
"How can you say doing nothing will simply cost us more lives, as the terrorist attacks continue? Have they continued in the weeks to now? Everything happened on one day and nothing since."
In 1983 terrorists attacked the Marine barracks in Lebanon. We pulled our forces out, and the attacks stopped... for a time.
In 1993 one of Al-Qaeda's first acts was to ambush and kill American soldiers engaged in "nationbuilding" in Somalia. We pulled our forces out, and the attacks stopped... for a time.
If we pull troops out of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan now, then the attacks will stop again... for a time.
We have taught these people that if they bloody our nose, then we will do what they want.
Why are we surprised that they attack us again?
If we keep giving them what they want every time the attack us then we teach the world that terrorism works. If we keep following that road, then evenutally it will mean the end of America as a free nation. At some point we have to stand up and say: "No" No matter how much they hurt us, we can't give them what they want. We have to hurt them worse. We have to show the world that attacking the United States is a VERY BAD IDEA. It will mean more attacks in the short term, but it is the only way to stop them in the long term.
It is easy to be a critic, it is not so easy to play brinksmanship with the fate of nations.
What should we do NOW.
If President Bush had called you up and said "Mr. RelliK... Do you mind if I call you Pancho? Well Pancho, I have been very impressed with your thoughtfulness posts on Slashdot... LINUX RULES... Sorry... um... as I was saying, I want you to give me your advicement on what America's response should be to these attacks. I'll listen to any suggestions you have." (best if you imagine this in Bush's peculiar dialect)
What would you have America do? What do you think the world would be like in 10 years if Pres. Bush listened to your advice? What do you think of the response SINCE 9-11, assuming that he didn't really ask for your advice, Pancho?
Would it have been less evil to allow over a million American and Japanese servicemen to die trying to subdue Japan in a conventional invasion in order to have saved the lives of the thousands of Japanese civilians in those cities? What kind of math puts the lives of a few* enemy citizens against the an order of magnitude MORE lives of both enemy and American citizens
Why does everyone bring out just Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "evil" in these examples? What about firebombing Tokyo? What about Dresden? Why are those not mentioned? They were more deadly attacks. Do you think the people who died care what the of explosive was in the bombs?
What about the bombing of Britain by the Germans? What about the use of bioweapons by Japan against the Chinese? The Rape of Nanking? The Holocaust?
The short answer of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not war crimes is simple. We won the war. If the Axis had won the war, then I'm sure they would have had Curtis LeMay up on charges of "war crimes" and Hermann Goering would have gotten a medal. But, thank God, they didn't win. And the winners get to write the history.
The long answer for why we would do something so horrible is that it was not a simple choice between doing it and not doing it. The options were not "do we only hit military targets or do we just carpet bomb cities." There were no precision guided bombs in World War 2. If there were, then using massive amounts of "dumb bombs" would have been evil. But the choice was not "smart bombs" or "dumb bombs"; the choice was "do we want to use every means at our disposal to defeat the Axis Powers?" Would you rather the Allies have only fought the war half-heartedly and allowed the Nazis, Fascists, and Imperial Japanese to have conquered the world? The Axis did not pull any punches. It was all out war. Unrestricted war, to use a modern term. To bomb cities full of civilians was evil, but to have allowed totalitarianism to dominate the future of mankind because we did not want to get any blood on our hands would have been far, far, worse. It would have been the worst kind of selfishness. To have lost World War 2 because of a lack of commitment or a lack of will to do what was necessary... that would have been a war crime.
*Yes, I know it is odd to list over 100,000 casualties as "few", in this case the term is relative. .
"You set up a very artificial scenario. The military person is almost certainly much better at hand-to-hand combat than the student. Even if the student punches back, he probably won't be able to incapacitate the military person. So why would the student think that punching back would stop further attacks, rather than escalating the intensity of those further attacks???"
Have you ever seen the movie _Cool_Hand_Luke_?
Even if you can't hit harder, if you have a "positive asymmetry of wills" then you can win in the end.
"Nope. But I do believe that they were driven by revenge. (as if it's not obvious!)"
Then you are an idiot. Or at least I'll grant that you are just politically naive. The attacks on 9-11 have nothing to do with revenge. They were not "crimes of passion." The terrorist leaders may toss around the word "revenge" in the propaganda they use to recruit throw-away agents, but the fact is that such terrorist acts are cooly calculated attempts at political manipulation.
To quote the DOD definition, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to [cause] fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological... In other words, terrorism is a psychological act conducted for its impact on an audience."
The leaders of Al-Qaeda seek to establish a unified Islamic gov't over the entire Middle East. Is that evil? Well, they want a gov't where women are considered property, where the political leaders are also the religious leaders, where practicing a religion other than the "state religion" is punishable by death, and not incidentally where THEY are those revered religious/political dictators. I think that qualifies for evil in my book. Even if you don't believe in "good vs. evil" political simplifications, then surely it is an end result which almost all civilized people would not want to see occur.
So why would Al-Qaeda attack the World Trade Center if it really wants to take over Arabia? Because as long as the United States maintains a strong military presence in the region then any attempt to "unify the Muslim world" will almost certainly come to a swift failure. Al-Qaeda's first step is to drive the U.S. out of the region that they want to conquer and to sufficiently damage us that we would not have the resources to ever come back in. Al-Qaeda is manipulating the hatred and jealousy toward the United States among the many Muslims to further their own goals of political/military conquest. They murdered thousands of civilians in a surprise terrorist attack in an attempt to provoke the United States gov't into taking rash action that will further increase their political base (something Bush's advisors obviously foresaw, considering the huge emphasis that Bush and his administration are placing on winning the "hearts and minds" of the Afghans and other Muslim people) and also as the first step in convincing the public and the leadership of the United States that we must withdraw our forces from the Mid-East (like we withdrew from Lebanon and Somalia after terrorist related casualties in those areas) so that it will be ripe for their conquest. Sounds close enough to "evil" in my book.
As the song says "everybody wants to rule the world." Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri might actually be satisfied with just the Middle and Near East... maybe. I'm sure they don't see themselves as "evil." I'm sure they would tell you that they keep women uneducated and oppressed because that is their proper place in society... not because they hate them. I'm sure that they would explain that they execute people preaching other religions because they care about their citizen's souls and want to protect them from temptation. Then again, I'm sure that the Communists would have told you that they were doing what they did only because they cared so much for the Working Class. I'm sure that the National German Worker's Party officials would have explained that their actions were taken to bring back the pride and sense of self worth among the much maligned German people and to free them from the unfair terms of the Armistice Treaty forced on them by the evil French.
I will not try to argue that the United States is perfect. We have used ruthless means to achieve our ends. We have manipulated nations. We have supported oppressive leaders simply because they were the enemies of our enemies. It is a cruel world. International politics is a brutal jungle where the only rules are the ones that you can enforce. We have played by those "rules of the jungle" and perhaps in some ways we mirror the evil we try to fight. But aside from some (thankfully) rare acts by misguided leaders, our ends are generally good. If you can't agree with that, then I submit that they are at least better than the ends pursued by our enemies, whether those enemies are Al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussien, or the Chicoms.
Some people are upset that the United States is never perfect. The choice is not "which side is perfect." The choice is "which future do you want to live in?" The future the United States is fighting for will not be a utopia... but it will be better than the alternative. It is time to choose sides. And don't forget the saying "The Perfect is the enemy of The Good." If you wait for a perfect society to support, then you will never find it. It is time to throw in on the side of "The Good." As long as you argue that the calculated conspiracy of an oppressive, tyrannical fanatic is morally equivalent to the calculated conspiracy of the powers of Western Civilization to promote global stability and the continued existence of liberal, capitalist, democratic society, then you are on the wrong side... and you are being just as manipulated by Al-Qaeda's propaganda as are the poor, ignorant youths who they recruit to be "throw away" agents.
P.S. All the people who feared a stupid, rash, and vengeful retaliation by the United States need only look at the huge effort being put into helping the Afghan people and building alliances with local, freedom-loving Afghanis to see how wrong those expectations were. I am very proud of Pres. Bush and his administration. www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/10/06/ret.bush.radio/ index.html (remove the space before "index")
I had (ok, my boss had... but it might as well have been mine) a 1 kiloWatt industrial laser that had an interesting easter egg.
It had 32k of memory in its onboard computer for storing CNC programs. (did I mention it was an old industrial laser?) The same company sold a model that had 64k of memory, for more money. But the laser manufacturer apparently decided it would be cheaper to only have one assembly line building the lasers, so all of them were actually made with 64k and the 32k versions must have been "dumbed down" with a software patch.
I discoved a very complex set of secret codes that would "transform" my 32k industrial laser into the 64k version. Very handy. The codes were probably used to allow the 32k machines to be "upgraded" to 64k by a factory service rep; for a few thousand dollars. (and you thought memory for your PC was expensive)
Slashdot Mirror
Donate money to a lobbying organization and have the pros work for you. If the EFF is fighting for your opinion, send them a check. THAT is how the system works. Take advantage of it.
If some clever hacker can figure out how to manipulate the system without spending money*, please post it. And don't just say "vote" because sometimes I'd like to affect the system more than once every 2 years.
"Give everyone wireless networked PDA's, and five days to vote on every issue"
Just what I want, I country full of uninformed people spending 10 seconds to decide every important issue.
We are NOT a pure democracy for a very good reason. We are a constitutional republic. We need people who can spend their time learning about the issues. We all can't afford to spend that time or we couldn't get anything else done. If the representatives suck, then it is the fault of the voters. If you think stupid legislation gets through now, wait until those voters start voting directly on stuff before they even finish reading it.
"Every nation has the government it desrves" -Joseph de Maistre
Their mission is the delivery of the new Joint Direct Attack Munition or JDAM. The JDAM is a gravity bomb guided by an internal GPS sensor. As long as the BUFF releases the bomb fairly close to where it should, the guidance system does the rest. No need to "paint the target." Of course, this assumes perfect maps...
deer gun
/ 0900/968.htm
http://www.securityarms.com/20010315/galleryfiles
More likely it should be "if SHE survives."
Especially in pro-Taliban areas, but even much (maybe all) of the non-Taliban leadership generally considers women to be of less value than men.
Oh, and this too:
The Media and the Terrorist: A Dance of Death
By James E. Lukaszewski, APR
http://www.executive-speaker.com/spch0025.html
I have no affiliation with this group, but they do seem to have some old posters that are suddenly new again.
http://www.openstore.com/posters/shiplips.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/somebody.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/watching.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/sometalk.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/sake.jpg
http://www.openstore.com/posters/stetson.jpg
"bundle a small handgun and/or combat knife with every book. Then, drop a load near every village, maybe one for every 20 people in the village"
6 8.htm (remove the space before the 8)
The CIA already thought of that idea. They called it the "deer gun." A cheap disposable pistol that was to be airdropped over an occupied territory. The idea was that the locals could use the gun to kill occupying soldiers, and then trade up for their guns. The theory being that it would be a lot harder to oppress a group of people that we had supplied with these. Even if not successful at kicking their oppressors out, at least the locals could make the enemy commit a lot more resources to the occupation effort.
And people wonder why the U.S. didn't like the UN's plan require nations to not let "non state actors" have guns. This is a perfect example of why the U.S. took its "unpopular" stand.
deer gun stats
www.securityarms.com/20010315/galleryfiles/0900/9
I like the e-book leaflet idea, but add a reciever so that encrypted updates (current news, proramming, etc.) can be wirelessly transmitted to it.
To answer JonKatz’s questions: Not necessarily. A lot. Maybe, different people have different expectations. Probably not, but see previous answer. As I said, a lot. Yes. Sometimes, it depends on the data. No, you can never guarantee perfect safety. Yes. Sometimes, it depends on how clever the launderers are. Yes. Yes, IF it is properly applied. Sometimes. As I said, a lot but it can’t do everything.
a tabase=ft_u2&searchid=100264671422011&keyf ieldvalue=ADA387381&filename=%2Ffulcrum%2Fdata %2FTR_fulltext%2Fdoc%2FADA387381.pdf]
Technology is one way to gain an advantage in conflict. But it is not the only way. We have a positive asymmetry of technology. In other words, we have better and more technology than Al-Qaeda. But, for example, we have a negative asymmetry of means. In other words, even if terrorists had skyscrapers and jet liners we would NOT fight them by slamming one into the other to kill thousands of non-combatants. At least I like to think we wouldn’t. We historically have had a negative asymmetry of will with these groups. The terrorists were willing to endure more hardship to achieve victory than we would. That has changed, as a result of poor intelligence (the military kind) on their part. They went too far, caused too many casualties; and now we are much more willing to endure hardship in order to eliminate them as a threat. At least I like to think we are. Technology gives us one type of advantage in this conflict, but just as Airpower alone won’t win this war, so to Technology alone is not enough of an advantage to guarantee victory.
I will address two specific areas of warfare that have been impacted by technology, psychological operations and the principle of mass.
War is usually a psychological phenomenon. It is possible to eliminate an enemy by killing every last one of them, but it is difficult. It is more efficient to either break their will or convince them to join your side, and so that is what is usually done. The terrorists know this. They stage their events for maximum media exposure and psychological effect. Or at least they try to. The technology that gives us mass media and instant communications thus becomes a tool to break the will of our society. But our side can use technology for it’s psychological operations, too. Not just in delivering the message* but in figuring out what message to send and when to send it. Psychological operations becomes married with the concepts of Civil Affairs and Grand Strategy. Technology is more than just machines with blinking lights. Technology includes things like advertising and marketing techniques (if you don’t think we have the best marketing technology in the world, watch commercials from other cultures) and even psychology, socionomy (I refuse to use the term psycho-history), and econometrics. Everyone focuses on the sophisticated eavesdropping equipment the NSA and NIMA have, but few people talk about the sophisticated social, economic, and psychological models that the CIA has. These models are supposedly just as advanced above their civilian counterparts as the spy satellites are from civilian imaging satellites. These models can allow us to understand which groups to target militarily, psychologically, or politically. This better understanding, both on an intuitive and an analytical level, of human nature and international politics means the difference between an overly lethal terrorist attack that unifies its victims and a slowly built, carefully targeted, well explained coalition attack that minimizes the number of supporters that are driven to the terrorist’s power base. It may be hard to think of an academic paper on Disaster Sociology as technology, but such “soft science” developments are just as much of a technological edge as their “hard science” counterparts.
Perhaps the biggest effect technology has had on how war is waged is by changing the principle of mass. Not mass as in Newton, mass as in a lot of troops in a small area. Robert Leonhard points out that in ancient times, when one man, on average, killed less than one opponent it was necessary to mass troops in order to maximize killing power. Troops needed their comrades help in dispatching the enemy and if alone would be vulnerable to massed troops from the other side. When one man can kill more than one opponent, then mass no longer becomes desirable**. A large tight group of troops just becomes a juicy target for one of those highly lethal enemy soldiers armed with high rate of fire, ranged weapons. Despite the obvious transition point at the 1=1 ratio, this is not a sudden switch. Some well equipped veteran troops in the War of Northern Aggression (the American Civil War for you Yankees and foreigners) probably moved into this “modern” region of the lethality curve. On the other hand, there are many units in modern armies that cannot achieve a lethality greater than 1. No one will dispute that well equipped (with high tech weapons) , well trained (with high tech training and simulation tools, some of which comes from the entertainment industry), disciplined (with modern indoctrination methods), Special Forces units supported by quality C4ISR*** (also driven by technology) can achieve a lethality of a dozen or more. Veteran Mujahideen fighting on well known terrain can probably also achieve high lethalities. It is likely, therefore, that small, self contained, dispersed units, supported by high tech logistics, intel, and ranged attack units will play a key role not only in this conflict, but in all future ones.
* Can anyone think of improvments we can make in the psy-op technology used to reach such people. Leaflets are the primary technology, but we also drop cheap radios tuned to Radio Liberty and the like. Could we combine the two into a thin leaflet/solar-powered radio? One of the advantages of a leaflet is an enemy soldier can hide it (sometimes we print stuff on the back side that allows the enemy to hide a leaflet more easily) and read it when alone, for a radio that would mean including an earphone, which would probably increase cost, mass, and bulk too much to be used on each leaflet. What about an e-paper leaflet with a small computer chip that would allow it to display more information (and even animation) than a conventional leaflet is limited to. What about using the e-paper to make a leaflet that could be reprogrammed by an encrypted wireless signal, so that it could be updated with new informtion. It could be sort of like a "closed captioned" radio. How soon could such a thing be made? Could it be powered by solar energy or otherwise freed from the constraints of battery life? Got any better ideas?
**Like some of Leonhard’s other conclusions, I feel that he has ALMOST got it but has somehow still missed the mark. The real equation describing the desire for mass must surely include not only your own troops lethality against the enemy, but also the enemy’s lethality against yours. Regardless, it is clear that technology has transformed warfare by greatly increasing the lethality of the individual, and therefore turning warfighting principles that were true for thousands of years on their heads within the last century.
*** Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. Formerly C4IS, formerly C4I, formerly, C3I.
References
Metz, Steven; Johnson, Douglas V., II., Asymmetry and U.S. Military Strategy: Definition, Background, and Strategic Concepts , ARMY WAR COLL STRATEGIC STUDIES INST, 2001, ADA387381 [http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/fulcrum_main.pl?d
(remove excess spaces in urls)
Feder, Stanley A., “Factions and Policons: New Ways to Analyze Politics,” Studies in Intelligence, vol. 31 no. 1, pp 41-57, 1987
Leonhard, Robert R., The Principles of War for the Information Age, Presidio Press, 1998, ISBN 0-89141-647-1
"The 2000 election and the SCOTUS decision was a fatal blow against democracy"
l ec tronic-vote-counting/NYCase.html
Why?
Was it a fatal blow to democracy when Kennedy "won" the election in 1960?
I hate to break it to you, but electioneering, vote fraud, and partisan manipulation of election commissions has a long history in the United States. Both sides pulled out the stops to try and win the 2000 election. If Gore was elected, his victory would have been just as tainted. While I don't agree 100% with the Supreme Court's decision (yes, I read it in it's entirety) it wasn't without merit. And they are, after all, the last word on such things in our country.
We should all work to eliminate vote fraud and electioneering, as it does damage the quality of our society. It is evil and wrong. But I would hardly call it "fatal." If it was, then we would have been dead a long time ago.
www.quivis.com/fraud.html
cse.stanford.edu/class/cs201/current/Projects/e
Hmm...
I suspect our disagreement on motives may not be a disagreement at all. Perhaps we are are simply using the same words to describe two different groups: the lower level agents of Al-Qaeda and the upper level "prime movers" of the organization. I agree with you that the lower levels of the terrorist organizations and their support groups are motivated by the anti-American factors you mention, which bin Ladin and his top lieutenants use to recruit and motivate them. When I said that I thought that the terrorist attacks were calculated attempts at political manipulation, I didn't mean that the "foot soldiers" that carried them out were not necessarily motivated by emotional or personal reasons. I was referring to the upper levels of Al-Qaeda who, it seems to me, put a great deal of thought into what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it.
Sort of like the difference between the poor infantryman who fights "for the glory of France" versus Napoleon who wages war for the benefit of Napoleon.
In understanding how the anti-American, pro fundamentalist environment came to exist that supplies Al-Qaeda with its power base, it is important to consider the factors you mention. In order to understand what the strategy is behind Al-Qaeda's current and future actions, I think it is important to consider the goals and plans of the "prime movers" of the organization.
Chris
Yeah, I picked up on their bias.
But are they accurate?
Some of their articles have been right on the button. Some of them (notably the claim about China moving forces into Afghanistan) seem to be full of crap.
Yes, I did read it, in High School. It was creepy, I prefered The Gold Bug. I also read The Jungle Book. And I believe that one of the most important Laws of the Jungle is to NEVER lose your temper.
I don't want our gov't to take revenge against the terrorists. I don't want them to take ANY action out of anger or emotion. It is not fit that the King of the Jungle should lose his temper. The terrorists are a problem. The problem should be solved. Coldly. Quietly. Patiently. Solve the problem.
Personally, I am mad. I must deal with my personal anger and desire for revenge, and overcome it. I don't want my gov't acting on such feelings... or any "feelings." I also read The Art of War. We should not be "of choleric temper." That way lies weakness. If bin Laden is really just out for vengence, then GREAT... he is "of choleric temper" and is not nearly as much of a problem that a coldly rational bin Laden* would be.
We should set worthwhile goals, and work to achieve them. That is the proper action for the King of the Jungle.
*The next Lenin? Probably not. But it is best to assume the worst and if you are wrong, then you can be happy.
Sara,
I am aware of bin Laden's stated reasons for his attacks. I am taking his statements with the same skepticism that you have for the Western Media. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a "hot button" and very symbolic topic for most Arabs. It is my opinion (but I admit I am not privvy to bin Laden's private thoughts) that he knows how emotional of an issue this is with the average Mohammad Sixpack* and is using it as a justification and a recruitment tool. But I doubt that is his real reason for his actions. He has repeatedly stated his desire to establish a unified Muslim empire. His nickname is "the emir." Call me a cynic, but I doubt that this personal ambition is just a secondary goal he wants to accomplish once he has helped out the Palistinians. But if he mentioned this important plan of his as the reason for his actions, I doubt he would get as much support and as many recruits. Claiming that the fight is to save the Palistinians, and avenge the starving children of Iraq is a lot better at recruiting and motivating "throw away" agents than telling them of his political ambitions. Yet his ambitions are quite well documented; in his own words as well as those of his biographers.
Saddam Hussein also claimed at one point that he had invaded Kuwait merely as the first step in his plan to free the Palistinians from Israeli and American oppression. It seems like every time some politician in the MidEast wants to do something, it is to help the Palestinians or hurt the Israelis; it is never to help themselves to something. It is like an American politician doing something "to protect people's rights." Forgive me if I am overly cynical in both cases.
As for his mentioning of Iraq, I am aware that we are commonly blamed for the misrule Hussien has brought on his people. Hussien has also provided some support for bin Laden (including supposedly training on bioweapons for 100+ Al-Qaeda fighters), and I suspect that his complaints about the mistreatment of Iraq are a combination of "playing to the crowd" and also paying back Hussein for his assistance.
Interestingly, bin Laden was one of the 1st to recognize the threat Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia and offered to bring his followers to Saudi Arabia to help fight off Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. So much for Muslim unity.
CYT
* I am aware of the irony.
I got picked on some in the 3rd grade. I "snapped" and beat the crap out of one of the guys who was tormenting me.
By the time we got to high school, the two of us were friends and doubles partner's on the tennis team (which required very good, almost instinctive understanding of what the other guy is about to do). We joked about the incident a couple of times; I'm sure if I had let him and the other's "get away" with their teasing when they were just ignorant little kids then we would not have wound up as friends when we matured.
Considering America's history of treating our old enemies from WW2 with respect and forgiveness, and Bush's emphasis on distinguising between the Afghan people and their leaders, I am very hopeful that within 5 years there will be a great deal of real friendship between the Afghani and American people. At least I hope so. They will be a very useful ally if we ever have a conflict with the ChiComs.
ANSER's Homeland Security Newsletter is pretty good, and it is free also.
http://www.homelandsecurity.org/
Click weekly Newsletter
Jane's Newsbrief has a free subscription, and they are good but they usually only tell you enough of the really interesting articles to make you wish you had bought a full subscription.
http://www.janes.com
Click on Free News Briefs e-mail service
I have been monitoring this site: http://www.debka.com/
But I'm not sure how good they are, anybody else have an opinion on this site?
Yeah, I'm sure you know far more about international diplomacy than the Bush administration. (sarcasm)
On the other hand, you are probably right that Al-Qaeda hoped to provoke an over reaction by the United States. I doubt we "played right into their hands." They probably expected we would immediately carry out an indescrimate bombing campaign. It looks like the current administration has a VERY good understanding of how important Grand Strategy and psychological operations are going to be in this conflict, as evidenced by their repeated emphasis that "this is not a war against Islam," the humanitarian aid sent to the Afghan people, the attempts to cooperate with local Afghan opposition groups, etc.
As for chess, I don't give a rat's @$$ how bad he is at chess. If playing chess was what ruled nations, then we should just put Deep Blue in charge and be over with it. I just care how good he is at picking cabinet members and supreme court judges. He seems to have done a bang-up job with the cabinet... A president is a manager; "the administration" is a team effort.
"Especially since the US-aligned Special Operations groups will be using what are, frankly, guerrilla tactics. It's going to be guerrilla versus guerrilla... They are simply trying to kill and disrupt a certain few thousand people"
-- Parent to this post
"'I've come to my conclusion after thirty years in the business,' my old friend Jose Flores said recently, a consummate professional even if he is a sometimes Agency contract merc, 'that we have been wasting our time. There are forty wars going on around the world. I estimate that we could settle most of them -establish real Peace, save millions of lives- if we successfully targeted about a hundred people.'
'But then, Mario, you'd be out of business.'
...
I estimated that incipient civil war could be snuffed out by snuffing out ten key individuals. This wasn't done."
-- Paul Balor in _Manual_of_the_Mercenary_Soldier_
"Well, the oposite choice is to get involved and to risk terrorists attacks as we have been through already (several times)."
This is exactly the choice that terrorists want us to make. They want us to abandon our interests and our allies so that we can feel safe. If we leave the rest of the world to the wolves, though, then WE may be safe but the next generations of Americans will have a much bigger mess to clean up as a result of our isolationism.
The time to crush monsters is when they are small. We should have done it with the Nazis. We should have done it with the Commies. Does that deny other nation's rights to self determination? No. Nations are organizations, they don't have rights. People have rights. The Taliban don't have the "right" to kill women for wanting to learn to read. We should stop this now before we have an entire Middle and Near East controlled by such tyrants.
"We had our chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, but as the media said at the time, Bush (Senior) was a wimp."
Bush Sr. was not a wimp. But the reason I suspect that he left Hussein in power may not make him look any better in many people's eyes. I suspect he left Hussein in power because the rest of the Middle East was scared $#!?less of him. As long as he was in power in Iraq, then America would have permission by the other Arab nations to station troops in their nations. Whenever these nations get uncomfortable with their American protectors, then the US or UN inspectors would suddenly find new evidence of Iraqi WMD research.
Bush Sr. was not a wimp. He was devious. He was, after all, ex-DCI. Was it wrong to condem the citizens of Iraq to live (or, for many... to die) under Hussein's rule in order to further our long range plans for stabalizing and Westernizing the Mid-East? Maybe. Maybe it was the lesser of many evils.
"The problem comes in, is that we pretend to be a moderator (unbiased by both sides) to gain international support, but in reality we are still one sided, we still give weapons to Israel but do nothing for Palistine."
Actually, thanks to Bush Sr.'s coalition building amoung Arab nations in that region, we are not as dependant on Israel's friendship as we once were. This has greatly helped the Palistinians. Ironically, the worst thing for Palistine would be for American troops to be driven out of the otehr Arab nations; because we would again become dependant on Israel's friendship and assistance in that region... and we would be in much less of a position to object to Israeli's treatment of Palistinians. We are not "unbiased" in the Mid-East, but neither are we on Israel's side. We are on our side. We very much want a stable and pro-Western Middle East. As Kissinger (who, while Jewish was never one to go easy on Israel) has pointed out, nations do not have friends, they have common interests. It is not an easy problem to solve, and whoever can do so certainly deserves a Nobel prize for it.
"How can you say doing nothing will simply cost us more lives, as the terrorist attacks continue? Have they continued in the weeks to now? Everything happened on one day and nothing since."
In 1983 terrorists attacked the Marine barracks in Lebanon. We pulled our forces out, and the attacks stopped... for a time.
In 1993 one of Al-Qaeda's first acts was to ambush and kill American soldiers engaged in "nationbuilding" in Somalia. We pulled our forces out, and the attacks stopped... for a time.
If we pull troops out of Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan now, then the attacks will stop again... for a time.
We have taught these people that if they bloody our nose, then we will do what they want.
Why are we surprised that they attack us again?
If we keep giving them what they want every time the attack us then we teach the world that terrorism works. If we keep following that road, then evenutally it will mean the end of America as a free nation. At some point we have to stand up and say: "No" No matter how much they hurt us, we can't give them what they want. We have to hurt them worse. We have to show the world that attacking the United States is a VERY BAD IDEA. It will mean more attacks in the short term, but it is the only way to stop them in the long term.
OK, lets put the past behind us.
It is easy to be a critic, it is not so easy to play brinksmanship with the fate of nations.
What should we do NOW.
If President Bush had called you up and said "Mr. RelliK... Do you mind if I call you Pancho? Well Pancho, I have been very impressed with your thoughtfulness posts on Slashdot... LINUX RULES... Sorry... um... as I was saying, I want you to give me your advicement on what America's response should be to these attacks. I'll listen to any suggestions you have." (best if you imagine this in Bush's peculiar dialect)
What would you have America do? What do you think the world would be like in 10 years if Pres. Bush listened to your advice? What do you think of the response SINCE 9-11, assuming that he didn't really ask for your advice, Pancho?
Would it have been less evil to allow over a million American and Japanese servicemen to die trying to subdue Japan in a conventional invasion in order to have saved the lives of the thousands of Japanese civilians in those cities? What kind of math puts the lives of a few* enemy citizens against the an order of magnitude MORE lives of both enemy and American citizens
Why does everyone bring out just Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "evil" in these examples? What about firebombing Tokyo? What about Dresden? Why are those not mentioned? They were more deadly attacks. Do you think the people who died care what the of explosive was in the bombs?
What about the bombing of Britain by the Germans? What about the use of bioweapons by Japan against the Chinese? The Rape of Nanking? The Holocaust?
The short answer of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not war crimes is simple. We won the war. If the Axis had won the war, then I'm sure they would have had Curtis LeMay up on charges of "war crimes" and Hermann Goering would have gotten a medal. But, thank God, they didn't win. And the winners get to write the history.
The long answer for why we would do something so horrible is that it was not a simple choice between doing it and not doing it. The options were not "do we only hit military targets or do we just carpet bomb cities." There were no precision guided bombs in World War 2. If there were, then using massive amounts of "dumb bombs" would have been evil. But the choice was not "smart bombs" or "dumb bombs"; the choice was "do we want to use every means at our disposal to defeat the Axis Powers?" Would you rather the Allies have only fought the war half-heartedly and allowed the Nazis, Fascists, and Imperial Japanese to have conquered the world? The Axis did not pull any punches. It was all out war. Unrestricted war, to use a modern term. To bomb cities full of civilians was evil, but to have allowed totalitarianism to dominate the future of mankind because we did not want to get any blood on our hands would have been far, far, worse. It would have been the worst kind of selfishness. To have lost World War 2 because of a lack of commitment or a lack of will to do what was necessary... that would have been a war crime.
*Yes, I know it is odd to list over 100,000 casualties as "few", in this case the term is relative. .
"You set up a very artificial scenario. The military person is almost certainly much better at hand-to-hand combat than the student. Even if the student punches back, he probably won't be able to incapacitate the military person. So why would the student think that punching back would stop further attacks, rather than escalating the intensity of those further attacks???"
Have you ever seen the movie _Cool_Hand_Luke_?
Even if you can't hit harder, if you have a "positive asymmetry of wills" then you can win in the end.
"Nope. But I do believe that they were driven by revenge. (as if it's not obvious!)"
/ index.html (remove the space before "index")
Then you are an idiot. Or at least I'll grant that you are just politically naive. The attacks on 9-11 have nothing to do with revenge. They were not "crimes of passion." The terrorist leaders may toss around the word "revenge" in the propaganda they use to recruit throw-away agents, but the fact is that such terrorist acts are cooly calculated attempts at political manipulation.
To quote the DOD definition, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence or the threat of violence to [cause] fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological... In other words, terrorism is a psychological act conducted for its impact on an audience."
The leaders of Al-Qaeda seek to establish a unified Islamic gov't over the entire Middle East. Is that evil? Well, they want a gov't where women are considered property, where the political leaders are also the religious leaders, where practicing a religion other than the "state religion" is punishable by death, and not incidentally where THEY are those revered religious/political dictators. I think that qualifies for evil in my book. Even if you don't believe in "good vs. evil" political simplifications, then surely it is an end result which almost all civilized people would not want to see occur.
So why would Al-Qaeda attack the World Trade Center if it really wants to take over Arabia? Because as long as the United States maintains a strong military presence in the region then any attempt to "unify the Muslim world" will almost certainly come to a swift failure. Al-Qaeda's first step is to drive the U.S. out of the region that they want to conquer and to sufficiently damage us that we would not have the resources to ever come back in. Al-Qaeda is manipulating the hatred and jealousy toward the United States among the many Muslims to further their own goals of political/military conquest. They murdered thousands of civilians in a surprise terrorist attack in an attempt to provoke the United States gov't into taking rash action that will further increase their political base (something Bush's advisors obviously foresaw, considering the huge emphasis that Bush and his administration are placing on winning the "hearts and minds" of the Afghans and other Muslim people) and also as the first step in convincing the public and the leadership of the United States that we must withdraw our forces from the Mid-East (like we withdrew from Lebanon and Somalia after terrorist related casualties in those areas) so that it will be ripe for their conquest. Sounds close enough to "evil" in my book.
As the song says "everybody wants to rule the world." Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri might actually be satisfied with just the Middle and Near East... maybe. I'm sure they don't see themselves as "evil." I'm sure they would tell you that they keep women uneducated and oppressed because that is their proper place in society... not because they hate them. I'm sure that they would explain that they execute people preaching other religions because they care about their citizen's souls and want to protect them from temptation. Then again, I'm sure that the Communists would have told you that they were doing what they did only because they cared so much for the Working Class. I'm sure that the National German Worker's Party officials would have explained that their actions were taken to bring back the pride and sense of self worth among the much maligned German people and to free them from the unfair terms of the Armistice Treaty forced on them by the evil French.
I will not try to argue that the United States is perfect. We have used ruthless means to achieve our ends. We have manipulated nations. We have supported oppressive leaders simply because they were the enemies of our enemies. It is a cruel world. International politics is a brutal jungle where the only rules are the ones that you can enforce. We have played by those "rules of the jungle" and perhaps in some ways we mirror the evil we try to fight. But aside from some (thankfully) rare acts by misguided leaders, our ends are generally good. If you can't agree with that, then I submit that they are at least better than the ends pursued by our enemies, whether those enemies are Al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussien, or the Chicoms.
Some people are upset that the United States is never perfect. The choice is not "which side is perfect." The choice is "which future do you want to live in?" The future the United States is fighting for will not be a utopia... but it will be better than the alternative. It is time to choose sides. And don't forget the saying "The Perfect is the enemy of The Good." If you wait for a perfect society to support, then you will never find it. It is time to throw in on the side of "The Good." As long as you argue that the calculated conspiracy of an oppressive, tyrannical fanatic is morally equivalent to the calculated conspiracy of the powers of Western Civilization to promote global stability and the continued existence of liberal, capitalist, democratic society, then you are on the wrong side... and you are being just as manipulated by Al-Qaeda's propaganda as are the poor, ignorant youths who they recruit to be "throw away" agents.
P.S. All the people who feared a stupid, rash, and vengeful retaliation by the United States need only look at the huge effort being put into helping the Afghan people and building alliances with local, freedom-loving Afghanis to see how wrong those expectations were. I am very proud of Pres. Bush and his administration. www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/10/06/ret.bush.radio
I had (ok, my boss had... but it might as well have been mine) a 1 kiloWatt industrial laser that had an interesting easter egg.
It had 32k of memory in its onboard computer for storing CNC programs. (did I mention it was an old industrial laser?) The same company sold a model that had 64k of memory, for more money. But the laser manufacturer apparently decided it would be cheaper to only have one assembly line building the lasers, so all of them were actually made with 64k and the 32k versions must have been "dumbed down" with a software patch.
I discoved a very complex set of secret codes that would "transform" my 32k industrial laser into the 64k version. Very handy. The codes were probably used to allow the 32k machines to be "upgraded" to 64k by a factory service rep; for a few thousand dollars. (and you thought memory for your PC was expensive)