Stopping 9-11s
IMO, we need to: (1) Admit to ourselves that commerce and travel have largely eliminated the utility of a single country's borders, and limited government means commerce alone (globalization) will incite the frustrated (note that if just the U.S. border was enforced, it would be such a large and unequal tax on U.S. trade that our own quality-of-life would certainly fall behind all other countries that do not labor under the same burden.) (2) Which really means that everyone is now our next-door neighbor. So, why don't we worry about the house next-door firing a mortar in our direction? Not because of mortar control laws (or self-protecting SUVs that won't allow a mortar barrel to be set up and fired out the sun roof), but because (3) we have a civil society with a rational expectation of good behavior with punishment that removes and deters the miscreants. And, given the ever increasing availability of very destructive materials, and the ever decreasing expertise required to assemble and use them to create mass havoc (if not mass destruction), we have no alternative (as the oldest boy on the play-ground) but to (5) demand civil society everywhere (as Gaddis writes, a "Jeffersonian foreign policy").
All of which leads to us having a number of non-negotiable demands under the heading of "you're either with us or against us" including (6) "You're cooperative and transparent in the policing of your borders, including flows of people, things, money, communications, and especially WMD." (7) "we will all trust but verify" - meaning open skies, no more denied areas, no more denial-and-deception. "Or else." And (8) "our mutual interest in civilization's survival requires individual and community frustrations to be vented at a ballot box, and a civil-society where rights of the minorities are protected, not through force-of-arms, intimidation, or terrorism."
Where a mix of sticks and carrots will be used to motivate these changes. Remember that punitive offense that deposes leadership is much cheaper than any alternative (consider the difference in safety and costs of living in NYC between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani). We (the U.S.) are fortunate because we're rich enough to do this with a minimum of additional harm to the non-combatants (ie. we attempt to help a country back up onto its feet, vs just emptying the chairs and saying "good luck, we'll be back in six months if we need to delouse again.").
Civilization has always fought with the humanity it could afford, and we may not be able to always be so gentle (i.e. we have bled all over the world for our friends, and we even bleed to minimize the casualties of our enemies). At the moment our leaders appear to think we're rich enough (or the long term return will outweigh the debt incurred) to take a given "country of concern" and nurse it towards its own path to democracy and self-rule (vs frequent delousing and its costs to non-combatants). Why a goal of democracy vs "just" delousing repeatedly? I don't know. Perhaps because we are idealists and we can. Or perhaps a Rumsfeld-type has done the calculation and determined it's actually less expensive in lives and treasure to do the hand-holding, and they think they know how to succeed without it corrupting into welfare (i.e. the difference between dependency/victimhood and the increasing acceptance of the importance of individual responsibility that drove the 90s restructuring of the U.S. welfare system). Granting all this, I somehow doubt history will claim this administration believed in "nation building," as all past attempts (equivalent to welfare, i.e. "we'll provide your security" vs. helping you provide for your own security) have failed.
A discussion for another day is the appropriate role of the federal government, and how governance should be as close to the governed as possible (for control, quality, cost, corruption, and survivability reasons). Certainly the only job the federal government MUST do itself is insure our safety from those outside this country that would do us harm. Just about everything else can be done closer to the citizen, and/or by the market. With this in mind, I'd expect the defense of the U.S. to be similar to property insurance. Where the yearly premium is, say, 1% of the NPV of the assets being insured. For the U.S. that's about a 1T$ yearly premium. Where we should expect ~89% spent on punitive offense (especially in a time of apocalyptic extremists, ie. there's no hope of negotiation, similar to several situations in WW2), 10% (100B$) to go into "intelligence" (the only actual defense that works, by defining the targets for punitive offense), and 1% (10B$) into "homeland defense" - which establishes palliatives (if not placebos) for citizens' anxieties (because humans have a very hard time differentiating risk from anxiety). i.e. given the Moore's-law-driven destructive power available to ever-fewer bad-actors (exceeding what nation states could do less than a century ago), it makes no sense to armor the tops of homes and buildings from some disaffected group firing mortars out the sun-roof an SUV. Nor can we search every SUV, nor remove mortars from the world, nor hold building owners or SUV builders responsible for threats that did not exist 20 years ago.
All of which leads to us having a number of non-negotiable demands under the heading of "you're either with us or against us" including (6) "You're cooperative and transparent in the policing of your borders, including flows of people, things, money, communications, and especially WMD." (7) "we will all trust but verify" - meaning open skies, no more denied areas, no more denial-and-deception. "Or else." And (8) "our mutual interest in civilization's survival requires individual and community frustrations to be vented at a ballot box, and a civil-society where rights of the minorities are protected, not through force-of-arms, intimidation, or terrorism."
Where a mix of sticks and carrots will be used to motivate these changes. Remember that punitive offense that deposes leadership is much cheaper than any alternative (consider the difference in safety and costs of living in NYC between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani). We (the U.S.) are fortunate because we're rich enough to do this with a minimum of additional harm to the non-combatants (ie. we attempt to help a country back up onto its feet, vs just emptying the chairs and saying "good luck, we'll be back in six months if we need to delouse again.").
Civilization has always fought with the humanity it could afford, and we may not be able to always be so gentle (i.e. we have bled all over the world for our friends, and we even bleed to minimize the casualties of our enemies). At the moment our leaders appear to think we're rich enough (or the long term return will outweigh the debt incurred) to take a given "country of concern" and nurse it towards its own path to democracy and self-rule (vs frequent delousing and its costs to non-combatants). Why a goal of democracy vs "just" delousing repeatedly? I don't know. Perhaps because we are idealists and we can. Or perhaps a Rumsfeld-type has done the calculation and determined it's actually less expensive in lives and treasure to do the hand-holding, and they think they know how to succeed without it corrupting into welfare (i.e. the difference between dependency/victimhood and the increasing acceptance of the importance of individual responsibility that drove the 90s restructuring of the U.S. welfare system). Granting all this, I somehow doubt history will claim this administration believed in "nation building," as all past attempts (equivalent to welfare, i.e. "we'll provide your security" vs. helping you provide for your own security) have failed.
A discussion for another day is the appropriate role of the federal government, and how governance should be as close to the governed as possible (for control, quality, cost, corruption, and survivability reasons). Certainly the only job the federal government MUST do itself is insure our safety from those outside this country that would do us harm. Just about everything else can be done closer to the citizen, and/or by the market. With this in mind, I'd expect the defense of the U.S. to be similar to property insurance. Where the yearly premium is, say, 1% of the NPV of the assets being insured. For the U.S. that's about a 1T$ yearly premium. Where we should expect ~89% spent on punitive offense (especially in a time of apocalyptic extremists, ie. there's no hope of negotiation, similar to several situations in WW2), 10% (100B$) to go into "intelligence" (the only actual defense that works, by defining the targets for punitive offense), and 1% (10B$) into "homeland defense" - which establishes palliatives (if not placebos) for citizens' anxieties (because humans have a very hard time differentiating risk from anxiety). i.e. given the Moore's-law-driven destructive power available to ever-fewer bad-actors (exceeding what nation states could do less than a century ago), it makes no sense to armor the tops of homes and buildings from some disaffected group firing mortars out the sun-roof an SUV. Nor can we search every SUV, nor remove mortars from the world, nor hold building owners or SUV builders responsible for threats that did not exist 20 years ago.
posted by Unknown at 9/11/2004 04:39:00 PM
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