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Ways to fight
May. 17th, 2007 10:50 amAmerica is not a country built for war. We sometimes do well at it because of our large size and advanced technical abilities, but mostly we are a different kind of strong. Our primary strengths are our prosperity and a system of government that gives the people a voice. We may not have the highest overall quality of life in the world, or the most effective democracy (in particular, partisan politics can often paralyze our government), but we are the biggest of the First-World nations and the largest economy, so we stand out. We also produce more self-promotional media than anyone else.
Among Second-through-Fifth-World populations, then, there are two main factions. There are those who like what they see and want to join us. We can fight them off as necessary by arresting illegal immigrants and building border fences, but also through foreign policy aimed at raising other countries’ standards of living toward Western levels (preferably using high-efficiency technologies that don’t put too much extra burden on the world’s natural resources).
Then there are those who want to bring us down to their level. Their motivations may be simple jealousy, outrage triggered by the harmful effects of economic globalization or American foreign policy, or religious condemnation of our sinful hedonistic lifestyles. Currently, this faction doesn’t include any entire nations that have the power to strike us directly and get away with it, though growth in Islamic populations and Chinese bellicosity may change that in the future.
For now, we can fight those with the both the desire and the power to hurt us—in short, the terrorists—through covert offense and military and police defense. (We can also try invading whole countries that harbor terrorists, but we’ve already seen that that strategy doesn’t really help.) We can also fight the terrorists by redoubling our efforts to get more people to join the like-what-they-see faction, rather than throwing their lives away for a basically lost cause. (Demographics may someday beat us, but scattered individual attacks, however dramatic, can never bring down the United States.)
The advantage of the military/police/intelligence approach is that it’s more likely to be effective in the short term, but the problem is that it will never make any progress toward eliminating the threat; we can’t prevent every attack, and for every terrorist cell we eliminate, two more will pop up. The advantage of the propaganda approach is that it’s far cheaper in both money and lives, and may in time lead to real reductions in the number of terrorists we face. Needless to say, the answer is to do both.
A specific, though unintended propaganda victory for Western values that's already well underway is the rise of Islamic feminism. The linked article is partly a scathing critique of modern American feminism, but observes that in the Muslim world, "a feminist reformation could be as dangerous to the dreams of the jihadists as any military assault by the West."
Among Second-through-Fifth-World populations, then, there are two main factions. There are those who like what they see and want to join us. We can fight them off as necessary by arresting illegal immigrants and building border fences, but also through foreign policy aimed at raising other countries’ standards of living toward Western levels (preferably using high-efficiency technologies that don’t put too much extra burden on the world’s natural resources).
Then there are those who want to bring us down to their level. Their motivations may be simple jealousy, outrage triggered by the harmful effects of economic globalization or American foreign policy, or religious condemnation of our sinful hedonistic lifestyles. Currently, this faction doesn’t include any entire nations that have the power to strike us directly and get away with it, though growth in Islamic populations and Chinese bellicosity may change that in the future.
For now, we can fight those with the both the desire and the power to hurt us—in short, the terrorists—through covert offense and military and police defense. (We can also try invading whole countries that harbor terrorists, but we’ve already seen that that strategy doesn’t really help.) We can also fight the terrorists by redoubling our efforts to get more people to join the like-what-they-see faction, rather than throwing their lives away for a basically lost cause. (Demographics may someday beat us, but scattered individual attacks, however dramatic, can never bring down the United States.)
The advantage of the military/police/intelligence approach is that it’s more likely to be effective in the short term, but the problem is that it will never make any progress toward eliminating the threat; we can’t prevent every attack, and for every terrorist cell we eliminate, two more will pop up. The advantage of the propaganda approach is that it’s far cheaper in both money and lives, and may in time lead to real reductions in the number of terrorists we face. Needless to say, the answer is to do both.
A specific, though unintended propaganda victory for Western values that's already well underway is the rise of Islamic feminism. The linked article is partly a scathing critique of modern American feminism, but observes that in the Muslim world, "a feminist reformation could be as dangerous to the dreams of the jihadists as any military assault by the West."
