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Sunday, September 30, 2001
Rhetorical asymmetry 
| | "America's New War" is the name given by TV networks to the "Attack on America" sequel. The problem is, there is no war yet. |
| | Troops have been called up and deployed. Ships are moving into position. There are reports of commandos already on the ground in Afghanistan. But this is mostly high-alert and readiness stuff. |
| | Instead there's lots of talk about "a new kind of war." Disconnect the Dots is a piece in the Washington Post that does a good job explaining a military buzzphrase that has just moved into common parlance: "asymmetrical warfare": |
| | If bombers are not the right hammer for this nail, what is? |
| | Bombers worked well in wars in which one Industrial Age military threw steel at another. World War II, for instance, was a matchup of roughly symmetrical forces. |
| | That's why people who think about these things call this new conflict "asymmetric warfare." The terrorist side is different: different organization, different methods of attack -- and of defense. |
| | "It takes a tank to fight a tank. It takes a network to fight a network," says John Arquilla, senior consultant to the international security group Rand and co-author of the forthcoming "Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy." |
| | He asks: "How do you attack a trust structure -- which is what a network is? You're not going to do this with Tomahawk missiles or strategic bombardment." |
| | "It's a whole new playing field. You're not attacking a nation, but a network," says Karen Stephenson, who studies everything from corporations to the U.S. Navy as if they were tribes. Trained as a chemist and anthropologist, she now teaches at Harvard and the University of London. "You have to understand what holds those networks in place, what makes them strong and where the leverage points are. They're not random connections," she says. |
| | The problem is, we're still thinking about all this in terms of sports and war metaphors ("attack," "defense," "playing field") with some drift to the electronic ("network"). We're still got this thing set up as a conflict between opposed forces — something with rules. If we understand the new rules, the new power relationships, the strengths, weaknesses and strategies of the opponent, we can win. |
| | But what if we're up against something that doesn't fit any of those metaphorical systems? What if the underlying belief systems are so deeply different that they cannot be fully, or even barely, understood in each other's terms? |
| | I saw an interview with Osama bin Laden a while back in which he said he didn't care what Americans thought, or even what they did. All he wanted was to get infidels off holy property. Watching it I had the feeling that Muslim fundamentalism is a lot more fundamental, and literal about its holy business, than anything in Christianity. And that it's a lot bigger, too. Aside from whatever role the Shah and his American sponsors may have played in Iran's Islamic Revolution, the movement was still sufficiently popular to succeed. |
| | We've gone out of our way to make a distinction between friendly and hostile governments of predominantly Islamic countries. Yet even the friendly ones are being pulled apart by differing belief systems within their own populations. In fact this whole conflict can be seen as a Saudi Arabian family issue that has spread outward to upset the whole world. Recall that the Bin Ladens are very closely tied to the Saudi Royal family (and that the Binladen International Group remains one of the leading industrial companies in the Middle East). |
| | The image of Saudi Arabia in the West is still a relatively benign one, and we should hope it stays that way. But the view up close is disturbing to Western sensibilities. Here's Eric Boehlert in With Friends Like These, in Salon: |
| | ...for the last half-century the country, at least through most American eyes, has enjoyed a sort of rarefied existence, most notably in the status it enjoys as a so-called "moderate" state. Yet alcohol is banned in Saudi Arabia, as were valentines and Pokéman cards recently. Women, who are routinely segregated from men, cannot drive automobiles. The country has no written constitution and no elected legislature, and there are no political parties. Instead, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. Its royal family numbers 4,000, but just 60 have a major say in policy decisions. Saudi courts order more than 100 public beheadings each year, and human rights groups claim detainees are routinely tortured. |
| | Radio, television and Internet content is censored by the state. Religious police patrol markets, searching for women not properly covered up or shops remaining open during required daily prayers. Tourist visas do not exist. American reporters can be denied access to the country during times of uncertainty. (Like now.) Official population and unemployment figures are deemed suspect by outsiders. Government spending is not made public. And an extreme, puritanical brand of Islam, Wahhibism, is the official religion of the Saudi monarchy. It's also practiced by Saudi native Osama bin Laden. |
| | Many of the recruits who attacked the U.S. so brutally on September 11 were middle-class Saudi citizens. Others were middle-class citizens of equally moderate Islamic countries. No doubt many more will come forward if they perceive this new "war" as one against the fundamentals of Islam and not just against terrorism. |
| | So the real trick here is to find and communicate a live-and-let-live strategy in respect to religion and its role in government. The problem of reconciling Ismamic fundamentalism with modern civilization belongs to the countries that define themselves as Islamic. The problem of controlling terrorism belongs to all of us, including the Islamic coutries that are far more threatened by violent fundamentalism than the rest of us are. (Moderate Islamic clerics have long been targetted by the Osama bin Ladens of the world.) |
| | I suspect this this is the problem that all the civilized countries of the world are working together right now to solve — talking softly while the U.S. grips its big stick. |
| | I also have a feeling that Islamic countries are making quiet deals for peace along the way — peace on terms the U.S. have not been willing to accept in the past. The final deal may not involve choosing between oil and Israel; but that question will be raised, and it will have leverage. |
De-crashing, cont'd
| | Norton has finally finished examining the Titanium. The only major error was an incorrect block count in the Volume Header Block. That should account for a non-boot, methinks. Fixed. |
| | Even if I can get this thing going again, I doubt I'll ever use it to play a DVD on the TV. I skipped talking about all the failures that led up to the final crash, but the whole experience was highly aversive. |
| | I think we'll just go ahead and get a cheap DVD player for the TV and let the computer show movies on its own damn screen. |
| | If we do that, the number of remote controls will rise to eight. That's one each for: |
| | - TV
- satellite receiver
- VCR
- CD changer
- stereo
- new digital camcorder
- old analog camcorder
- DVD player
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| | [Later...] Okay, the Titanium is back up again. All is well. (And, between the last sentence and this one, I'm back on it.) Thanks again, everybody. |
Uh oh. An innovation.
| | The most impressive thing I saw at Seybold (and forgot to mention earlier) was Microsoft's ClearType. It was beautiful: almost unreal. |
| | Apple's tech support right there on the floor was also primo. But that's nothing new. Just recent. |
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