Terrorism

Random Thoughts

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The big war (not the Iraq campaign) isn’t over. We have continuing problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but we’ve suppressed our enemies for a while in most places. However, eventually we are going to have to fight large battles again, because our enemies will eventually attack us in a way that we can’t ignore. I suspect that we are now in a situation like that of Israel, which has never been allowed or willing to defeat its enemies decisively and so has to fight a major campaign every decade or so. We will probably have to keep fighting until we develop the political will to win decisively. This is going to be true no matter who is President or which party is in charge in Washington.

One counterexample to my speculations is Korea, where we have been in a mostly peaceful stalemate for more than fifty years. And there are always conflicts simmering around the world that rarely do us harm. But North Korea is an isolated regime that seems likely to fall apart eventually. Radical Islam is a much more distributed, dynamic, ambitious and aggressive enemy that does not seem likely to stop fighting unless it is defeated. Remember the anecdotes that suggest that the Syrians and Iranian mullahs and Hamas want Obama to win? The usual assumption by Obama critics is that Hamas et al favor Obama because they think he’s one of them. I suggest that they are favoring him because they think he’ll pursue policies that will make it easier for them to defeat us.

In the old days America could walk away from wars, because most of the costs of our walking away would be borne by non-Americans. Technology has removed this security and we should update our sense of security accordingly. Most of us haven’t, or have become complacent, because 9/11 now feels like distant history. But the metaphor of distance is misleading here. We are not physically more distant from threats; advances in technology and in the technological sophistication of our enemies may even make us more vulnerable. Like it or not we are probably going to be at war for many more years, even if it doesn’t feel like war most of the time.

Ancient Wisdom

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A paraphrase of Beowulf (starting around line 1383).

Beowulf said “We must mourn our friends later; they have died, but we have not yet avenged them. While we live, we win whatever victories we can; so now let us hunt the monster, whether its trail lead through the middle of the earth or the bottom of the sea.”

The monster is hiding, but heroes are hunting it.

9/11 Plus Seven Years

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(This is basically a rerun of my post from this day in 2006. Some new links added this year are at the bottom of the post.)

I am increasingly worried about our prospects for success in the battle against those who would destroy our civilization. America and the other democracies possess great military, economic, and intellectual strengths–but severe internal divisions threaten our ability to use these resources effectively.

Within days of the collapse of the Towers, it started. “Progressive” demonstrators brought out the stilt-walkers, the Uncle Sam constumes, and the giant puppets of George Bush. They carried signs accusing America of planning “genocide” against the people of Afghanistan.

Professors and journalists preached about the sins of Western civilization, asserting that we had brought it all on ourselves. A well-known writer wrote of her unease when her daughter chose to buy and display an American flag. Some universities banned the display of American flags in dormitories, claiming that such display was “provocative.”

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Patriotic Thieves

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You’ve probably already heard about the thief who alerted police after breaking into a van…which contained devices that appeared to be explosives.

This incident reminded me of another story.

Odette Sansom (later Odette Hallowes) was an agent of the WWII British sabotage organization Special Operations Executive. Unlike many SOE agents, she survived the war. She was honored by the British government with the MBE and the George Cross, and was made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur by the French.

Some time after the war, the house of Odette’s mother was burglarized, and these decorations were stolen along with some silver. Odette’s mother appealed via the newspapers for the return of the decorations, and the thief sent them back along with this note:

You, Madame, appear to be a dear old lady. God bless you and your children. I thank you for having faith in me. I am not all that bad – it’s just circumstances. Your little dog really loves me. I gave him a nice pat and left him a piece of meat – out of fridge.

Sincerely yours,

A Bad Egg.

The MSM Misses the Bout: Part I

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As an amateur historian, I am given to musing about the flow and processing of information. People make mental models of the past, but those models are usually highly skewed. As both Napoleon and George Orwell are alleged to have observed, it is the winners who write history. Beyond that, most historians rely primarily on written sources, which further skews our perspective to the prejudices of a given time’s literati, as well as limiting our perspective by that self-same “intelligentsia’s” intellectual shortcomings. The uptake curve of any new trend is difficult to perceive at its inception. Important events often show up as important only well after the fact. Of all the news stories of today, how many human beings can predict what story will actually shape the world of 50 years from now? Even experts fail at this. And often, the true import of events is obscured until the generation who experienced those events has passed away, along with their distorted perceptions.

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