Terrorism is auto-immune war; war-on-terror does the terrorists' job
The Yorkshire Ranter recasts terrorism as an "auto-immune war" -- a war intended to inflict maximum damage by getting the host's defense mechanisms to overfire, damaging the host well beyond than the actual terrorist attacks:
Specifically, auto-immune war is a strategy, but its tactical implementation is the creation of false positive responses. Security obsession gums up the economy with inefficiencies. Terrorism terrorises the public; security theatre keeps them that way. As Kilcullen points out, every day, millions of travellers are systematically reminded of terrorism by government security precautions. Profiling measures subject entire communities to indignity and waste endless hours of police time. Vast sums of money are spent on counterproductive equipment programs and unlikely techno-fixes. National identity cards and monster databases are the specific symptoms of this pathology in the UK, just as idiotic militarism is in the US.Accidental Guerrilla; Part 2, Strategy (via Futurismic)
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It's time for a war-on-wars-against-abstractions. From now on let's fight the criminals instead of the ideals that we can lump them into.
I've been saying this since late september in 2001, and I'm not smart enough to be the only one. Strategically it's really damned obvious.
To use a comical analogy: Why attempt to defeat a dangerous enemy in hand-to-hand combat if all you have to do is sneak up and slap them to make said enemy have a breakdown and spend 8 years incessantly punching themselves in the testicles.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
I've been saying this for some time. Trust is the solution to scapegoating and tyranny, not more criticism and control. Trust and faith in your fellow men to do the right thing. Fewer police, more lenient punishments, and fewer laws. That is the solution to all our problems. Violence in all its forms must be abandoned and the people who condone and commit violence must have no place in our lives.
I'm unconvinced that the US or the UK can be compared to a biological organism. Leviathan? Puuuleeess. In order for that to be remotely true you have to believe that everyone always has the best interest of the whole in mind. Or that they can even know what that is.
Do you really believe that George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld acted to maximize everyone's best interest? Even if you grant they did, unlikely as it is, did they actually know what that was?
High grade wankery.
Another element in the equation is the "war on terror business". Don't think it will be so easy during recession to tell companies running the "security show business" to give up and fire hundreds of thousands of people working in the show.
It's not easy from a politician's point of view to get chances like this to let friends make huge business using tax money and at the same time having the tax payers happy. So basically they just milk the cow till they can...
Think about it: even Obama invested more money than bush in this biz and I don't see his popularity being affected at all so why give up on a huge business chance like this?!
noen - I'm unconvinced that the US or the UK can be compared to a biological organism.
I'm pretty sure the point is that the net of the individual misfires as a result of the stress is a drain on a nation, not some analogy to a nation as an individual organism.
It can be safely said that we, individually, have made no shortage of terrible decisions, to placate the fears drummed up after 9/11.
It's another matter entirely that the US government was not interested in helping us make better choices.
@noen:
You don't need to believe that everyone (or even most people) have to keep the best interests of the whole in mind. You think a skin cell has the slightest idea what's in your best interest?
Heck, you thik a blood cell really cares? Every cell in your body is operating only to meet it's own needs. As long as all of those needs balance out properly, everything's fine.
That took what, almost eight years to sink in?
I cried on September 12, 2001, when George W **** held his famous either-you-are-with-us-or-you-are-with-the-terrorists address and framed the situation in terms of war and retribution, not crime and prosecution. I knew then already that the tragedy of the day before was only the prelude to the disaster. The disaster was that it happened under **** Cheney's watch.
I'm not at all sure that "9/11 was an inside job", but for all that came from it, it might as well be.
Apropos #9, As I recall, in GWB's 9/12 speech he used the word "crusade".
That was when I realized our fate was in the hands of fuckwits -- because, to moslems, the word "crusade" is understood in a very specific way. It means "jihad", as the word "jihad" is understood in the post-christian west by folks who don't know of its internal meaning among moslems.
The aphorism that springs to mind is "we have met the enemy, and they is us".
I favour "Philip K. Dick dystopian nightmare analogy" over "uto-immune analogy".
Real enemies, with territories and leaders and resources and threat-posing and all that, unfortunately also have things like press secretaries that can go on TV and contradict what you say about them.
"Terrorism" is whatever you say it is. And you over there, if you say it's something else, then it's that too.
Osama bin Laden wants to destroy America, and he wants to do so for the following reasons, and using these specific tactics, that a little bird told me about last weekend while I was sitting on the pot.
Terrorism means everybody's an expert.
Terrorism never runs out.
Terrorism has been hiding in the same cave in Afghanistan for eight years, and terrorism will never show up at Thanksgiving and tell the kids things about Grandma and Grandpa you didn't want them to know.
Continuing with the theme, I like to think the US as a whole is starting to moderate its political immune response. Bush's "Axis of Evil" and "crusade" speeches, the invasion of Iraq and the full-throated "America - Fuck Yeah!" were the cytokine storm. Voters responding to the jacking up of the terror alerts in October 2004 was of a piece with that. But in 2006, waving Osama bin Laden in our faces failed to have much effect, and in 2008, people cared more about the bad economy than about terr.
Some old-time leaders' wisdom is yet still wise:
We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.
(And who's been using 'fear itself' to advance their agendas, of late?)
Cory, I think you should point out that it's not only me who thinks that; I was reviewing the counter-insurgency strategist David Kilcullen's new book.
So, terrorists *do* hate our freedoms?
"You're a disease, and I'm the body's overactive inflammatory immune response that may ironically cause more damage than you as the initial pathogen would have"
I like the onion article from way back when.... "US to World: Stop hating us or you'll pay the price".
Something like that.
It was funnier when they said it.
As one who suffers from three auto-immune diseases (asthma, diabetes, and arthritis), I can tell you that this is a VERY effective analogy. By putting the body's defenses into overdrive and aiming them at the body itself, your defenses end up battling one another. All it takes is a tiny outside irritation to shut down the entire system.
JimBuck, #18: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/31395
I've been saying since Shrub announced the "war on terror" that he was making the US Government into the terrorists' collaborator by maintaining a state of terror. (And I think he wanted it that way; a terrorized population was more likely to cooperate with his administration's abuses.)
I'm just sorry Obama hasn't yet had the guts to say this and start dismantling.
Moderates lost their biggest battle by allowing the phrase "War on Terror" to slip into the public discourse unchallenged. In calmer times more people would have argued against the plausibility of fighting a war against a noun, but between the lingering shock of 9/11 and the precedent set by the "War on Drugs" it was just too easy to let it go.
That is a very profound analogy. I had been comparing the Iraq war to, "throwing rocks at hornets' nests," but an AIDS analogy wouldn't sound as inappropriately zany.
Plus, autoimmune diseases have such postcolonial connotations on their own; so this is a good analogy with good politics.