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Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Terrorism And Deterrence
I must be cruel only to be kind,
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.[Hamlet, Act III, scene IV]
There's been a lot of nonsense about lately, much of it parading in the clothes of sweet reason. Unfortunately for the purveyors, its character is quite distinct from that of genuine logic.
The subject is Representative Tom Tancredo's recent suggestion that we might use a threat to destroy Mecca and Medina to deter an Islamic act of terrorism with a weapon of mass destruction. The furor that's erupted since has reached every part of the Commentariat.
Why?
Those who oppose this suggestion, and who've vilified Tancredo for having made it, appear to have three points:
- Nuclear weapons are bad and their use is unthinkable;
- We'd be killing an awful lot of innocents;
- You can't deter terrorists.
Allow your Curmudgeon to dismiss point 1 with prejudice. If one cannot use a weapon, then why develop or manufacture it? If one cannot even threaten to use a weapon in retaliation for being struck with a weapon of the same kind, then what sense can it possibly make to speak of the "laws of war," whatever their source?
As for point 2, it would easily be met by announcing our intentions: "Your Majesty, this is the President of the United States. You have two weeks to relocate the populations of Mecca and Medina, and to remove everything of value in them. Zero hour has been set. Please inform the responsible agencies." With that sort of warning, everyone in the target zones, and all their movable property, could be preserved. Anyone who died in the blast would have brought it upon himself.
Point 3 is a conclusion presented as a premise: what logicians would call "affirming the consequent." At this time, we do not know whether we can deter Islamic terrorists in this fashion. We do know that they can be deterred from certain actions. The success the Soviet Union had in doing so, during the late Seventies and Eighties, when the rash of Middle Eastern kidnappings was at its height, is the proof.
If your memory doesn't reach back that far, Islamic terrorists made a business out of kidnapping Americans and Europeans, and using them as hostages to gain all sorts of considerations. Many families were suspended for years in the worst sort of agonized uncertainty. Some were permanently bereaved. Terry Waite, an Anglican priest, was taken hostage himself and held for more than four years when he tried to negotiate with a group of kidnappers.
However, only once did Islamic terrorists try this with Soviet citizens.
On September 30, 1985, Islamic Jihad kidnappers snatched four Soviet diplomats off the streets of Beirut, and informed the Soviets that they'd done so. The Kremlin ordered the KGB to take action. According to various reports, a KGB team went to Beirut and performed a counter-kidnapping: they snatched one of the Islamic Jihadis, slit his throat, and dumped his body into the street -- minus some intimate parts which they mailed directly to one of the other terrorists. The kidnapped Soviets were released the next day. Until the atrocity in Beslan, no other Soviet national was ever touched by Islamic kidnapping.
Therefore, at least some Islamic terrorists can be deterred, at least some of the time.
As your Curmudgeon has already written, the secret to deterrence is discovering what the enemy values more than the damage he plans to inflict upon you, and holding that hostage to his good behavior. It's chancy, prone to miscalculation of several sorts. More, when "the enemy" is not a decision-making monolith, there's always the possibility that your threat will deter some but not all -- and that the undeterred segment will act against you despite all your disincentives. But these observations fall far short of proof that Islamic terrorists cannot be deterred, particularly since history says the opposite.
For all of that, even if the threat to destroy Islam's "holy places" -- yes, those are sneer quotes -- had little or no deterrent value, it would have value of another sort: It would create an incentive for Islamic regimes and Muslims worldwide to withdraw their support, active or passive, from terrorist forces, and to cooperate in their elimination.
Islamic terrorists' major asset is their ability to hide among other Muslims. This not only provides them with concealment; it also allows them to use their co-religionists as human shields. Since most Muslims cannot bring themselves to condemn violence perpetrated in the name of Islam -- it's a tenet of their creed that the advance of Islam uber alles justifies any measures whatsoever -- even those who would never pick up a gun or strap on a bomb vest will normally cooperate in hiding the terrorists among them. This is the asset of which the terrorists must be stripped if we are to prevail.
There are two approaches to getting someone to do as you want him to do: You can offer him a positive inducement, such that he'll gain something he wants by it, or you can threaten him with a penalty great enough, and certain enough, that cooperating with you becomes the least bad of his options.
The United States is still learning the steps in this new dance of death. Our experience with nation-states isn't entirely apposite...but it's not entirely worthless, either. Nor do the principles outlined above apply solely to ships of State and those who steer them.
Representative Tancredo's suggestion should be seriously considered. Indeed, it might well be the jumping-off point for a new strategy and a matched set of tactics with which to fight this new war. If one is resolved to differ, then at least let the reasoning be genuine, not a collection of post hoc rationales formulated to support a fundamentally emotional position reached well before, which no skein of logic would be permitted to displace.
Comments
Additionally, the personal slandering of Mr. Tancredo for even voicing the prospect of such actions is making me angrier than the refusal to discuss the issue. Coming from the left, disgusting but inevitable. Coming from those who supposedly know better, disenheartening.
I’ll again echo your position: we not only need to discuss this, OUT LOUD AND IN PRINT, but vigorously defend the proposition on its merit. When faced with an enemy whose evil intent reaches beyond the ‘civilized’, being the ‘better man’ means being better able to defend, protect and project.
It’s a matter of wills, I believe. We need to say and do what we will to survive and prevail.
Posted by on 07/26/2005 at 03:11 PMI suspect the purpose of the suicide boming tactic is to convince us they cannot be deterred. Since the effect of successfully convincing us of that is to keep us from deterring them, they clearly must fear deterrence.
Posted by Joseph Hertzlinger on 07/26/2005 at 04:10 PMI heartily recommend listening to radio jock Hugh Hewitt to learn how dangerous some on the Not Quite Right (NQR) can be about this and how despicable they can be defending their less than enough positions. He can be heard on the internet from 6-9PM EST at http://www.krla870.com/ . He also has a blog that’s up in the Mere Mortals range. But you have to hear his voice to understand the contempt he has for any with conservative principles.
The more of us who hear how the NQR operates, the more of we may learn as a group to fight it and discredit it.
Posted by Pascal on 07/26/2005 at 04:48 PMHewitt had a representative from CAIR on yesterday. As if we are to believe anything CAIR says.
Posted by on 07/26/2005 at 05:16 PMYes Nuanced. Hewitt’s behavior with respect to the southern Cal director of CAIR and those callers who challenged him struck me too. Hewitt reminded me more of Judy Woodruff than Britt Hume, or even Tim Russert.
Posted by Pascal on 07/26/2005 at 05:32 PMI believe your points agree with the observation of Dr. Bernard Lewis of Princeton that this group of Mohammedan believers think us cowardly; if we prove to be cowardly, they will see the hand of Allah and grow in will and numbers.
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Posted by on 07/27/2005 at 02:38 AMI would give them three hours to vacate...then hit a different city close-by and have the State Department say “ooops!” Or give the warning to vacate and then do nothing...for the first three times and then bomb. They’d never be sure when we would rain fire and brimstone, we’d save bombs and jet fuel and they’d basically trample themselves to death. Or we could do like the Romans, tear a nettlesome city down, brick by brick, and then salt the earth for miles around so nothing will grow for a century.
Posted by on 07/27/2005 at 03:09 AMI saw only some partial transcripts of Tancredo’s remarks, however it appeared to me from what I read that he never stipulated nuclear attacks on Mecca and Medina. He said “bomb”. So the first point seems moot regarding his comments. As for the second point, bombing innocents… casualties of war, sorry to say. But this is war, and innocents die; fact of life. Were we to leave Berlin unmolested during WW2 to avoid killing innocents? So what it boils down to is the third point, but bombing mecca is not just a deterrent but also an attack on a legitimate military target, the command and control of radical islam.
Posted by on 07/27/2005 at 07:23 AMIt seems to me that that bombing Mecca and Medina with either nuclear or conventional weapons would be counterproductive. If we start with the premise that Islamofascism’s religious and political programs are mutually reinforcing, where they are not actually the same thing, then clearly an attack that destroys the Islamic holy sites may be an overt disaster for Islam but a political boon for the Islamofascists, who will be able to smear anyone who opposes their program afterwards as a tool of the unbelievers. In attacking Mecca or Medina we will simply alienate those Muslims who dislike the Salafi fanatics but who will not help people who attack the sources of their religious faith. Tancredo’s idea represents a laudable desire to go to the root of the Islamofascist problem rather than the usual lefty hunting through the bushes for root causes, but I think in this case Mr Tancredo’s solution will only exacerbate the problem rather than alleviate it.
Posted by akaky on 07/27/2005 at 10:35 AMakaky, you seem to believe that it is inevitable for an action that angers Muslims to lead to reprisals. This is not the case.
The Muslim response will be based upon the scale of Western punishment. The Romans had most of the known world angry with them for hundreds of years at a time. But those peoples FEARED the Romans more than they hated them. So if we hit them HARD ENOUGH the first time, they will attempt to prevent future reprisals.
I do not care that homophobic, misogynistic, preindustrial thugs who enjoy abusing women and children hate me. Hell, I WANT them to hate me. But I also want them to fear me more.
I would suggest that you look to Kim du Toit’s site today. In a post there, he references an earlier essay he wrote. In brief he argues that Western nations have the ability to be brutal and uncivilized in a war against a brutal and uncivilized foe without damaging their own culture. Because for us, civilization is our normal state, not a veneer we paint on as an illusion.
Posted by on 07/27/2005 at 04:39 PM” If one cannot use a weapon, then why develop or manufacture it?”
Great minds think alike, baby. Reading on…
Posted by Juliette on 07/27/2005 at 05:49 PMbweep posted at LGF:
.. I’m outraged your picture appears to show muslims waving their backsides at the statue of the british military hero Charles James Napier, conquerer of the Sindh province what is now Pakistan.
PS Here is a quote from the great man.
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=19184#c0104
Posted by on 02/18/2006 at 12:38 PM
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