Robert Wright, of Non Zero fame, has written a piece on how to wage a real war on terrorism. Wright makes some excellent points, particularly when he discusses how "The amount of discontent in the world is becoming a highly significant national-security variable." If nothing else, it's worth a read as a backgrounder in what the Bush Administration is thinking. (more below)
The piece falls short, though, in providing genuinely new models. Wright acknowledges that poverty, resentment and the diffusion of technology to terrorists are problems, but he offers only global trade, better PR and more policing as the solutions. We can do better.
How much better is made clear by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi's biting acceptance speech yesterday:
"If the 21st century wishes to free itself from the cycle of violence, acts of terror and war, and avoid repetition of the experience of the 20th century - that most disaster-ridden century of humankind, there is no other way except by understanding and putting into practice every human right for all mankind..."
Key points from the Wright essay:
Al-Qaida and radical Islam are not the problem
For the foreseeable future, smaller and smaller groups of intensely motivated people will have the ability to kill larger and larger numbers of people
The number of intensely aggrieved groups will almost certainly grow in the coming decades of rapid technological, and hence social, change.
The amount of discontent in the world is becoming a highly significant national-security variable. (Therefore) the substance of policies should be subjected to a new kind of appraisal, one that explicitly accounts for the discontent and hatred the policies arouse. The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.
The current phase in the evolution of information technology is anti-repression. Support free expression and, ultimately, democratization in authoritarian Arab and other Muslim states.
Globalization, though a large part of the solution, is also a large part of the problem. We are seeing, and will continue to see, the globalization of resentment.
The problem isn't poor people; the problemor at least part of the problemis poor nations. Terrorists may not be the poorest people in their nations, and they may not draw most of their support from especially poor people in their nationsbut the nations they come from tend to be at the bottom of the world's economic hierarchy. Draw Islamic nationsand for that matter all nationsinto the web of global capitalism.
The lines separating domestic policing and foreign policing, national security and international security, are rapidly blurring.
Understanding where technology is moving us in the long run can save us lots of short-run turmoil.
