Demosophia

Some Observations About Asymmetries and Terrorism

I decided to post this here because I couldn't seem to open the comments section on Anticipatory Retaliation's post on Asymmetries and Terrorism. And also because it's really the only thing I seem to understand on his site. I agree in general with A.R.'s observations, and think he's on the right track. I really just wanted to make a couple of points, but couldn't keep myself from expanding the topic to include some particular characteristics and implications of mass terrorism that A.R. may have missed. There is a deeper and more problematic asymmetry than those he covers: individuals warring against nations.

By the dawn of the twentieth century, two things had come to light - soldiers fought soldiers on the battlefield and soldiers attacked means of production behind the front lines (sort of like the distinction between tactical and strategic bombing). It is important to note, however, that even then creation of civilian casualties (collateral damage) was never considered an objective, in and of itself. People were attacked directly with the intent to kill individuals when they were soldiers, while behind the lines, attacks were centered on production.

As conventional warfare has become much more lethal in the last several decades, sensitivity to collateral damage has become much higher (in the conventional warfare arena). First, with the increasing lethality of modern warfighting, the entry cost for those wishing to fight a conventional symmetric war has gone through the roof.

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Clausewitz is generally considered to be the premier philosopher of war, and his doctrine of "total war" simply says that the only way to bring such a war to conclusion is to target the civilian population that supports it. That may or may not mean directly targetting civilians with weaponry, but his contention was that only when you bring the "ultimate cost" of the war home to them, will the nation surrender. Prior to that point a nation at war has a dominant incentive to keep fighting "by all means necessary." And this was recognized before Clausewitz; by Lincoln for example, in the strategy employed by Sherman. So, targeting civilians isn't new, or all that unusual. In fact the ethic of sparing civilians is what's new. And I suspect it exists because "total war" is now out of the question. Our behaviors are, even now, governed to some extent by what game theorists call the "dominant solution," that all parties identify as their worst outcome. This is the ultimate outcome of an arms race, for instance. At the moment we are doing what we can to avoid or escape the dominant solution, but there's a lot of uncertainty and more than a little confusion.

Jonathan Schell made the point in The Abolition, that Mutually Assured Destruction imposed a kind of governance on the potential combatants in a conflict. It's an imperfect and rough sort of governance, that's fraught with danger, but it still constrains us nonetheless. And what the terrorists have recognized is that they aren't bound by that constraint, because they can't be identified as an entity that can be targeted in the classic retaliatory escalation. They can escape with impunity. The problem that both Schell and Mortimer Adler (in How to Think about War and Peace) identified is that the cause of war is anarchy. And if the type of rough governance that Schell sees as constraining the nations, is no longer effective, because of the asymmetry of having individuals or small groups at war with nations, then you ultimately have to impose a type of surpranational order that deals with the problem at the level where it lives. In other words, you need a system of law that is able to identify, place on trial, and punish people and organizations whose sole intent is to destroy civil peace through mass terrorism. Something like that is developing informally, but it will eventually need to be formalized.

And there also can be no ultimate supranational law until all or most nations are liberal democracies governed by Lockean principles of individual sovereignty. The reason is that some nations will attempt to gain a strategic advantage by indicting the leaders of another nation as "war criminals," and the court has to be above the extreme factional disputes that distort justice. Ultimately that can only happen in a society where individuals are sovereign, and where their liberty is protected by something like a Bill of Rights. That is, we need to institutionalize the concept of "negative rights" globally. Otherwise, a supranational government would either disintegrate in factional disputes or it would become a global tyranny, governed by one dominant faction willing to rule by terror.

So, if one really desires Peace on Earth the route to it involves the sort of initiative that the US is currently engaged in, as a temporary project to set the stage. And there's just no way around it.

I think what we have to do is stop quibbling with the French, et al, in the UNSC, and enlist them in this project. And that, I'm afraid, calls for some political acumen as well as a willingness to lead by example. I have no problem with what the US is doing so far, but sooner or later we're going to have to allow our critics in Continental Europe a role in this project, at least as "junior partners." That's partly because we really can't do it alone, and partly because the end state will involve a mass surrender of national sovereignty, which can only happen if the nations and their peoples are "on board" willingly. So the overall task is perhaps a 50-year project, or more. The kickoff, which will be dominated by the US, is probably about a 10-year project. And the clock is ticking, because once the terrorists have access to true WMD they'll use them, and then hide in the general population. It'll be so bad, it's probably better to not even try to imagine it.

So, you see we really are in the midst of World War IV, and the hope is to keep it as "cool" as possible. We really don't have much of a choice here. And we also don't have much time.

Update. VDH, in an NRO article today, wastes no words:

THE "AL QAEDA IS CRAZY" FANTASY Perhaps this myth grew out of suicide bombing. Maybe it was the lunatic videos, the head nodding in the madrassas, Iraqis in the Sunni Triangle receiving billions of dollars in aid and then celebrating near the bodies of American dead, or the too-smart notion that we Westerners were blinkered and unimaginative Clauswitzeans. Whatever.

But the fact is that a few million in the Islamic world have a definite and discernable ideological agenda, and it is explicable in traditional military and political terms — and it always has been.

Posted by Demosophist at November 5, 2003 07:33 PM | TrackBack