Demosophia

A Paradigm That's Half Dead, Is Dead

Bear with me. Although the following involves a discussion with, and about, Don Rumsfeld, my point is larger than a defense of the Bush administration. From a Feb., 2003 article in The New Yorker by Jeff Goldstein:

I asked Hayden [the Director of the National Security Agency] whether he thought Pearl Harbor or September 11th had been the greater surprise. "Pearl Harbor was, essentially, not a surprise," he said. "It was that one could not divine the meaningful signals from the thousands that were out there." He thought about the question a little longer and added, "I'm going to say, and I might change my mind, perhaps it was more a failure of imagination this time than last. We failed to see how absolute their"—Al Qaeda's—"world view is. A signals-intelligence agency gets inside the head of an adversary, if you're doing your job at all. You get to know the inside of a target. But I don't think we properly appreciated how capable and how different, how evil, that mind-set is."

Hayden also suggested that September 11th was the greater surprise, because the United States was, in effect, already at war with bin Laden. "Al Qaeda had attacked us before," he pointed out, "and we had a broad effort against the group." He noted that, after the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa, Tenet had told the intelligence community that he was "declaring war" on Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, Hayden said, America was surprised....

Somewhat further along in the article, Jeff references Donald Rumsfeld, whose views are similar to Hayden's:

Rumsfeld is especially drawn to Schelling's theory of surprise; he believes that surprise is often the by-product of analytical timidity. "The poverty of expectations—the failure of imagination—I found this just so interesting," Rumsfeld said. "We tend to hear what we expect to hear, whether it's bad or good. Human nature is that way. Unless something is jarring, you tend to stay on your track and get it reinforced rather than recalibrated. If I as a policymaker fail to make a conscious decision that you want to go around three hundred and sixty degrees and test things, you're likely to stay in a rut. And we've seen our country do that."

Rumsfeld believes that one long-held belief among Middle East analysts is overdue for reconsideration: the idea that doctrinal differences prevent Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and religious and secular Muslims, from pursuing common projects in anti-American terrorism. This is a subject of great relevance today, because the Bush Administration contends that Baghdad is a sponsor of Al Qaeda; critics of the Administration's foreign policy argue that bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are natural enemies. "The argument is that Al Qaeda has got a religious motivation, somehow or other, and the Iraqi regime is considered to be a secular regime," Rumsfeld said. "The answer to that is, so what? The Iraqi regime will use anything it can to its advantage. Why wouldn't they use any implement at hand?"

Now, the point I'd like to make here is a simple one. It is that no matter which side you happen to be on with regard to the 9-11 Commission's findings about the Al Qaeda/Saddam relationship, we now know that the assumption that Sunni or Shia Muslim terrorists would not consider a collaboration with secular totalitarians is completely false. That one has "taken the dirt nap." What remains, as the "wall" that separates secular Totalitarianism 2.x from religious Totalitarianism 3.x, is a pragmatic consideration on the part of the former about the consequences of "sharing" a tactical advantage with the latter, for fear of diluting its usefulness. In other words, Saddam had no doctrinal reason to rebuff Bin Laden (assuming he did so). At most, he had a strategic reason, and possibly only a tactical reason for doing so.

To put it even more simply, there was one and only one reason for disbelieving in a pragmatic collaboration between religious terrorists/totalitarians and non-religious terrorists/totalitarians, and that was the constraint imposed by "religious purity." That's gone. Therefore there is one and only one reason why such a collaboration might not happen, and that's the same reason that any collaboration might not happen: it may not be to the practical advantage of both parties.

And, again, no matter which side of the issue you happen to be on... that isn't encouraging news, because both Totalitarianism 2.x and Totalitarianism 3.x are still extant, and we know that at least the former has nuclear weapons. If strategic or tactical considerations that meet the practical criteria for collaboration it will occur.

Posted by Demosophist at June 18, 2004 01:48 AM | TrackBack