We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Back when I was a kid growing up in Pittsburgh, I remember a blue neon sign across the Allegheny River from the downtown. Mostly I remember it from winters, because that was when it would already be dark when mom and I were on the bus home after one of her shopping expeditions. I don’t think it is there anymore, what with all the Northside development that has come to pass over the years, but it was a series of circled W’s: the Westinghouse emblem. Now Westinghouse was a local Pittsburgh company and absolutely anyone who grew up there knows “You can be sure if it’s Westinghouse”.
One can apply the same phrase to other companies. Many companies really do have products with features you can always depend on, always be sure of.
That is why I was not terribly surprised while I was having difficulties posting stories to blogspot all day long and kept seeing this message:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver]Timeout expired
/blog_form-action.pyra, line 53
Yes, you really can be sure of some things in this life.
There have been quite a few retrospective’s recently about how badly wrong some September pundit prognostications were. Unfortuneately Samizdata was not then in existence so my thoughts were spread amongst numerous private email groups and private “conversations”. I looked at some of these this evening as I was doing some system admin and came to the conclusion that I did much better than most. The essay below is one I mailed to a small private policy discussion that sprang up shortly after September 11th and lasted only a week or two. I won’t specifiy any names but there were some interesting people on it. I also know it circulated a bit in amongst some policy types but whether anyone “in high places” read it I do not know.
I’ll leave it to you the reader to judge, but I think I deserve at least a B grade.
Wed, 19 Sep 2001 00:28:09 +0100
Comments to a small group of friends.
I’ve a few thoughts on the prosecution of this war, and although I’ve stated a number of them in assorted public lists, some may be of interest to this small selection of what appears to be rather more than average in terms of policy analysis.
One issue that is paramount to me is that we do not give an inch on the liberties we value. There is no sense prosecuting a war against a potential oppressor if we are willing to do to ourselves what he would do to us if victorious. I hear all to many calls for invasions of privacy, restrictions on civil liberties and the like. If such are indeed required for the prosecution of the war, they should be carefully limited to what is needed only for the prosecution of that war and sunsetted so that they must either be re-enacted at a specific time and unconditionally terminated with the end of the war, regardless of how much time there is left in the sunset clause.
The country has a significant libertarian and libertarian leaning component now, and if those (myself included) are to give wholehearted backing, we must know that by so doing we are not driving a stake into the heart of our liberties.
If we are to prosecut a war, we must have a clearly defined target and a clearly defined end point. The information supplied on bin Laden shows that we do indeed face a foe who is effectively one of the new nonterritorially based states. His is based on hatred and violence whereas as most of the others which are developing are not. The concept of a nation as a place with borders is blurring and will continue to blur. I, for instance, am an american by birth living in the UK/Ireland and dealing real time with a peer group that spans the globe.
So we have a new form of warfare as well. bin Laden is the first virtual state to declare war on another state. Defeating his virtual state will require application of force that is independant of borders. To do that there will have to be strong international acquiesance. And to retain support at home it will have to be clear that we are not creating a tool that will be turned to other, highly undesirable uses.
On the home front there are several battles:
* ongoing public support
* classical law enforcement and security
* the average citizen as a soldier
* dealing with the 5th column
I’ve touched on the first issue. We have to be sure we are fighting for our liberty.
The second issue is the one the press and most policy types seem to be focusing on. I probably cannot add a great deal to what has been said there.
The third issue is one that has been almost ignored. What is new about this war over others is that there are no lines. The battlefield is anywhere at any time. The enemy will attempt to chose those times and places such that miniscule force will be overwhelming force. That is what they did on Tuesday. However if we learned no other lesson on that day, we have better have learned this one;
Terrorists will always be victorious when surrounded by sheep.
That was the force multiplier that allowed them to capture an airliner despite being outnumbered 10:1 and most likely in fact *outarmed* at least 5:1 as well. Most guys carry small knives just as dangerous as the mattknives carried by the enemy; additionally, large numbers of americans are trained in martial arts.
The only reason that they succeeded in the first two cases was that what they planned to do had never been done. All previous hijackings ended in extended negotiations. The vast majority of all passengers hijacked sat quietly and eventually returned to friends and family.
But that all changed. The second flight may have found out about the WTC; the news has not told us, but I would suspect that at least one of the known cellphone calls passed the info on. However there was simply no time to react for them.
But the time line for the 4th plane was enough for the fact to be communicated and discussed. There in lies the flaw in the enemies logic. Americans are rational; but they are not sheep. The terrorists in aircraft number for died for their mistake.
This is what I would call the “citizen as soldier”. In this kind of war, the enemy will strike when and where they want, and they will not go where either military or police are in abundance. Neither will security measures at airports or elsewhere stop them from hijacking if they can get on board at all. Remember the dictum:
“There are no dangerous weapons, there are only dangerous people”
Trained enemy can kill with their bare hands. Or with a bit of string for a garrot, or a pen through the eye into the brain, or…
If there is a single guard on the plane, he will be taken out first and then they will proceed. However the citizen is now aware that they are a soldier. Perhaps the average american is not thinking in those terms, but it is almost certainly that case that if a plane is hijacked, the passengers will assume that no matter what the hijackers say, their intent is to kill thousands. Americans will make the rational decision and they will kill the hijackers with their bare hands, even if they all die.
This is a fact proven by the new crater in Somerset.
Next on our agenda. There is a 5th column in place in American and it has had years to bury itself in the flesh of the american islamic community. It will have to be dug out.
I have suggested to some friends that moslems who are truly citizens of the US or UK or where ever should back a Fatwah against bin Laden and his organization.
If they do not do so, they prove they are either unreliable, traitorous or afraid of retribution. A movement by patriotic american moslems to make such a declaration would drive a wedge between moslems. The moslem community must be split into the part which belongs in a modern society like America, and the part which is the enemy to be defeated.
Like others before them, american Japonese, Germans and Italians, they should be offered the chance to stand up and be counted. After WTC there can be no mixed loyalties on the issue of bin Laden. Either you is with us or you ain’t.
Now to move to the international side of things. While bombs and technology and push button warfare have their place… they will only be a backup part of this war. I suggest an air cavalry able to insert divisions onto a target anywhere in the world, with whatever other assets are necessary.
They should be prepared to operate without the permission of the harboring state; they should be intended not for holding ground but for reaching, confirming and destroying (or killing) a specific objective. It also avoids many disastrous mistakes. And if the target has moved or dug in, you will know it and can act on that knowledge immediately. A cruise missile is a hell of lot dumber than the lowliest grunt, and I for one hope that it stays that way.
It does look like there is a great deal of common cause with Russia on this; there have also been been news that the Northern Alliance is willing to back us wholeheartedly; and that Turkmenistan has offered support because it would like a peaceful environment in which to develop it’s (alleged) massive oil and other resources in peace. US investment to extract those resources could change it from dirt poor to one of the wealthiest per-capita countries over night if what I have heard is indeed true.
We may also turn the Taliban’s threats of invasion to our own advantage. They may do very well in their own mountains, but the mathematics of offense are very different from those of defense. If they can be taunted into acting, they can be made to take massive casualties.
Afghanistan is a nation held captive by a (relatively) small number of fanatics. Our goal should be to work with the Russians, the NA and such to get the civil war there going against the Taliban. With the Iranian border closed to them, they have their backs to Pakistan.
So ideally we assist existing forces to install a moderate government that is sufficiently friendly to Russia to give them a stake in this, and under ideal circumstances, friendly enough to us to allow continued hit and run operations against any bin Laden or similar groups who attempt to operate in those fearsome mountains.
In other nations the battles might be entered by working with the local government, as perhaps in the Phillipines; to inserting a commando squad without that government’s knowledge to take out the bin Laden organization members manu a manu.
I see on excellent blog Inappropriate Response some very appropriate response to peevish Egyptian press claims that Muslims have not been hostile towards any particular trends in Christianity, so why all this Western hostility to some trends in Islam? Moira Breen replies
He’s right. I don’t know any Muslims who object to any particular trend in Christianity or Judaism. There are of course some Muslim governments that object to Christianity and/or Judaism period.
But hey, when Jehovah’s Witnesses or Unitarians, or our resident Christian criminal nutbars, start hijacking your planes and trashing your cities, we’ll attend to any objections you’ve got against our non-mainstream types, OK?
Yes, it is a funny thing but we do tend to get a little grumpy when people try to kill us. Obviously a flaw in Western Christian civilisation. But maybe it is something in the water in some western countries because there are Muslims who live in Britain seem to see things that way too because they are also grumpy about the whole annoying mass murder thing.
Here are yet more insights sent in by Samizdata reader George Guttman , who has not finished with us yet.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar is planning to give up? Didn’t he tell his people to fight to the death?…I guess he meant their death, not his…
Didn’t Omar want to become a martyr and cavort with 72 virgins in paradise???…Well, maybe he is gay and the virgin stuff is not for him…
Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus
– J. K. Rowling (…whom the Samizdata Illuminatus happens to think is rather desirable)
It is remarkable when a man such as Christopher Hitchens makes the transformation from Prince of Darkness of the Socialist Left to something pretty damn close to a libertarian. He is on excellent form in this article in The Nation.
He even favored us with the most witless and fatalistic of the recent naysayings, to the effect that if we kill Osama bin Laden then others will rise to take his place. I actually think this proposition is an unsafe one: Bin Laden looks like one of a rare kind to me (and increasingly flaky in recent guest appearances). His deputies are obvious goons and would probably start knifing one another if the holy one stepped on a mine. But leave that to one side–does it never occur to anyone that tens of thousands of people would also rise up to rid the world of bin Laden all over again?
This is good stuff. Read the whole article.
I’ve been a Belfast resident for over a decade, long enough to be familiar with the sounds of mortar bombs, thousand pound fertilizer based explosions, gunfire… and walking in funeral processions. So I know about war zones, although I would be the first to admit that I missed the worst of it by far. I am an American ex-pat, not so much because I left the USA as that I came to Ireland. In the decade plus that I have lived here, it has become my home. But on September 11, 2001 I could not ignore the fact that my people were attacked and slaughtered by madmen. The killing rage I felt was of a depth that I’m sure was a bit difficult for some around me to fathom. It was distant news to them.
The United States is big. It’s just so mind boggling big you can’t imagine… but at the same time it’s a small town. People travel widely; they don’t stay put so the interconnection of people from one coast to the other is extensive. Probably very few people in the country did not at one point or another entwine their lives with one of our war dead. For myself, the closest I am aware of (so far) are some alumni from my University, one of which I probably knew in my college days: Carnegie-Mellon University was and is a small world.
I grew up in a small town named Coraopolis just outside of Pittsburgh; I studied in Pittsburgh and I was involved in technology startups there before going to Ireland. I often travelled to Washington to lobby for the space program. I lived in Burke, Virginia for the better part of a year while on a joint project with Computer Sciences Corporation at an office just inside the DC beltway. My current companies largest customer, prior to the dotCrash, was in Manhattan. I spent nearly half of my time between 1997 and 2000 there and usually lived in the Lower East Side. I froze my behind off in Time Square for the New Year 2000 celebration. I joked with others about the manhole covers in Times Square being welded shut.
I know Somerset. I had friends out that way. I went to school with people from there. I skied up at Seven Springs every chance I could get.
I know Arlington. I drove by the Pentagon and across the bridge into DC night and day; I worked there, I played there, I had friends who worked for the DOD and in the Pentagon. I drove by it as recently as March because my other major customer is just down the road in Alexandria.
I know Lower Manhattan. I lived there. I sometimes watched the lines of aircraft in the landing pattern for La Guardia coming up from the South past the Twin Towers at dusk while I sat in my flat on Rivington and read after work. Or used the always visible towers to navigate my way home on foot after a night out in a newly discovered pub. My business partner and I walked around the World Trade Center just this last March on the way back from a business trip to Washington DC, before we caught a taxi to the airport for our flight home to Belfast. I was part of the tech staff on an internet broadcast from the Trade Center for the Western Governors University kickoff. I hauled racks of electronic gear in through the basement world of the WTC.
I know the places. I know the people. It wasn’t distant news. Atta and the other war criminals didn’t strike at some distant unknown place. They didn’t strike at my government. They struck at me and mine.
That is why I want the al Qaeda dead. All of them. Their excuses and complaints are of no interest: my heart is “hardened like a stone and my ears are deaf” to them. I wish them hunted down like the animals that they are, hunted as the Jews have hunted and hounded the Nazi monsters, hunted even when they become feeble dying old men. I will never forgive and I will never forget. An image of 5000 of my own people dying before my eyes on a video screen is seared into my soul and that of 280,000,000 other very ordinary americans. Our government has no choice in the matter. It will comply with our will or else we’ll elect one that will. It is that simple.
Our anger is deep and wide and very, very cold. We will give no quarter. We feel no mercy. We don’t want their surrender, we want them dead. To the last man. Dead.
From the first recognized day of the war I have been reporting character and true heroism are alive and well in America. That character came packaged in all sorts of shapes and sizes including very “non-traditional” ones: a gay San Francisco rugby player as an example. We simply cannot say enough about these very ordinary people who stepped onto an airplane in a world at peace. Within a few hours they had fought and died in the first battle of the war. These individuals acted in a way that would honour the noblest traditions of any Corp of the US military. Unlike a soldier who is trained, briefed, ordered and given a mission, these people improvised their own structure and strategy on the spot and then implimented it. I find it heartening that the President and the Nation recognize this:
“Above all, we will live in a spirit of courage and optimism. Our nation was born in that spirit, as immigrants yearning for freedom courageously risked their lives in search of greater opportunity. That spirit of optimism and courage still beckons people across the world who want to come here. And that spirit of optimism and courage must guide those of us fortunate enough to live here.
Courage and optimism led the passengers on Flight 93 to rush their murderers to save lives on the ground. Led by a young man whose last known words were the Lord’s Prayer and “Let’s roll.” He didn’t know he had signed on for heroism when he boarded the plane that day. Some of our greatest moments have been acts of courage for which no one could have ever prepared.
We will always remember the words of that brave man, expressing the spirit of a great country. We will never forget all we have lost, and all we are fighting for. Ours is the cause of freedom. We’ve defeated freedom’s enemies before, and we will defeat them again.
We cannot know every turn this battle will take. Yet we know our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured. We will, no doubt, face new challenges. But we have our marching orders: My fellow Americans, let’s roll.” — President George W Bush, November 8th, 2001.
In honouring these fine people we honour ourselves, for “They” are us. Let us hope we live up to the high bar of courage they have set for us.
Take it from me. The Pope really is Catholic. I live in Ireland. We know these things. I’ve also trompped around in America’s forests and I can likewise state with impugnity: “Bears shit in the woods”. They really do.
Now given these simple guidelines, why is it so difficult for the media to understand a similar tautology: “Civilians get killed in wars”. Sorry, it’s not nice, but dems de breaks. Innocent bystanders get killed in all sorts of random and horrible ways. Bombs miss (although that is becoming almost apologetically rare). Bullets, rockets and shells don’t go into orbit. As Myers, Rumsfeld, Stufflebeem and others have said in one form or another: “Stuff goes up, stuff comes down, people get hurt”. That’s gravity for you. It’s a real bitch ainit?
The guys on the ground aren’t very nice people. The Taliban are quite capable of killing Afghans and claiming someone else did it. They killed enough of their own before we got there, so why would anyone think they’ll stop now? And to top it off, there is a lot of shooting and shelling going on. The Northern Alliance isn’t firing blanks you know.
Lastly, there has got to be an awful lot of left over ordinance. They are still digging up and disarming bombs in London from the Blitz in 1940 fer crissakes! And that only occured for a few months sixty odd years ago. Afghanistan is filthy with unexploded modern ordinance from over twenty years of nearly continuous warfare. Civilians are lucky to survive walking to whatever passes for an outhouse in that sort of environment.
Could it be that the newsmedia focus on civilian casualties has nothing to do with newsworthiness? I have this deep down suspicion that we’re seeing the “civilian casualty” stories not because they are news, but because they are theater. Anyone with a theatrical background knows that “Kids and animals” always steal the show. The only thing that gets attention faster than a cute fluffy doggie and a towheaded (or turbanned) 8 year old are dead ones. That is what the news media is selling us. It isn’t news. It’s pandering.
Am I being harsh? Damn right I am. War is hell and nothing you can say or do will change it. Look at the aftermath of WWII. The ruins were filled with orphans, children with damaged limbs, eyes, souls. Terrible, terrible things happened to people in Europe. And yet I don’t think you will find many who would have preferred the alternative. Nor do many of us prefer the alternative of a world in which the horror of 9-11 is overshadowed by even worse events, one after another after another.
So let’s put our news focus on what matters. Winning.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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