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So where do we go from here? Terrorism is a real problem, and one that will only get more dangerous. I've argued that terrorism is well within the capabilities of the individual, with or without backing from rogue states. I don't think removing Hussein will make us appreciably safer. Even if stopping rogue states is the best way to combat terrorism, we're literally months away from seeing North Korea get more than enough nukes, and Pakistan is one coup away from being very unfriendly. As has been accurately observed, the problem of regime change in a rogue state with nukes is a far cry from the problem of regime change in a rogue state without nukes.
Or, in short: regime change in Iraq ain't gonna make that much of a difference in the terrorism threat. It would feel good to believe that it does. Terrorism scares me. But the war on Iraq is not making me feel any safer.
So where's safety?
One really obvious approach is to surrender our privacy to the government. Central London's a good example of this; there are cameras everywhere. When you go down into the subway, there are posters encouraging people to pay the television tax -- and they identify specific streets and specific numbers of people who haven't paid the bill. It's a surveillance society. There is not a lot of crime in Central London. It works.
The Patriot Act, Operation TIPS, and other such bills would work. There would certainly be ancillary damage to our rights. Some innocent people would get caught in the net. Misguided Presidents would use the technology to crack down on legitimate actions. Terrorism would be sharply reduced. It wouldn't be worth the price.
So what's worth the price?
David Brin proposes one method in The Transparent Society. He says we should give up our privacy -- but not to the government. Rather, we should give it up to each other. He argues that we have nothing to fear from large databases and cameras, as long as they're open to anyone who wants to look at them.
It's an interesting argument. When I originally read the book, I didn't think that there was any benefit to such openness that would be worth the sacrifice. My opinions have shifted somewhat since 9/11. It might be an emotional reaction, but I don't think we're as safe as I once assumed we were. I think that in the face of terrorism, maybe it would be worth giving up the privacy in a way that doesn't force us to give up our freedoms.
A libertarian response (I hesitate to say the libertarian response) is withdrawal. Jim Henley, whose blog I linked above, argues that we should take a step back from our various international entanglements, thus reducing accidental resentment. There's a lot to this; while Osama would probably still be a terrorist if we hadn't stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, he might not have focused quite as hard on us. On the other hand, I think our relative wealth would still make us a target for resentment.
My anarchistic belief is that we'd be well served by going a step further (and one step sideways), and devolving as much responsibility as possible back to the states. The United States is a very large target. Few terrorists talk about going after the EU. Perhaps we should draw some conclusions from that. And, frankly, if the State of North Carolina feels compelled to involve itself in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I'd just as soon that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is clearly not involved in that decision.
Combine both approaches -- decentralization of responsibility, and a transparent society -- and you've gone a lot further towards preventing and combatting future terrorist attacks without spending tens of billions of dollars on bribing Turkey to let our troops attack Iraq from the north. Kind of radical concepts, I'll admit, but it behooves me to fess up to what I have in mind given the amount of time I've spent criticizing Bush.
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1) Removing state sponsors may not eliminate all terrorism, but it does take some of the bigger guns and bigger bankrolls off the table. Sure, it doesn't make us 100% safe, but why should that be the thing that stops us? Under that logic, we'd never undertake any safety precautions if they weren't absolutely reliable in every situation. Initiating action against states may be just chipping away at the stone, but it's still making it smaller by degrees. There are plenty of other good reasons for not going to war (very few of which I agree with; my concerns are more logistical than ethical) but this one doesn't hold water for me.
2) Terrorists want to attack the U.S. and not the EU not because we're more centralized. The majority of the reasons are political. The results of said terrorism may differ when inflicted on a centralized state rather than a decentralized one, but I don't see how devolving power before an event will aid in preventing/mitigating damage.
These aren't arguments on my part, really, they're more appeals for elaboration.
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On point 1: I agree, but I don't think simply removing Iraq as a rogue nation provides enough additional safety to be worth the price, particularly when you consider the cost of additional resentment. If there was a way to both a) remove all rogue nations and b) prevent new ones from arising, sure. But how do you do that?
For example, right now, Pakistan is part of the community of nations. On the other hand, there are indications that Al Qaeda is operating out of Pakistan now, and Pakistan has in the past cooperated with North Korea. There's no way on earth we can do anything about Pakistan militarily, cause they have the Bomb. So does it do any good to induce regime change in Afghanistan if the terrorists can simply base out of Pakistan?
Note that we're still getting alerts about Al Qaeda activity. Doing what we did in Afghanistan, while admirable from a human rights perspective and while certainly a good start, did not make us safer in and of itself. It only helps if it's part of a lengthier process, which is what Bush is promising with his War on Terrorism. Alas, that War can't be won and the intermediate steps don't make us substantially safer.
2) I think that decentralizing places responsibility where it belongs. It pisses me off that I'm at greater risk because Reagan screwed up in the Iraq/Iran conflict during the 80s. I want to be able to say "Hm, Governor Dukakis screwed up and I am therefore not going to move to Massachusetts."
This is kind of a weird way of thinking, but we already think that way economically. "Hm, California is spiralling down into the debt abyss; might be a good time to move to another state." Why shouldn't we be able to think that way on the geopolitical scale?
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I don't think we should've had a "war on terrorism." As you say, it's doomed to failure, not because it's not laudable, but because it's conceptually impossible. It should've simply been a Congressionally-declared war on the entity known as Al-Qaeda and all related and subsidiary entities. I've been saying this since the beginning, but it's moot now. You deal with your declared armed enemy first, and then you work on building the bridges and Marshalling up the place (in this case, the entire Arab and "Third World").
Yes, maximizing choice as far as with whom and what a global citizen choose to align himself is a wonderful idea. Sure, I'd love to live, say, with 3 million like-minded souls. But in reality, no one even in the most free society has that sort of freedom of movement and association. Closest thing you get is internet communities. You should be able to choose who your countrymen are, but then you get into all sorts of nasty ideas like eugenics, forced relocation, and all that. Taking it to an extreme, granted, but something to think on.
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As to the TV licence thing, what a simply ghastly scheme. As someone who was hounded for six months for not paying my TV license, threatened with search warrants and bailiffs, simply because the previous resident of my flat had owned a TV (I didn't) and I didn't happen to be in when the Inquisiton called round, I'd have been one of those people with my data on posters in public. No thank you. I still wonder what happened to the poor sod who moved into that flat after I moved out. Maybe they had a TV license. I hope so, for their sake.
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Re: London crime rates:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/surveillance_pr.html
"There was similar push-back in Britain in 1996, when authorities installed 300 cameras in the East London neighborhood of Newham in an effort to gather intelligence on suspected IRA bombings. The cameras didn't help much in the fight on terrorism, but overall crime rates fell 30 percent after they were deployed, according to city figures. Crime dropped an additional 34 percent in 1998, after the cameras were equipped with Visionic's face-recognition software. Last year, illegal activities in surrounding areas increased between 10 and 20 percent, but Newham's inched up less than half a percent. The program has been so successful that Visionics has been retained to hook up closed-circuit TV cameras in five more nearby London neighborhoods."
On the ever popular other hand, Jeffrey Rosen wrote this article a couple of years ago.