[WARNING: This is a half-baked post (and that's being charitable). I decided that I would stop banking drafts for ages, and instead write much crappier posts. If that's annoying, let me know and I'll stop. This is an exemplar of what I don't like in half-baked posts, it's rambling, unedited, lacks links and references, and is vague at key points. Still, I'm among friends here, so I thought I warning would be enough]
See, this is an example of how we tend to try to think of ideologies as "root causes" rather than trying to solve security problems by going after organizations and reducing structural vulnerabilities.
Post Columbine, many people blamed ... THE GOTHS. Goths were thought of as a cross between a gang (violent and dangerous) and a cult (white and satanic). It later turned out that the whole "Trenchcoat Mafia" thing was overblown, and that the two shooters weren't really Goths. Recently, the FBI has argued that the two shooters were not normal kids somehow corrupted by a sinister belief system, but instead were two kids with mental health problems, one of whom (the "normal one") was a classic psychopath.
But at the time, schools blamed "Gothism" (or whatever the ideology would be called) for the shootings and dealt with goth students accordingly.
A very different response would have been to say, yes, kids are violent. Even normal kids are violent. Why did these two act in the massively violent way that they did, and how did they get the weapons that allowed them to do so? It's not clear to me that we really have to care about what justifications were in their heads in order to deal with the problem effectively. Similarly, it is not clear to me that knowing what was in their heads helps us "understand" the situation. What I want to understand is their long term behavior pattern, not their values.
I've got a similar beef with the "War on Terror". Sure, if we go back to the origins of modern terrorism, to the Anarchists, there were people who argued that terror alone was an ideology. But most of the time, terror isn't a belief system, and it's never a person or group, it's a tactic. Even the US armed forces has attacked civilian targets to scare the beejezus out of the enemy. It's not some alien evil force, it's an evil thing that people and groups do.
I also don't think that we're at war with "Radical Islam" any more than we were at war with "Anarchism" or with "Communism". There is no intrinsic link between particular ideologies and particular tactics, although there is such a link between groups and situations and tactics.
(A variant of this argument is the claim that suicide bombing / suicidal terrorism is inherently Islamic b/c of the Islamic traditional of martyrdom. Yet the suicide bomb was refined to perfection by the Tamil Tigers, who've launched over 240 suicide attacks. They're a nationalist group with Hindu roots, not related to Islam at all. And columbine was a suicide attack as well, it was an instance of "suicide by cop". We actually see a variety of different instances of people being willing to give their life, directly and indirectly, for political causes. It's not something that stems from pernicious ideology per se, although it is an unusual form of behavior.)
I can't find the link I was looking for, to a very useful study of terrorism all over the world, so I'll have to cut this post short. The rest of my argument is that we've seen terrorism used as a tactics by particular types of groups in particular circumstances, irrelevant of ideology. We've got amnesia, but the same arguments that are currently being used to state that "Radical Islam" is the enemy were also used about Communism, although now we say the problem is that terrorists are fanatic, and before we said the problem was tha tthey were godless. [Apologies for the vagueness of this, there's alot which goes behind this particular claim and can't get into it further in this post]
Fighting terrorism is something we can do without having to "drain the swamp" or kill / convert everybody who believes a value system antagonistic to ours. That's the wonderful thing about liberal democracy, it can stand on its own in the market place of ideas. As for protecting the members of liberal democracy, I think we can do that better by protecting vulnerable targets, going after specific groups, and reducing their particular incentives to use certain kinds of attacks. (This vagueness here is another cop out b/c my tummy is rumblign and this post is way too long)
(We also don't help our cause any, by calling any attack against the US terrorism. Terrorism is an attack on a civilian target. I have trouble seeing the marine barracks in Lebanon or the Battleship Cole or the Pentagon as civilian targets. We have no qualms about attacking those sorts of targets when we go to war.)
We don't need to cure Goths, or disabuse them of their Gothiness, even though they do go around saying things that give me the creeps (such as one group that named themselves after the Khmer Rouge) and you could connect their nihilism to terror. Similarly, we can live with people who are anarchists, communists, religoius fanatics, sub-nationalists, etc. Let's spend our money on good, targetted intelligence, not on some sort of broadspectrum witchunt. It didn't work before, and it wont work now.
| Goths | War on Terror | Ideology |
