Quick Victory in Short War

While the Long War erodes our liberties at home (mainly because our Politically Correct elites won't concentrate our domestic countermeasures against our Islamist enemies), terrorists abroad create instabilities that raise the price of oil and thereby increase terrorist funding. What America needs is a Short War. And a quick victory in a Short War is well within our grasp, since winning the war on terror requires controlling a relatively small amount of territory occupied by a relatively friendly population.

We can seize our enemies' center of gravity by liberating the oppressed Shia Arab majorities in Iran's Khuzestan province and Saudi Arabia's Hasa province. These provinces also happen to be the sources of the oil that funds the mullahs and sheiks who run the Islamist terror programs. They are compact, and their populations have no love lost for the imperialists in Teheran and Riyadh who seized these provinces in the early 20th century.

The oil revenues could then fund an infrastructure for peace in the Middle East, with funds going to roads instead of nukes and engineering schools instead of madrassas. A coalition of the willing -- an Anglosphere+ Alliance with the US-UK-Australia-Canada-NZ-India + Japan + Germany -- could administer the funds, paying for schools and hospitals and highways throughout the region.

The Khomeinists and the Wahabbis would have a choice of resisting our liberation of those provinces and suffering the consequences in Teheran and Riyadh -- think shock and awe -- or submitting to our control of those limited territories and living in peace with their palaces and offshore bank accounts intact (or with whatever their citizens will allow them to escape with after leading their nations into a disastrous confrontation with the West). They'll probably submit, but if they don't, the Army and the Marines could sweep their forces aside, and our Iraqi allies could help restore order among their Shiite cousins.

The same coalition of the willing could form the nucleus of a new United Democracies organization, withdrawing from the United Nations and setting high standards for membership in the new global community. With control of Persian Gulf oil revenues, this community could offer real benefits to nations that meet membership standards. The Islamist threat would fade with the end of Islamist funding, which has never had anything to do with earned wealth and productivity.

Would any politician embrace using our overwhelming power to convert this Long War into a Short War? It smacks of Teddy Roosevelt, who liberated Panama when it was a Colombian province and Colombia wouldn't let the USA build a canal. Teddy didn't believe in limits on governmental power, which was not such a good thing domestically but earned the USA tremendous respect internationally. As we face radical Islam again, it's time to for a leader to arise who would fulfill a promise "Pedicaris alive or Raisuli dead." George Bush, as you rightly note, Bill, does not seem to be the man. However, if he's been biding his time waiting for the opportunity, we should see that very soon. Both al-Quaida and Hezbollah have given us plenty of reason to go after Saudi and Iranian oil revenues.

Defunding the network of radical clerics sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Iran

Glenn is almost there:

"We need to be going after the sponsors and encouragers of this sort of thing, not just the formerly weed-smoking dupes. In particular, that means the network of radical clerics sponsored by Saudi Arabia and Iran."

Yes, Glenn, the money comes from the Khuzestan and Hasa oil fields where Shia Arabs are oppressed majorities. Call for a policy that liberates the oppressed (sounds like whose motto?) and funds an infrastructure for peace in the Middle East, rather than nukes and terrorists.

This doesn't have to be a Long War, but we have to seize our enemies' power centers to make it a Short War. Our enemies cannot defend their source of power against our conventional forces, and they cannot fund a counterstrike when we control the oil revenues. Let's end the war against Islamism now so we can begin restoring our liberties at home.

A Really Bold Proposal for Iran

Karl R. Maier's "Bold Proposal for Iran" at Strategypage suggests destroying Iran's oil fields to defund the terrorists. He says destroying the fields will convince the world we're not at war for oil. That doesn't make much sense when the US could be really bold and just brave the world's concerns that the United States is in Iraq for the Oil. Let's let the world think we're at war for oil rather than to liberate Arab Shiites, and just take the oil provinces intact from Iran and Saudi Arabia. We'd liberate the Arab Shiites nonetheless in Khuzestan and Hasa nonetheless, and give Najaf great prestige at the expense of Qom when Iraqi troops join us in the liberation.

With our dominance in the air, we can give the mullahs and the wahabbis a choice of what condition they'd like their ministries and ministers in Teheran and Riyadh to be in after we liberate those provinces -- no damage to the oil fields and no deaths in the provinces mean no damage to the ministries and no deaths in the capitals. The terror masters will be quite circumspect when they understand that their homes will be in the same condition as the oil fields when we move in, for better or for worse.

Then we'll have lower oil prices thanks to better reservoir management, and that will give the world some real shock and awe. No need to blow up fields or capitals, and we defund the terrorists all the same. It just takes a little more boldness...

Peace-loving, naturally-harmonious Islamofascists

Glenn Reynolds writes about voyeuristic idealization as the reason "Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, does popular culture portray primitives as peace-loving folk living in harmony with nature, as opposed to rapacious and brutal civilization?" Indeed. Beyond Marie Antoinette playing peasant, we see Michael Moore playing insurgent, and the mainstream media treating terrorism as the inevitable reaction to our attempt to bring democracy to the heart of the Middle East. Those peace-loving, naturally-harmonious Islamofascists get plenty of support from popular culture.

Passes for Third-World Oppressors

It seems to [Glenn Reynolds] that events like [IRANIAN PROTESTERS KILLED] would get a lot more attention if they were happening in Iraq. "So why are they being ignored, now?" Glenn asks.

Glenn already pointed to Helen's review of Shelby Steele's extended explanation: White Guilt... being a Third-World imperialist oppressor means never having to say you're sorry. Only Western (white) imperialist oppressors have to say their sorry, and they have to say they're sorry even if they don't kill any demonstrators.


Third world imperialist oppressors can use unearned oil wealth to finance world-wide terror, and the West can only try to take the terrorists out one-by-one in a Long War, instead turning the War on Terror into a Short War by liberating oppressed minorities (Shia Arabs) living in the terror masters' oil provinces and administering the oil wealth to create infrastructure for the local residents instead of funding terror movements around the world.

Those are the rules when White Guilt molds the mainstream media's coverage, and the political class try not to upset the politically correct.

Murawiec on redrawing the lines

In a great interview about the dark kingdom of Saudi Arabia, posted November 22, 2005 at National Review online, headlined“Talibans with Oil and a Good P.R. Company,” the following exchange took place:

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What do you anticipate Saudi Arabia looking like in ten years?

Murawiec: Split in its original component parts conquered between 1910 and 1934 by Ibn Saud as his sword was carving him an empire: Hasa, the predominantly Shiite eastern province with the oil, along the Gulf coast; Hijaz, the Red Sea province open to international trade since the dawn of history; Asir, largely Shiite, brutally wrested from Yemen... and these segments then trying to enter some form of association, perhaps with others in the peninsula. The Soviet Union had been born in 1921, and Yugoslavia too: They were older, when they toppled, than Saudi Arabia now is.

The terror masters in Iran and Saudi Arabia are imperialist oppressors, and having gotten used to oppressing the weak and poor, they'd like nothing more to oppress the strong and rich, like the United States. King Abdullah and Ayatollah Khameini aren't practiced at hiding, like Saddam was, and to save their skins you can be pretty sure they'd issue the orders not to resist the Marines as they liberate the Shia Arabs in Khuzestan and the 82nd Airborned as they liberate the Shia Arabs in Hasa. With the Anglosphere (including India) plus Japan and (Merkel's so good we ought to think about it) Germany administering the oil revenues, there'd be no more unearned wealth backing terrorists or nuclear proliferation in either country.

If Iran's Kurds and Azeris want to join Iraq's Kurds and Azerbaijan's Azeris, then perhaps we could convince them all to join some kind of association with the Persians and the Wahabbis, but it would have to be an association where Islamic radicals from Riyadh and Qom never get their hands on any oil money. If they want to export their fanaticism, let them figure out how to make that pay.

Do you prefer your mullahs ousted or bankrupt?

Unrest in Iran is evident among Persians, Azeris and Arabs, as Gateway Pundit observes. This is scary, as the mullahs have shown themselves more than willing to murder opponents, and reports say that numbers of protesters were killed on the scene or arrested for death by torture. If the Iranians can overthrow the mullahs and create a democratic regime without our help, more power to them. However, my comment at Gateway Pundit was this:

The Persians and the Azeris can take care of themselves, but the Ahwazis ought to get US support to secede from Iran -- Khuzestan province, with its Shia Arab majority, has all Iran's oil. If the Iranian people can't get their act together to take political power away from the mullahs, soon, the Marines can easily take away their financial power by liberating Khuzestan's Shia Arabs from their Persian imperialist oppressors. Once the mullahs can no longer fund Hezbollah, a big part of the world's terrorist infrastructure will go down. (And if the 82nd Airborne liberates the Shia Arabs in Saudi Arabia's Eastern province from the Wahabbi sheiks at the same time, there won't be much terrorist infrastructure left -- moves that let us convert the Long War into a Short War, and that put rogue governments on notice that supporting terror outside your borders can do great damage to your regime.)

Science Non-fiction

Glenn Reynolds' "An Army of Davids" tours the horizon as advancing technologies increasingly let individuals productively move away from mass organizations back to humanity's artesanal roots. He addresses these individuals' principal tools (microchips, software, fiber optics and sensors), their crucial support systems (comfy chairs in third places offering caffeine), their prominent applications (news and analysis, entertainment and fashions, security), and new tools that will empower their crafts in the future: nanotech, biotech, and spacetech. He extrapolates these advances towards a new horizon: the Singularity, where tools themselves become sentient and design even newer tools taking our technology beyond human ken.

Reynolds' keen eye highlights numerous anecdotes that illustrate his theses well. The huge information flow he has attracted with his influential commentary on current events at his Instapundit blog serves his book readers well. His blog readers send him hundreds of emails a day with news about his wide-ranging interests, which season his own ongoing search for valuable reading and, increasingly, audio and video materials about those interests. With clever turns of phrase, he gives readers his own perspective on those stories, building up a strong case for his own general optimism for the direction technology is taking humanity.

He chooses his aphorists well, writing about and quoting many analysts who pithily shed light about the trends he finds compelling. For those who want a deeper analysis, he provides many references to the analysts he respects on his chosen topics. He is quite fair in discussing the ideas of technological pessimists, honestly admitting the dangers that arise when evil individuals have the same access to powerful tools as the good. If you end up sharing his optimism about these trends, it's not because he has only presented one side of the story.

And just what is Reynolds' story? He describes the humanity's transition from the small scale enterprises characterizing the hundreds of centuries from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution to the Dilbert Interlude of large scale enterprise encompassing the two centuries past, and then back to small scale enterprises again coordinated by the power of microchips, software, and fiber optics. He tells it with rich, lively illustrations and great sympathy for its participants. Importantly, he focuses on how this affects us in America today, and how it's likely to change America going forward. His focus on America leaves out a lot -- in terms of global population, the huge and ongoing shift of Chinese off the farms and into new industrial enterprises (Dilbert lives!) shows that industrialization is far from over -- but does effectively capture the leading edge of this shift in the efficient economic scale for various activities.

Reynolds tells his story pretty much wearing his blogger/journalist hat. He's a lawyer by trade, but he doesn't use the law as an analytical framework very much. His discussion of the comfy chair revolution ends up at the boundaries of acceptable public conduct, and his discussion of home-made content ends up at Big Media's regulatory restrictions, but generally he focuses on observations that appeal to a wider public, and even where he gets into these specialized discussions, you can certainly argue that the wider public's interests would be better served in it took an interest in these kinds of regulatory issues. Most of what he includes is "gee whiz, that's really neat."

In terms of tying it all together, his Army of Davids theme is very successful. The Internet and blogging have enabled ad-hoc coalitions to quickly form around important subjects and bring effective pressure to bear on institutions that previously enjoyed immunity from public pressure. He lists several instances where people in pajamas took on the suits and won, and since his book came out, they just keep coming. Hilton Hotel's Brian Kelleher, for example, might have behaved quite differently if he read AoD before his email account crashed with protests about Fran O'Brien's' closing, and the Hilton Corporations of the world will find it a lot harder to recover from their missteps now that bloggers can get inside their decision cycle.

Still, Reynolds could have enriched his Army of Davids theme even more by discussing Chris Anderson's Long Tail analysis. Perhaps because he thinks of economics as equilibrium and learning curves as military, he missed taking his connection of diversity as a consequence of capitalism with the possibilities for corps, divisions, regiments, battalions, companies, platoons, squads, and fire teams of Davids. More analysis of how the Internet unites and empowers small groups to pursue their own distinct interests definitely could have improved the analysis, and would have highlighted the diversity that characterizes the blogosphere between the occasional blogswarm that groups everyone together. And it does take a blogswarm to bring down a goliath.

One of the neat things about industrialization was that it finally allowed great designs to be mass-produced, so that rather than buying an indifferently designed pistol from your local artisan, you could buy a masterpiece of design from Sam Colt. That doesn't mean that industrialists never produced schlock, but the onset of aggregation, uniformity and economies of scale in the 19th and 20th centuries brought us some wonderful benefits that we still enjoy when great designs are mass produced. Where diversity, variety and efficiences in small-scale and one-off production pay off is in trying out new possibilities to find the important innovations that will captivate a broad public. People increasingly can make a living with the small successes thanks to the long tail, and comfortably make a lot more of the trials that we inescapably have to attempt before something big comes along to change the terms the goliaths operate on.

All those little trials attempted by all those Davids ensure that breakthroughs keep on coming, and the breakthroughs fuel economic growth. Reynolds isn't an economist, but one hopes he could take the time to learn about churn from Michael Cox and Donal Hicks and combinatorially-growing economic diversity from Stuart Kauffman and John Holland. John Holland's comments on software improvements versus hardware improvements might give him a useful perspective to consider Kurzweil's analysis about the Singularity. AI's progress simply hasn't kept pace with Moore's Law. and the fact that we'll have faster and cheaper processing power doesn't mean that computers will develop design abilities or self-awareness. Those combinatorially-growing possibilities leave a lot decision space to explore. By comparison, chess is child's play, so that when we start asking AI to deal with the real world without our language instincts, we're going to have to laugh at their stumbles. Looking through the warehouses full of failed consumer products or the crazy patents people spent good money to file will seem like solid common sense in comparison.

For someone without formal economic training, Reynolds does pick up on some very good points. In terms of analyzing new technologies, stasists tend to focus on unknown costs to scare the rest of us away from floating any trial balloons. Like a good dynamist, Reynolds rightly notes that the benefits are also unknown, and may make any risky trials well worth taking. Stasists underestimate the number of good people out there trying to make new technologies serve mankind, whether motivated by profit opportunities or altruism. There's a natural bias for people to extract the good that technologies offer us, and Reynolds picks up on that optimistic bias. He has a very nice discussion on prizes, too, as a economical way of motivating people to look for good things.

He misses some points too, though. Thousands of artisans may take away a bit of Budweiser's market at the margins, but brewing beer isn't an activity that's enjoyed declining costs. You're not going to see a new brewer come along and sweep Bud aside. Info processing has had huge declines in costs, though, letting the producers of "Open Water" spend weekends in the Bahamas and come home with footage that can put Hollywood studios to shame. Glenn doesn't properly distinguish between the impact of the different kinds of Davids. The Open Water folks have created a mass household in a way the local brewer never will.

This carries over into his take on the impacts of future technologies as well. Nanotech and biotech are essentially information-processing technologies that are destined to generate enormous transformations of just what people do, generating tremendous opportunities for what Jane Jacobs characterized as new work. Spacetech, on the other hand, is a matter-moving technology. While space elevators are sure to provide dramatic decreases in costs per pound to reach orbit, it's not clear what matter is out in space that can't be found more conveniently here on Earth. As geology and geophysics advance, we're finding hugely-rich mineral resources under just a few feet of seawater. For oil, this hasn't kept resources from turning into reserves and production. For metals, a few feet of seawater might as well put those resources on the far side of the moon in terms of our likelihood of ever producing from them. Earth mining is likely to stay more efficient than space mining for a very long time. Certainly the costs of providing air to miners in space aren't likely to be competitive any time soon.

And if space is mainly a tourist business, which does seem viable as combinatorially-advancing technologies put geometrically-increasing wealth in the hands of more and more Davids who will buy air in outer space, it doesn't seem too likely to protect humanity from some galloping plague. Commercial ties make the remotest settlements vulnerable, as permafrost burials from the 1918 flu epidemic show. If the government's going to invest in technologies to keep humanity going in any event, the money ought to go into subsidizing good guys biotech so the keep ahead of the virus hackers, rather than encouraging pleasure jaunts to Jupiter.

That's not to say we don't need to occupy the high ground. For defense, space offers unparalleled dominance. Turn Project Orion over to the Navy, and we'll see nuclear-powered spacecraft carriers guarding our shores and commerce from any physical attacks, and have a way to reach out and touch anyone anywhere who tries to sneak in with infotech, nanotech, or biotech subversion. The riches created by an Army of Davids exploring the possibilities opened up by collapsing costs in all these information-processing technologies will make that affordable, especially with space elevators to cheaply take the bombs up without setting any off in the atmosphere.

Reynolds' merits in this work far outweigh any lacunae from his somewhat imperfect understanding of and attention to economics. He's right on the money in trusting our security to packs educated by wargaming, rather than bureaucratic shepherds checking little old ladies for shoebombs. Horizontal knowledge and swarming are going to make those herds incredibly powerful, and not just against terrorists. Politicians are starting to learn just what Porkbusters are capable of. We're entering into a golden era where economic diversity leads to rapid stable growth, as Davids keep needing to hire more people to take advantage of all their inventions and discoveries. And they won't be able to hire them unless they're "..helping people to do what they want to do, not getting them to do what you want them to," as Reynolds says. The Singularity it's not, but we're very likely to appreciate the advent of those projuvenation technologies that let us stick around to see it all (and if you don't know about that, Reynolds gives you a nice introduction).

So, read the Army of Davids and see where the future might be taking us. Just take it with a grain of salt here and there. Reynolds always has at least the gist of what's going on, if not the exact details. He's already living much of what will be the future for many of us. As William Gibson said many times, "As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." And Reynolds was pretty darn close when he put the words "The future has already arrived -- it's just not evenly distributed" in Gibson's mouth.

Liberation Means Non-Proliferation

Saudi Arabia and its neighbors are talking about buying nukes with their oil money, because Iran is building nukes with theirs. Saudi Arabia's oil-producing Eastern province is full of Shia Arabs who hate their Wahabbi imperialist oppressors, as is Iran's oil-producing Khuzestan province, whose Shia Arabs hate their Persian imperialist oppressors.

None of the Shia Arabs are talking about buying or building nukes. Perhaps it's time for the 82nd Airborne to liberate the Eastern province Shiites while the Marines liberate the Khuzestan Shiites. With no more money flowing to the Wahabbis or Persians, the War on Terror would pretty much be over (it doesn't have to be a Long War -- we only make it one by giving our enemies sanctuaries).

With the Anglosphere plus Japan administering the oil revenues to ensure transparency, the Middle Eastern infrastructure boom and reduced geopolitical risks would be good for the whole world economy.

So, let's do it before any more nations start brandishing nukes.