Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Drones Are Weapons for Individualists

Pacifistic liberals and libertarians (who are a subset of liberals) tend to decry America’s unique and novel campaign of drone bombing against Islamic terrorists. This method was explicitly chosen to play to America’s military strengths (air superiority against weak enemies) while minimizing exposure of the Pentagon to domestic criticism regarding civilian deaths in bombing campaigns.

Since the Vietnam War ended, America shifted from holding civilian death tolls as a strategic objective to making it one of the highest priorities to minimize civilian casualties. This flip happened around the same time that the New Left ascended into authority, deposing the older faction of more collectivist leftists.

Under the new way of thinking, when the United States goes to war, it doesn’t engage in total war, which considers foreign civilian populations as legitimate targets. It instead goes to war against individuals whom the state determines are ‘bad.’ The two Gulf wars were fought against Saddam Hussein and his military. When civilians were harmed, as they were through the trade embargoes, they were not harmed as the primary objective — they were harmed in the process of pushing Saddam the individual out of power.

The War on Terror was also conceived of as a fight against individuals with the religious motivations behind Islamic terror being considered non-material, at least under the official belief system as communicated by the public. Drone warfare — really radio-controlled rather than autonomous — was employed in conjunction with signals intercepts to go after the individuals perceived as responsible for terror attacks against Westerners. This was also supported by an ideological campaign to promote ‘moderate’ Islam which condemned rather than justifying terrorist attacks against infidels.

Most politically educated people see this program as incoherent and hypocritical for various reasons, but I don’t want to get into that in too much detail in this post.

The ethic of drone warfare holds that, for some mysterious reason, ‘radical’ (really mainstream) Muslims who are beyond the reach of propaganda will, out of sheer evil, attack Western interests to further their political goals. The ethical way to fight insurgencies and light infantry, in the American mind, is to continue killing individuals identified by intelligence intercepts until enough individuals freely decide that they should instead support a ‘moderate’ Islam — which is to say a politically and religiously neutered Islam which can cooperate with the global liberal order.

Thinking about it from a historical perspective, it’s entirely crazy. Killing individual fighters doesn’t break the will of a population to resist. It also doesn’t really punish a population for sheltering a resistance. Further, it misunderstands the nature of ideas and religious faith. Rather than an isolated criminal tendency of a ‘few bad apples,’ Islam is an aggressive religion which has warred with its neighbors for dominance for more than 1,000 years. Creating hundreds of martyrs is nothing for a culture with a history of being willing to sacrifice tens of millions of martyrs in the cause of the faith.

Rather than taking a Max Boot-style position that total war is really a good and admirable thing, we should instead consider some of the larger problems that have emerged in the conduct of war since the emergence of popular government.

Limited war was more symbolic than it was about entirely annihilating civilian populations or attempting to completely alter underlying civil societies. Up until World War I — and even during the popular Napoleonic wars with introduced the mass levee — it was possible for civilians to spectate battles safely. The conflicts may have been terrible — and sometimes spilled over into civil conflict among noncombatants — but it was one still bound by laws of warfare.

Having lost this method of resolving conflicts between elites, all wars are now, in a sense, total wars. The second Iraq war’s chief objective was to profoundly change the culture and moral beliefs of the Iraqi people, as America also attempted to do in Afghanistan. This was more ambitious even than colonialists, who only sought to command the state, while leaving civil society mostly to itself, skillfully managed by administrators. Ironically, this was more successful at inducing cultural change, as the colonized naturally sought to mimic the ways of their rulers. By imposing self-rule, the Americans encouraged the natives to, in the language of American self-help, be more true to themselves.

Comparing the Predator drone to the B-17, the B-17 was designed to destroy the enemy population, with the enemy population itself defined as a strategic target. It says “the individual is irrelevant, what matters is the destruction of the mass to break the general will.”

The drone denies the existence of a culture beyond the individual — it says “there are no bad groups, there are only bad individuals.” While the B-17 had only a primitive sight for targeting and rarely was capable of precision targeting, the drone has a high resolution camera, and advanced communication makes it possible for pilots to make highly considered decisions about whom to kill and at what time.

Radio controlled drones also give non-warrior political administrators the illusion of direct control over the conduct of war. Trying to fight a war by conducting a series of assassinations is strange, but also sort of understandable for a race of bureaucrats who want to minimize danger to themselves while also failing to achieve anything resembling a strategic objective.

It would, in fact, be better to achieve the strategic objectives of the “War on Terror” while minimizing fighting, but that wouldn’t create so many lucrative jobs for so many bureaucrats who are essentially pretending hard to be protecting the West from Islamic terror.

The larger problems which tend to be ignored are the ramshackle series of alliances that the US began putting together after the collapse of the European empires, and the particular imposition of the Carter Doctrine mandating that the US intervene in defense of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies. This licensed bad behavior on the part of those monarchies, and the maintenance of that clueless alliance has also lead to the West’s absurdly accommodating immigration policies for fear of giving offense to the non-colonies that we guarantee defense to. America bears the costs of running Gulf colonies — providing them with guarantees of defense — without having the sanity to demand the traditional powers of colonizers. This included the expropriation of American assets in those countries, doubling down on the insults.

Whenever this arrangement comes to be threatened, American talking heads will tend to whinge about the ‘economic benefits’ of the enabling alliance, or appeals to vague notions of ‘regional stability.’

This enabling regime also prevents other countries from effectively defending themselves when attacked by Saudi-inspired-and-financed fanatics. They can operate with virtual impunity (at least collectively if not individually), with the only way for states or groups of people to respond are ineffectual complaints, frequently suppressed by states.

These places grew rich thanks to the American guarantee of security and technical assistance provided, besides.

This pattern is as common to the approach of popular government to foreign relations as it is to domestic policy.

The US gives these countries a guaranteed alliance, goes to war at public expense on the behalf of those states, and demands little other than the maintenance of the petrodollar system to buttress its top position on the international financial stage. This is at least the surface justification — America could also just try pursuing a sounder monetary policy than other countries rather than relying on an insane and frequently malfunctioning Rube Goldberg apparatus to prop up its financial system.

Drone warfare is sensationalized propaganda that encourages people and elites alike to focus on small, non-essential issues while ignoring the larger picture. The larger issue is the special relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, and the feckless management of it by America’s itinerant political managers and permanent bureaucrats alike. When that alliance should have broken down catastrophically in 2001, it was instead reinforced multiple times over.

In all this the drone is an excellent symbol of the way the people in today’s government tend to think and what they focus on. It’s also fascinating to see how a weapon developed to flatter the sensibilities of the New Left managed to also come under severe criticism by those same people as inhumane implements used against merely misguided people who are probably really hippies on the inside. The defenders of this method of fighting also themselves minimize the larger picture of what’s going on, because it’s too complex and requires too much background knowledge to fit into a short segment on a shouting-head TV show.

Filed Under: War

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Why They Sent Ahmed To Juvie

Effete technicians and tech-bubble speculators everywhere are angry that a Muslim teenager in Texas was arrested for bringing a circuit board to school.

Ahmed Mohamed is a maker in the making. A young genius if you ask his cousin. Mohamed builds his own radios and Bluetooth speakers and likes to tinker on his go-kart because he wants to be an inventor when he grows up. So, the 9th-grader brought a clock he made to his new Texas school with the hope of impressing his teachers. Instead, the Muslim boy was arrested by Texas police after teachers worried that his clock was actually a bomb.

The arrest came 14 years and four days after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. This is the America in which the 14-year-old Mohamed lives. Where the most common images of Muslims on television depict them wearing orange jumpsuits when not being viewed through the targeting sight of a drone. A country where young men with brown skin and odd-sounding names are potential terrorists lest “real Americans” be diligent.

Mohamed’s America is the same country that’s struggling with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The most recent PISA results, which measure the competencies of 15-year-olds, ranked the US a sad 35th out of 64 countries in math, and 27th in science. A Pew study published in February with a focus on K-12 STEM education showed little progress.

Blah blah blah.

The Verge is supposedly a trade magazine for the technology industry, but it can’t help but put forth a whole lot of corrosive criticism of America and the core American population.

There’s nothing especially objectionable about a Muslim boy who tinkers with electronics. It’s also a typical funny illustration of the way that school teachers are terrified of any display of initiative on the part of one of their inmate-students.

But this system that places bureaucratic administrators in charge of students is the very system built and maintained by progressives. The results on science-tests that this writer decries are the results of progressive policies, yet he ascribes the failures of these policies on the evil thoughts of the core population. We should add that modern science exists entirely because of the Western tradition — nothing like it was developed in the Arab world or Asia, and the English speaking people came to dominate the world in large part because the English, specifically, kicked off the revolution in the arts and sciences through the institution of the Royal Society.

The reason why the school sent Ahmed into detention over a circuit board is because civil society has broken down to the level to which behavior which deviates from lockstep conformity expected by governing institutions tends to be regarded with the most severe suspicion. Common culture has been diluted to nothing, as peoples from all over the globe have been imported to live together in close proximity without common moral or cultural beliefs & practices to bind them together.

Ahmed can learn how to build all the bombs — or clocks — that his heart desires if he goes back to his homeland, without any of the nasty and oppressive Texan school administrators to bother him about it.

It’s natural for people from Texas to be paranoid about people coming in from strange lands dominated by religious leaders who support the killing of infidels with a reputation for constructing shoddy bombs. It’s also reasonable to be paranoid about attacks from that group because Texas has been subjected to such attacks repeatedly from Muslims, as recently as last March. The 2009 rampage at Ft. Hood in Texas was also conducted by a Muslim. It’s entirely reasonable to deny would-be terrorists a domestic population that’s more likely to be friendly to them. This sort of pluralism, while making people feel good as a high expression of the never-quite-fully-realized ideals of religious toleration is destructive to social order.

Ahmed might be a good boy, but not of such enormous value that we need to alter the rest of society and condemn the inclinations of the majority in order to accommodate the Ahmeds while enduring the occasional Tsarnaev bombing. Multiculturalism eliminates any shared sense of rules beyond an ever increasing tangle of bureaucratic doctrines. The administrators who sent him to a detention center were almost certainly following strict rules about how to respond to students bringing unidentifiable electronic devices into school — those rules having been created by hysterical liberals terrified by the acts of terror committed by youths addled by prescription drugs and seeking a glorious death with huge media attention.

In order to make room for Ahmed, Jamal, J’miriquoi, Running Bear, Jorge, and Moonbeam, we subject all of them — including lil’ Johnny the racist cracker — to the same set of regulations, because we see all of them as potential malefactors to be treated uniformly by a blind system.

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Popular Government Is Active Government

Drawing support from the great masses of the people, a popular politician needs to be continually in the public eye. One of the ways that he does this is by passing legislation, implementing projects, and making speeches about this thing and that thing.

Under monarchy and other forms of private government, the sovereign and his agents are also omnipresent — but there is no illusion that he’s a public servant. The people serve the sovereign rather than the other way around.

In practice, people even under popular government do serve elected officials. The projects that politicians work on tend to be either wasteful or re-distributive. But the spectacle that they need to maintain their support requires that they be always introducing something new and creating a mythology around the policy. For example, the governor of New York — the latest member of the Cuomo clan — is trying to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15/hour.

The minimum wage is an interesting case of a policy that has relatively little support among economists, but near universal support among non-economist textbook writers. The logical argument against the minimum wage is airtight, but the sophistic argument for the minimum wage is very persuasive. Under democracy, sophistic arguments for projects will almost always defeat logical arguments against those projects.

When the better course of action is to do nothing, people reigning over a popular government will almost never take that option. Inactivity would take them out of the public eye, and give an opportunity to other ambitious people within the political system to displace them. Bad law piles upon bad law while useless public projects pile up to flatter the reputations of demagogues and faceless state bureaucracies.

Reversals of failed policies also provide some essential push and pull within the system. It’s often possible to win popularity with the mob by reversing policies that never should have been implemented int he first place. This makes it much more difficult for the civilization to accumulate the trappings of a long-lived culture — popular government tends to construct ramshackle buildings which look impressive in the first years, but then rapidly decays afterward.

As the Revolution ages, many of its old policies, much like its physical representations on Earth, need new coats of paint and renovations to maintain the pretense that this time, they’ll get it right. The failures of public education transform into new redemptive pushes through new slogans and testing regimes along with new infusions of treasure. The opposition gins up enthusiasm by resisting the new push while rarely questioning the larger systemic failure. The Revolution finds nothing to revolt against except itself, and in the process, it lays waste to everything around it.

While older forms of government have their faults, what they don’t entirely rest on is ginning up popular enthusiasm in perpetuity. The public venerates the king for being more than they venerate him for doing. He can also expect to suffer from mistakes — namely, that he’ll be deposed by a foreign potentate, his own aristocracy, or a member of his own family. He carries downside risk, which makes him relatively less cautious and ambitious to change the fundamental nature of mankind. Kings never believed that they could end war or poverty in the way that presidents have. Their concerns were, at once, more worldly and more spiritual at the same time.

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