Clarifying statement from Iran:

"In our country there is freedom of speech, but not freedom for corruption."

That sums up expansionist Islam's proposition to the world rather nicely. What all these bombs are about.

The corruption in question is being a dog or dog owner (yes they want to arrest the dogs too), though that's incidental. Their endless laundry list of wrongs to be righted doesn't begin or end with dogs.

If only we'd give in, they could stop the bombing. And at that point we'll still have as much free speech as we like as long as we agree with them. Bastards. Arf!

Terrorist Exit Strategies?

Tiny Israel with 5 million Jews and no oil has overawed the surrounding Arabs for 30 years. The Arabs vastly outnumber the Israelis; Egypt alone outnumbers it more than 10 to 1. Yet they can only grumble in impotence. It's not primarily a question of American aid; Egypt alone receives about the same amount of aid Israel does. Countries with freer speech, freer markets, and democratically elected governments simply have more vitality. They're more competent. They're not fuck ups. Dictatorships are formidable in concept but brittle and feeble in practice. Add a dose of Islamic theocratic insanity and you can take the inherent incompetence of dictatorships to a whole new level.

Given the American national character, is an endless series of terrorist attacks against it likelier to turn it into an Israel, or a New Zealand? Need I answer this, anyone? Given this, if you are plotting Arab terrorist strategy, is it wise to play blacksmith and hammer the US into a sword that would be 46 times the size of the one that has been intimidating you for the past 30 years?

Israel served a certain purpose as the "guy we love to hate", for consumption by the disaffected Arab masses, to deflect attention from their failed governments. They may find an enraged United States overqualified for this job. There's not only the question of sheer size. Even the little 2 percent guy had a hand and a half tied behind his back the whole time. Who will be tying America's hands?

Do they think then, that if they cannot pacify the US with attacks, that they can ultimately destroy it? In the limit, as mathematicians might say, with this limit being the unlikely event that they are able to bring the US face to face with extinction, they should consider, among other things, the US fleet of nuclear submarines, and what the US might feel compelled to do in righteous self-defense or righteous vengeance.

They have embarked on an enterprise that is exceedingly dangerous to them and from which I for one can make out no rational exit strategy.

Terrorist Strategies: What Next?

Is it accidental that this latest wave of terrorist attacks is occurring just after the US Congress voted approval of military action?

This has been my working assumption on the best terrorist strategies, under two scenarios:

Scenario 1: US pulls in its horns and tries to be nice:

• continuing "open season" on US, with the Arab Street becoming only more radical and exultantly anti-American with each attack.
• conventional rather than WMD attacks for a good long time, since otherwise they'd be forcing the dog to get up and start fighting back. Meanwhile the Arabs could be building their own WMD deterrent capability.
• extra-mean attacks after any momentarily vigorous US reactions

Scenario 2: US looks like it might smite someone:

• hold off during the divisive debate
  since otherwise you just strengthen the pro-smiting crowd
• once it looks like it's going to happen:
  some small-scale attack to remind us what they can do
• once attack begins:
  escalating series of major attacks starting that day or the next,
  step-laddered to make it seem like it's only
  going to get worse.
  but shooting their wad after 2 or 3 waves.
  

In other words I suspect that our long-mooted attack on Iraq is partly responsible for our unreasonably long reprieve from attack.

I'm very definitely expecting a wave of major attacks once the invasion of Iraq begins, which is why I'm not buying U.S. stocks yet. I might start buying after the first few attacks, when presumably everyone else will be selling. But like pulling off a bandaid, it's best to get this over with sooner rather than later. They'd eventually be happening anyway no matter what we did, and the WMD capability of Iran and Iraq et al will only be increasing with time.

The basic strategic error the terrorists have made, however, is that prior to 9/11 they had their best-case United States. a hegemon that in spite of its unparalleled power was painfully self-conscious and guilt-ridden, allergic to colonialism and sure to shrink in horror from any thought of brutal Roman-style retribution. This America may not have been entirely to their liking, but it was the best they could hope for, and in light of US power and how antithetical radical Islam is to US values, they would have been wiser to tolerate the gift horse rather than poke at its gums.

Perhaps even more importantly they had a Western chattering class devoted to self-criticism and reflexively sympathetic to any feisty third-world reproach. They could swallow almost any pill so long as it had a bitter coating.

But as the terrorists unite this chattering class against them, I think they will be amazed at how their legitimacy crumbles, both domestically and internationally. To a great extent I think the Sontags of the world have provided a sort of shade in which this harsh medieval throwback of a faith could flower.

But with each attack this shade will be diminishing. So much light has already been brought to bear not just on radical Islam but on the Koran itself in the past year. My own reading of both is that more light is not the friend of either.

For now the West still teeters, with perhaps 60-70% of the chattering class still (wrongly in my view) believing the West can afford the luxury of further neglect, inattention, and appeasement.

Feature Idea: Monetizing Blogging Via Pay-For-Pindown

I suggested this to one of the founders of bloggingnetwork.com over lunch a couple months ago. Don't know if anything will come of it, but it's something many popular blogs might usefully employ and I invite anyone to take this idea and run with it.

The idea is you pay a fee (say $100) to a popular blogger in exchange for this series of events occurring prominently in his blog and appearing indelibly in its archive:

1. You get x hundred words to state your case and question.
2. The blogger responds.
3. You get another y hundred words for a rebuttal.
4. The blogger is then free to continue on with his blog, which could include further rebuttals or whatever he likes.

A free market would operate here, in that prices would vary by blog, and a blogger might reserve the right to reject anyone's business, before or after seeing the question. Since you need a way for bloggers to control for content they deem too objectionable, probably there has to be a way for the blogger to cancel the entire transaction even at the rebuttal stage, though this would involve a full refund. To control for gratuitous cancellations where the question and rebuttal were just too good and made the blogger look bad, there should be a certified record somewhere of the question/response/rebuttal, so even if the exchange is suppressed from appearing on the blog itself, it could be linked to and provably presented to the public elsewhere.

Yes I might donate $50 in soft money to a political party, but for the same price I might prefer to inject a well-thought-out factoid into the heart of my opponents' lair.

I think we'd all love to pin down our favorite "love-to-hate-them" ideological opponents. As a side benefit, this might increase cross-fertilization between Left and Right. I sometimes worry that since much of blogdom is a preaching to the choir, lots of good thought and analysis simply ends up on the floor.

Since I'm skeptical about cash subscription fees ever working (it's hard to compete with free), monetizing blogging will have to use more devious side methods. Beyond hard cash, you could also look at using a virtual currency for this a la frequent flyer miles.

There are many differences of opinion on the relative worth of different corporations, just as there are many differences of opinion on the optimal strategy to pursue in Iraq. And I think measures like this could be one of the first tentative steps toward bringing that same market discipline to the general problem of opinion clarification and coordination.