We're Winning the War on Terror
Mar. 19th, 2008 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIt's the five year Iraq anniversary, and if you've read any part of Bush's speech, you know how our Commander-in-Chief feels about this. And because of this, you get random, half-coherent ranting.
It galls me to admit that Bush is right about one thing; in the past years we have won a strategic victory in the War on Terror. Well, that's not the part that galls me. What galls me is that he clearly has no idea why.
The War on Terror, as we've chosen to call it, is probably the most important struggle happening in the world today. It is being fought in almost two hundred countries by six billion people, almost none of whom have the faintest inkling that they're involved in it.
To understand this, you have to understand where the War on Terror began.
You can go back to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, to the Infitada, or back into the history of the fractious Afghan tribes who have been killing each other since shortly after they discovered stone tools, but the real War on Terror began in the late 1980s. There may have been hidden trends, laid down for millenia, but it was not until the Berlin Wall fell, until the long embrace of the Cold War had faded into nothing but a bad memory, that the real war began. When the West launched a massive first strike on the rest of the world.
It must have been disconcerting for the residents of places like Saudi Arabia. One day you're living the life, perhaps not that your ancestors lived, but one near to the land (especially when it blows in your face), and the one your parents prepared you for, when suddenly the Americans were there. Of course, the Americans always had been there; rain or shine, night or day, but they had always been more distant, more remote, less threatening. But suddenly there was no more Soviet bulwark to hide behind, no more obfuscation between you and the world, and there the Americans were. There were the kids from your neighborhood, wearing shirts that said Nike on the front, listening to American music, watching movies made in Hollywood. There were your women, wearing fashions that might have been at home in New York, buying washing machines and dryers from American companies. There were your friends, driving foreign cars, buying bigger, Americanized televisions.
And you couldn't stop them. You could close the door, but the Americans came into your house, through the cable to your TV, bombarding your family with Mickey Mouse, and Bart Simpson, and CNN. And they came through the air, to your radio, and sometimes through your neighbor's walls if they had the volume up high enough. And one day it occurred to you, as you dug through shirts with American logos on them, under pairs of used Levis, while listening to American-produced movies on your television, that America had invaded your country. And they hadn't done it with bombs, with knives, or anything so crass. They had invaded your country and begun to make you just like them.
Because that, at heart, is what the War on Terror is all about. All those people who woke up one morning and suddenly realized that the world was on their doorstep, and not content with that had already picked the lock, grabbed the morning paper, and was drinking your coffee on your couch in the living room. Suddenly their world was changing, and not like it had always changed, but in a breakneck, topsy-turvy fashion that tore down everything that had come before and replaced it with something that was, at best temporary. The Machine had come for them.
The Machine is the most dangerous artifact ever constructed, and the most destructive. It came like a tornado and left devastation strewn in its wake. Families who had spent generations raising Water Buffalo as draft animals in Asia were displaced by the mechanical tractor in the space of a generation, masters of traditional arts found themselves unemployed, or worse breaking their back to make knockoff works for western tourists. Entire cities dissolved as their entire reason for existence, their economic lifeblood, was made obsolete by the fact that factories in Taiwan could do what they could at half the price. Entire cultures were submerged in the passing of the Machine, existing now only in history books. Anthropologists struggled valiantly as first one nation, then another, disappeared into the mists of history.
But the Machine is not evil. The Machine is not good. The Machine just is. Many have ascribed to the Machine some innate malevolence, some driving will, implied that it is a puppet of international cabals, or (a favorite) of the United States. But this is a lie: the Machine just is. Even the United States, which seems to dominate the Machine is but a slave to its progress, a vulnerable tool that is used more than it uses.
The Machine is many things, but there is one thing that we do know about it, the most important thing, you cannot fight the Machine.
Because the Machine is more than just some abstract concept, more than just commercialization, more the fashion and style and gossip. Have you ever sent someone a link to a webpage that you thought they would enjoy? Have you ever recommended a book, a movie, or a play? Because if you have, you too are part of the Machine. The Machine is the sum total of human interaction, the overarching bridge by which a species of social animal influences its fellows, by which we communicate, not only our words, but our ideas, our preferences, our likes and dislikes. The Machine is older than any of us; perhaps even older than humanity itself, dating back to the age when were just another species of ape. It is a monster, true, an unstoppable monster that has destroyed cultures and civilizations, but it is also at its heart very, very human. It is us, and we are its metallic sinews that stretch as it embraces the world.
This is what the Terrorists, as we now call them, are trying to fight. The ones that we fear, the ones that look outside their local struggles, who dream of hitting America and Europe and other nations far beyond their normal ken, the ones who coordinate attacks all over the globe, who think globally, are just rebels against the relentless path of the Machine. They are striking against the monster that has parked itself outside their door, that is assaulting them with pop music, cartoons, and brand-name clothes. They are the ones who woke up suddenly to find the world had come to them, uprooting their carefully hidden sanctuary to forcibly drag them into a world that was as different as you could get. They are not fighting for some lofty ideal, or to avoid a horrible fate, but simply to dig their heads back into the sand and hide from the future. They fight because, while others have learned to adapt to the Machine, to face the future, they can do no such thing and wish to return to a past that can never be again.
And this is why they will fail. This is why they are losing. They have videotapes of Osama bin Laden preaching at us about the ills of our nations. We have DVDs with CGI graphics, entire seasons of television shows, and special features. They have AK-47s. We have McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Levi, and Nike. They have madmen screaming about interpretations of the Koran. We have Coca-Cola. How can you compete against something that not only packs a fizzy kick, but also rots your teeth? We've got Mickey Mouse for God's sake!
You can't beat the Machine. As long as there are even two people in the world who share with each other, who talk to each other, the Machine, however diminished, survives. And from that small seed it grows, and grows, taking advantage of all our technology, all our knowledge, until it once again wraps the world in its embrace. Unless the Terrorists can cut us apart, separate each human into a separate room and leave them there, they cannot defeat it.
And while they plan this, we are coming for them. We are coming for them with all the fury that we can program into the Machine, with all that we have fed into it. We are bringing with us human rights, and women's rights, and the strange idea that people are people everywhere regardless of the color of their skin or the cut of their hair. Behind the commercialization, the glitz, the glamor, this is what the Machine now threatens. These are the ideas that it now feeds off of, the intoxicating freedom that it brings to those long enchained. A nation at arms can resist the Machine's fashions, its products, its hype, but they cannot stand against the ideas that it brings into battle.
The best they can hope for is that they'll be able to knock down enough supports, destroy enough key networks, that the Machine's progress will be stalled. The Machine has been reborn now, made out of fiberoptic cable and copper wire, a web that allows people in New Delhi to work with people in New York, that allows grandchildren in Iceland to talk to grandparents in China. It now crosses oceans, mountains, and even the void of space with ease, standing astride the world like a colossus, but it is still new in this form, still fragile. And it has given power to those who would see its destruction. Those in Malaysia can now connive with those in Saudi Arabia, planning attacks in Spain. And, as attacks on communication centers have shown, the nature of the Machine is now vulnerable. But each day, that vulnerability shrinks. Once the pathways of communication are open, more of them grow, until it becomes impossible to cut them all. And more diversity, more planning, and more change have made the world's systems more redundant, harder to cripple.
In the end, the best the opposition can hope to do is cut themselves off from the world, to go back to the ways of their ancestors and live in the deserts, alone and forgotten. But even then they must live in eternal dread of the day when their descendants will peer out of their borders and discover a world that has reached out to seize the stars, whose reach and grasp are now unlimited, and fall victim to envy and let the Machine take them again.
This is what the War on Terror is about. It has nothing to do with Islam. If it was not Islamic radicals leading the way it would be some other group, the Luddites, the Hindu radicals, someone. It is the cry of the voiceless, who found themselves caught up in a world that is much smaller than it used to be, but also more impersonal. It is the people who find their values suddenly challenged by imports from another country, who find their jobs and their way of life uprooted by faceless executives in countries they have never visited, who find themselves in the shadow of a developed world that has rendered their opinions moot who are rising to challenge the Machine. And even if they should stop it, even if they should reverse it as the barbarians did when they burned Rome, it will not last. It is a vast struggle between those who have learned to flow with the Machine's whims, to keep themselves true amid its buffeting currents, and those who have chosen to resist it. Perhaps there would be something glorious in those who have refused to bend, who will break instead, if it were not for the fact that they would break others to see themselves unbroken. And the conclusion is already forgone. Should it take a thousand years, the Machine will win.
So yes, we are winning the War on Terror. We win a battle every time someone in one country makes friends with someone in another. We win a battle every time people in different parts of the world combine their skills in business, in pleasure, or for the purpose of helping their fellow man. We win a battle with every phone line that gets put up, every cell phone activated, every computer that signs onto the internet. We win a battle every time a little girl in an intolerant foreign country sees a female scientist on television, or a female detective, or a female pilot, and says "I want to be like that." Every time someone looks beyond their small world and catches a glimpse of what lies beyond, and is fascinated instead of horrified, we win a battle.
We're winning the War on Terror. We're not winning because of what's happening in Iraq, or despite what's happening in Iraq. We're winning regardless of what happens in that particular piece of the world, because the enemy is not trying to achieve a goal, but rather to stop a tide. Already we are struggling to decide who will win, whose figure will be carved on the monument, whose ideals will guide whatever the Machine makes of our disparate world.
And to you who side with the ones who want to go back and pull the covers over their head, instead of facing the reality we live in now, remember that you have had many compatriots throughout history. History has forgotten their names. It will forget yours too.
It galls me to admit that Bush is right about one thing; in the past years we have won a strategic victory in the War on Terror. Well, that's not the part that galls me. What galls me is that he clearly has no idea why.
The War on Terror, as we've chosen to call it, is probably the most important struggle happening in the world today. It is being fought in almost two hundred countries by six billion people, almost none of whom have the faintest inkling that they're involved in it.
To understand this, you have to understand where the War on Terror began.
You can go back to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, to the Infitada, or back into the history of the fractious Afghan tribes who have been killing each other since shortly after they discovered stone tools, but the real War on Terror began in the late 1980s. There may have been hidden trends, laid down for millenia, but it was not until the Berlin Wall fell, until the long embrace of the Cold War had faded into nothing but a bad memory, that the real war began. When the West launched a massive first strike on the rest of the world.
It must have been disconcerting for the residents of places like Saudi Arabia. One day you're living the life, perhaps not that your ancestors lived, but one near to the land (especially when it blows in your face), and the one your parents prepared you for, when suddenly the Americans were there. Of course, the Americans always had been there; rain or shine, night or day, but they had always been more distant, more remote, less threatening. But suddenly there was no more Soviet bulwark to hide behind, no more obfuscation between you and the world, and there the Americans were. There were the kids from your neighborhood, wearing shirts that said Nike on the front, listening to American music, watching movies made in Hollywood. There were your women, wearing fashions that might have been at home in New York, buying washing machines and dryers from American companies. There were your friends, driving foreign cars, buying bigger, Americanized televisions.
And you couldn't stop them. You could close the door, but the Americans came into your house, through the cable to your TV, bombarding your family with Mickey Mouse, and Bart Simpson, and CNN. And they came through the air, to your radio, and sometimes through your neighbor's walls if they had the volume up high enough. And one day it occurred to you, as you dug through shirts with American logos on them, under pairs of used Levis, while listening to American-produced movies on your television, that America had invaded your country. And they hadn't done it with bombs, with knives, or anything so crass. They had invaded your country and begun to make you just like them.
Because that, at heart, is what the War on Terror is all about. All those people who woke up one morning and suddenly realized that the world was on their doorstep, and not content with that had already picked the lock, grabbed the morning paper, and was drinking your coffee on your couch in the living room. Suddenly their world was changing, and not like it had always changed, but in a breakneck, topsy-turvy fashion that tore down everything that had come before and replaced it with something that was, at best temporary. The Machine had come for them.
The Machine is the most dangerous artifact ever constructed, and the most destructive. It came like a tornado and left devastation strewn in its wake. Families who had spent generations raising Water Buffalo as draft animals in Asia were displaced by the mechanical tractor in the space of a generation, masters of traditional arts found themselves unemployed, or worse breaking their back to make knockoff works for western tourists. Entire cities dissolved as their entire reason for existence, their economic lifeblood, was made obsolete by the fact that factories in Taiwan could do what they could at half the price. Entire cultures were submerged in the passing of the Machine, existing now only in history books. Anthropologists struggled valiantly as first one nation, then another, disappeared into the mists of history.
But the Machine is not evil. The Machine is not good. The Machine just is. Many have ascribed to the Machine some innate malevolence, some driving will, implied that it is a puppet of international cabals, or (a favorite) of the United States. But this is a lie: the Machine just is. Even the United States, which seems to dominate the Machine is but a slave to its progress, a vulnerable tool that is used more than it uses.
The Machine is many things, but there is one thing that we do know about it, the most important thing, you cannot fight the Machine.
Because the Machine is more than just some abstract concept, more than just commercialization, more the fashion and style and gossip. Have you ever sent someone a link to a webpage that you thought they would enjoy? Have you ever recommended a book, a movie, or a play? Because if you have, you too are part of the Machine. The Machine is the sum total of human interaction, the overarching bridge by which a species of social animal influences its fellows, by which we communicate, not only our words, but our ideas, our preferences, our likes and dislikes. The Machine is older than any of us; perhaps even older than humanity itself, dating back to the age when were just another species of ape. It is a monster, true, an unstoppable monster that has destroyed cultures and civilizations, but it is also at its heart very, very human. It is us, and we are its metallic sinews that stretch as it embraces the world.
This is what the Terrorists, as we now call them, are trying to fight. The ones that we fear, the ones that look outside their local struggles, who dream of hitting America and Europe and other nations far beyond their normal ken, the ones who coordinate attacks all over the globe, who think globally, are just rebels against the relentless path of the Machine. They are striking against the monster that has parked itself outside their door, that is assaulting them with pop music, cartoons, and brand-name clothes. They are the ones who woke up suddenly to find the world had come to them, uprooting their carefully hidden sanctuary to forcibly drag them into a world that was as different as you could get. They are not fighting for some lofty ideal, or to avoid a horrible fate, but simply to dig their heads back into the sand and hide from the future. They fight because, while others have learned to adapt to the Machine, to face the future, they can do no such thing and wish to return to a past that can never be again.
And this is why they will fail. This is why they are losing. They have videotapes of Osama bin Laden preaching at us about the ills of our nations. We have DVDs with CGI graphics, entire seasons of television shows, and special features. They have AK-47s. We have McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Levi, and Nike. They have madmen screaming about interpretations of the Koran. We have Coca-Cola. How can you compete against something that not only packs a fizzy kick, but also rots your teeth? We've got Mickey Mouse for God's sake!
You can't beat the Machine. As long as there are even two people in the world who share with each other, who talk to each other, the Machine, however diminished, survives. And from that small seed it grows, and grows, taking advantage of all our technology, all our knowledge, until it once again wraps the world in its embrace. Unless the Terrorists can cut us apart, separate each human into a separate room and leave them there, they cannot defeat it.
And while they plan this, we are coming for them. We are coming for them with all the fury that we can program into the Machine, with all that we have fed into it. We are bringing with us human rights, and women's rights, and the strange idea that people are people everywhere regardless of the color of their skin or the cut of their hair. Behind the commercialization, the glitz, the glamor, this is what the Machine now threatens. These are the ideas that it now feeds off of, the intoxicating freedom that it brings to those long enchained. A nation at arms can resist the Machine's fashions, its products, its hype, but they cannot stand against the ideas that it brings into battle.
The best they can hope for is that they'll be able to knock down enough supports, destroy enough key networks, that the Machine's progress will be stalled. The Machine has been reborn now, made out of fiberoptic cable and copper wire, a web that allows people in New Delhi to work with people in New York, that allows grandchildren in Iceland to talk to grandparents in China. It now crosses oceans, mountains, and even the void of space with ease, standing astride the world like a colossus, but it is still new in this form, still fragile. And it has given power to those who would see its destruction. Those in Malaysia can now connive with those in Saudi Arabia, planning attacks in Spain. And, as attacks on communication centers have shown, the nature of the Machine is now vulnerable. But each day, that vulnerability shrinks. Once the pathways of communication are open, more of them grow, until it becomes impossible to cut them all. And more diversity, more planning, and more change have made the world's systems more redundant, harder to cripple.
In the end, the best the opposition can hope to do is cut themselves off from the world, to go back to the ways of their ancestors and live in the deserts, alone and forgotten. But even then they must live in eternal dread of the day when their descendants will peer out of their borders and discover a world that has reached out to seize the stars, whose reach and grasp are now unlimited, and fall victim to envy and let the Machine take them again.
This is what the War on Terror is about. It has nothing to do with Islam. If it was not Islamic radicals leading the way it would be some other group, the Luddites, the Hindu radicals, someone. It is the cry of the voiceless, who found themselves caught up in a world that is much smaller than it used to be, but also more impersonal. It is the people who find their values suddenly challenged by imports from another country, who find their jobs and their way of life uprooted by faceless executives in countries they have never visited, who find themselves in the shadow of a developed world that has rendered their opinions moot who are rising to challenge the Machine. And even if they should stop it, even if they should reverse it as the barbarians did when they burned Rome, it will not last. It is a vast struggle between those who have learned to flow with the Machine's whims, to keep themselves true amid its buffeting currents, and those who have chosen to resist it. Perhaps there would be something glorious in those who have refused to bend, who will break instead, if it were not for the fact that they would break others to see themselves unbroken. And the conclusion is already forgone. Should it take a thousand years, the Machine will win.
So yes, we are winning the War on Terror. We win a battle every time someone in one country makes friends with someone in another. We win a battle every time people in different parts of the world combine their skills in business, in pleasure, or for the purpose of helping their fellow man. We win a battle with every phone line that gets put up, every cell phone activated, every computer that signs onto the internet. We win a battle every time a little girl in an intolerant foreign country sees a female scientist on television, or a female detective, or a female pilot, and says "I want to be like that." Every time someone looks beyond their small world and catches a glimpse of what lies beyond, and is fascinated instead of horrified, we win a battle.
We're winning the War on Terror. We're not winning because of what's happening in Iraq, or despite what's happening in Iraq. We're winning regardless of what happens in that particular piece of the world, because the enemy is not trying to achieve a goal, but rather to stop a tide. Already we are struggling to decide who will win, whose figure will be carved on the monument, whose ideals will guide whatever the Machine makes of our disparate world.
And to you who side with the ones who want to go back and pull the covers over their head, instead of facing the reality we live in now, remember that you have had many compatriots throughout history. History has forgotten their names. It will forget yours too.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-20 04:25 am (UTC)Oh, wait. I forgot, I'm 112 years old :)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-20 04:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-20 04:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-20 05:05 am (UTC)I think I need to think about this a lot.
Date: 2008-03-20 01:58 pm (UTC)Well, that's reassuring, at least.
Re: I think I need to think about this a lot.
Date: 2008-03-20 02:22 pm (UTC)The only problem is that they may not lose in our lifetime. That would suck a lot...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-20 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-21 01:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-20 11:31 pm (UTC)Marvelous analysis.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-03-21 01:18 am (UTC)