Application of aikido principles to war rhetoric

[mithriltabby]

So there are pundits proclaiming that the War on Terror is World War IV, with World War III having been the Cold War. Now, while I’m of the opinion that these metaphorical Wars on Drugs and Terror are nothing of the sort— they resemble police work far more closely than they do wars, and it’s not like Drugs and Terror are sovereign nations— let’s see if we can roll with the war metaphor.

This putative World War IV is obviously not fought in the same way as previous wars. World Wars I and II were won by direct application of military might. The putative World War III was won by direct application of economic might: a form of arms-buildup potlatch that showed that the Western implementation of capitalist democracy was more efficient than the USSR implementation of socialism and eventually drove the USSR out of business.

World War IV will require a similarly nonmilitary solution.

Potlatch won’t work this time; there’s no pretense at parity here. We need to starve them out.

Islamic extremism is fueled in multiple ways by oil money. In one way, the influx of oil money into regimes that don’t feel a need to make life better for their citizens creates discontent and strife, which is one form of fuel for terrorism. Another is more direct: Saudi Arabia funds Wahhabist schools that teach that America is the Great Satan, which creates ideological fuel.

So if we cut our spending on foreign oil, we’ll slowly starve them out. All the while, we’ll still need to be doing the police work as well. But how to wean the world outside the Middle East off foreign oil?

Start with biodiesel. Figure out the most efficient, nonpolluting way to make it (algae, hemp oil, fermenting garbage, what have you), and start encouraging it— subsidies, tax breaks, whatever it takes. Get our transport infrastructure of trains, trucks, and buses running without a drop of foreign petroleum. And then raise the gasoline taxes.

This will produce a gigantic collective whine from the owners of gas-guzzling SUVs. At which point, tell them: “Suck it up. There’s a war on. Go ask your grandparents what a victory garden was.”

We’ll also need to encourage other countries to do the same. How much foreign aid could we repurpose to creating local infrastructure to get them hooked on biodiesel as well, creating local jobs? We might have to spend more on foreign aid if there isn’t enough that we could appropriate, but that’s the cost of war, after all.

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

I've said before that I wish there was a site I knew of that tracked all the issues I care about... Sometimes I wonder if BOF could form a sort of theory thinktank, whereby each of us picks an issue or facet that we all care about, and every couple of weeks we discuss what we've each researched out about that... or send emails to keep all the others apprised of action we can take, companies we can track for job openings, bills about to be passed, etc etc. Moveon.org is close, but it doesn't do a very good job of showing the background behind the issues, or educating the reader on how things got to the current pass.

[mithriltabby]

I keep a private wiki for that purpose. Let me see if I can find some security measures I can put on it before I open up an HTTP port to the outside world...

[baronlaw.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, but wouldn't there have to be tremendously large areas of land cleared and converted to farm to provide the raw materials for biodiesel? I am all for decreasing the worlds overall dependency on oil based products. I myself have a diesel truck and would welcome a less polluting source of fuel. But with peopel barely able to feed themslves with homegrown crops in certain countries would converting large crop lands be problematic?

[mithriltabby]

If the land was growing food before, it could be a problem. But if you can grow oily algae someplace inhospitable to crops, it wouldn’t require choosing between food and fuel. And most countries that have trouble feeding themselves aren’t ready to consume large quantities of foreign oil anyway.

[baronlaw.livejournal.com]

Prehaps we could convert all drug related crops to biodiesel production and kill two birds with one stone. I'm sure Columbia and Bolvia amoung other would be happy to accept American money for a productive crop just as quickly as for an illegal one.

[grandmoffdavid.livejournal.com]

There's also all those American farmers who're getting paid not to grow crops so that the prices stay high. (At least, the government used to do that, and I haven't heard of them stopping.)

[abditus.livejournal.com]

I would truly love for my next car to be a VW Passat TDI (TDI = VW's Diesel models). Diesel cars have gotten such a bad rap as being noxious an polluting in the US that most manufactures no longer produce them for Americans any more -- which is unfortunate, because they have come a long way from the old smokers in '80s. VW is the only readily available auto manufacturer that still produces diesel cars for US consumers. It is even allowable in TDI warrantees to run certain kinds of biodiesel.

I mentioned some biodiesel resources in a rant (http://www.livejournal.com/users/abditus/1218.html) I had a while back on the topic.

[baronlaw.livejournal.com]

I hear that GMC is developing a mid-size diesel engine for use in the Jeep Liberty SUV.

[rhylar.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to see what the adoption rate of biodiesel is in various parts of the world. I don't think it's a particularly high-tech fuel, so the third world should be able to use it without problems.

How to fix the system that creates terrorists is hard to figure out. Are the terrorists fighting us to destroy democracy? to tear down the corrupt local dictator? to get away from crushing poverty? to cut off support for Israel? To impress the cute chador-wearing ladies back home? (nice ankles! hubba-hubba!) All of the above?

Cutting off the money flow will help, but I don't think its the whole solution. I think that the only way we'll win a long-term victory is to reduce the middle easts reliance on oil as the sole source of their income, and to establish the meme of "corruption is bad." Private investing (in corporations) is one of the things that leads to a whistle-blowing culture, and that isn't nearly as established in the Middle East.

[mithriltabby]

That’s why I pointed out that we still need the police work; by stifling the flow of oil income with one hand and doing the police work to stop existing terrorists with the other, we can make the world safer while giving the only real incentive we can to Middle Eastern nations to clean up their act. And with both hands busy, maybe we won’t be inspiring new terrorists with stupid stunts like Abu Ghraib.

[rhylar.livejournal.com]

yes, real police work is needed. As opposed to "police actions." Military non-war actions are going to be necessary, since cops can't go after guerillas, and there isn't a whole lot of difference between a terrorist & a guerilla.

How we're going to sell the 3rd FBI Foriegn Legion to the voters at home, and our "allies" overseas is another question entirely. Putting some sort of transparency & anti-corruption riders on our foreign aid is about the only way I can see it working using local labor. Otherwise, our choices are a) installing a new puppet government or b) enforcing the corruption laws unfairly. And then we're talking about a generational timescale change.

[mithriltabby]

It means international cooperation between police forces, and the countries with more competent police forces training the cops from the ones that are still learning, applying diplomatic pressure to the ones that don’t want to cooperate, and applying regime change for hard cases like the Taliban. The 3rd FBI Foreign Legion are likely to be the equivalent of the “military advisors” we’ve had in other countries in the past, and we’ll be needing them as well as some of our actual special forces as “military advisors” when rooting out nests of terrorists.