mithriltabby | Application of aikido principles to war rhetoric (Reply)

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.