> > > The security of many will NOT, repeat NOT, be secured by the lives of
> > > another many. It will be a straight-out human sacrifice for no practical
> > > results. There will be no increased safety.
> > >
> >
> > Hate to sound like the social scientist here, but isn't this an
> > empirical question?
>
> Yes -- that is how it can be confirmed or negated. There is a political
> principle behind it: if I'm wrong no one (except people on this list who
> are bugged by me) will remember it. If I'm right, it's an agitational
> point of some use.
I think we can safely predict there will be more human sacrifice, whatever happens in the near future - when has it been otherwise? And to argue more or less people would have died in a given period of time had the US done something else is to dwell in the realm of counterfactuals rather than facts. The social scientist in me would hate to operationalise 'safety', too. Those poor buggers in the WTC would have registered pretty high on the safometer at 8.00 on the 11th of September, after all. And who was to know, as those planes smashed into the WTC, that the already significantly qualified safety of several million Aghans had been greatly diminished in that moment? So, if the audience be empiricists, I reckon Carrol's stance has legs.
> Of course the real way to stick one's neck out (on the same principle)
> is to predict that u.s. troops will be engaged in widespread and
> continuous war over a huge arc of nations across Africa and South Asia.
>
> One complicating factor is a point John Adams made about the England of
> his day which may apply to Washington: Never, he said, trust the English
> to act in their own interest. Some predictions I've seen are based on
> estimating what the "real" u.s. ruling class interest is and assuming
> that Washington will pursue that interest.
This is very important, I reckon. Henry the K once told the Davos mob that the US was not very good at being The Hegemon. Then there's the story of the Whitehouse scurrying about the place looking for an atlas to find out where Rwanda was in 1995 - years after, eg, the Guardian had begun telling everybody else what was in train there. I'm inclined to suspect Washington has a lot of Americans in it, and these latter inhabit a culture whose salient strength is definitely not a sound understanding of the world of which it's part - not even that good a grasp of the fact that it is indeed a part of anything. And a century of unmatched discretion in the world - indeed half a century of economic and strategic dominance - is not likely to produce an entity particularly perceptive of change, nor particularly institutionally flexible.
The efforts of the hegemon to secure, consolidate, simplify, streamline and optimise its advantage are definitively contradictory. That the interest, the method, and the goal are one (okay, I'm oversimplifying myself; but merely for the point's sake), does not mean that its manifestation will be the monadic nirvana with which spectre our besuited functionalist/integrationists have been regaling us. It enriches here, impoverishes there; confirms identities here, dissolves them there; grants power here, takes it away there; makes highways of country tracks and country tracks of highways. etc.
This contradiction - the export of fragmentation that attends integration - requires ever more disciplinary structures, techniques and expense. These will be formulated and imposed by a hegemon for whom the new objects of policy will be framed in the image of themselves - as acquisitive, egoistic, competitive, monads. But that is the actually the goal of their efforts, not the raw material with which they must work. I think that point has missed a lot of them. Washington doesn't, for instance, have a model for people who fly into buildings - nor one for people whose conscious aim is deliberately to draw the wrath of The Great Power.
The terrorists know Washington far better than Washington knows the terrorists, I think.
Cheers, Rob.
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