Well, you've given me an opportunity with your predictions. Admittedly my posts are rife with speculation in any case, but rather than endeavor to make a change, I'll play the Great Criswell and put on my fortune-telling cap. ... All astoundingly prescient and completely unforseeable to everyone but the owner of this cap, of course.
/dave/
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/dave/,
there was a logic of sorts to my predictions. I asked myself what is the most depressing, non-result result, possible---given the very dim wits in power?
And there was an indirect point, which was to show that force is meaningless in determining outcomes in this particular context.
For no apparent reason I was reminded of how Tolstoy starts Anna Karenina, ``Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.''
There seems to be a kind of corollary to this idea, in larger political contexts. I am not sure I can come up with a statement of it, in as compact a form as Tolstoy, but it seems to go something like this.
Terrorism like the destructions and deaths of a battle are conceptually easy to entertain and are effective in a very narrowed focus. One can kill or destroy through terror, or win a battle given sufficient force. The immediate outcome is relatively easy to anticipate. The target will die, the building will fall down, the enemy troops will capitulate or die, etc.
However the larger consequences seem completely unpredictable. In other words there is a logical and predictable immediate result, but it produces complete chaos---from which nothing or very little can be predicted. Perhaps the most compact way of saying this is that wars are easy to start and very hard to finish. A terrorist act is easy to accomplish, but impossible to achieve its goal. Well, something like that.
So in general the use of force (killing and laying waste) is easy to accomplish, but it can not construct a given political goal, unless that goal is merely killing and laying waste. (Was the supposed political genius of the nazis, that they had no politics?)
The meaningful threat of force on the other hand is useful in constructing a particular political result. So there is an impossible dilemma. If you use force you gain nothing. But if you can threaten to use force, you gain coercion which can be used in a political construction. It's a kind of primal conundrum of politics and society. The equivalent in economics is the threat of poverty, versus the concrete condition of poverty. The threat is coercive, but the accomplished fact is not.
Machiavelli must have cited something like this, since it sounds like his kind of reasoning---but I can't locate a reference at the moment.
So, then returning to the current topic, you can't stop terrorism by force or the threat of force. You can insulate a society from its chaotic effects, you can probably undermine its rational use, by properly addressing its breeding ground in poverty, political marginality and social isolation. But it is ludicrously impossible to bomb terrorism out of existence. You just can't kill enough people, period.
Therefore the predictions that nothing will be the result of bombing Afghanistan. In general, it seems that history has taken to producing the most boring, tedious, and inane results imaginable. Perhaps because the ruling elites are such tasteless, dreary, unimaginative, bores? Is it wrong to pray for more interesting oppressors?
Chuck Grimes