Articles

Oct. 9, 2004

Seduction and Winning the War on Terror

Listening to Bush and Kerry go head to head over their plans for Iraq, I was reminded of the arguments over how to win in Vietnam. I was further reminded that it took the US 25 years to abandon Cuba and even today the Cubans do not like us. As a mental exercise I tried to imagine how I would handle the War in Iraq should after the election someone be stupid enough to ask me to solve the problem.

The two most difficult things in life are to get someone to leave who does not want to leave and get someone to stay who does not want to stay. Landlords and divorced couples can relate. In truth, wars solve little more than kill and maim a bunch of people. Even smart bombs are not smart enough to avoid killing children. Further looking at history it appears the best way to encourage a population to grow is to kill off a portion of the population. This is true of war as well as plagues and natural disasters.

Wars and separations in culture are generally based on two things - ideology and economics. The more a government attempts to suppress a ideology the more stubbornly it becomes ingrained within society. The rise of Christendom was built on the backs of the fanatics who refused to change religion even in the face of a hot lead enema or boiling oil. Although Lenny Bruce claimed the hot lead enema would do it every time.

What is it that makes people cling to their religion with such tenacity they are willing to die for a fantasy - a myth - a superstition?

To understand the process one has to understand the hierarchy of religion. In any religion, only a few people truly talk to God. The talking to God thing is not a commonality in any religion. In Eastern religions there are those who have good concentration and can train their bodies to do phenomenal tasks. In Christianity, there are the few hearing voices in their head who believe they talk with God. Such behavior can be very compelling. Most are unsure of anything and when one in the group really believes God is speaking then the power of such a belief becomes contagious.

Charisma and belief only goes so far. Accompanying belief has to be an economic advantage. All religions at one time or the other provided the services of government. Society is doomed to chaos without a higher moral authority. Someone has to save the seed corn and grant divorces. The ability to resolve disputes is critical to the survival and growth of any society. One of the things we hear today from the Shiites in Iraq is the desire to return to Islamic Law. Without a higher moral authority, religious beliefs quickly fade like the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny.

If war changes little and in fact can reinforce the exact behavior war is attempting to change, what is it that brings about change? The world has gone in a few short centuries from tribes hiding in caves to a complex interdependent technological society. Religion and government have played a very large part in promoting cooperation and advancement. In listening to Bush and Kerry, the two major players of the most sophisticated society in history, I came away understanding that both believed in their hearts, souls and minds that each presents a plan for the future which will better our lives.

When we make rules, pass laws we do so with the belief or perception that such rules and laws will lead to their intended outcomes. In fact, nothing is further from the truth. The dichotomy of life is that for every action there are two reactions - one positive and one negative. If tomorrow I was to invent a cheap non polluting replacement for gasoline, the outcome would be both good and bad. The good would be a lower cost to society both for the initial cost and the long term clean up costs to our grand children's environment. The bad would be the displacement caused and the lost jobs. In each and every action government takes someone loses and someone wins. Further the winners are often just the people who the law was attempting to control

Even in war, the makers of military equipment benefit while others die.

Maybe what I suggest above is too Zen for most and in particular for our government, but the future lies in understanding the process of displacement and making allowances for it. During the Robber Baron days when the US was largely unpopulated, blowing up mountains to put in rail road tracks affected the few for the benefit of the many. As the world grows smaller through communication, transportation and population, the displacement costs start to overtake the benefit value and the world falls into stagnation. The rise of terrorism is an outgrowth of this process.

We tend to think of terrorism as a new phenomenon, but it is not. Every time in history when a group has been displaced by progress and not allowed an outlet for their reactions we have seen the rise of terrorism. This was true with the Native Americans, the Irish, the Luddities, the US militia movement, the rise of the Unions and many other groups. Getting oil from the Middle East comes with the cost of displacement.

There are three basic ways to manage the negative impact from displacement. The first is genocide, the second is isolation and the third is seduction. Only seduction has a lasting effect. Lets deal with each one.

Genocide seems on the surface the most effective way of eliminating a group of dissenters. Yet the history of genocide has a very poor history of accomplishing its intent. The life force is strong and the will of survival is greater than the organism. Even when we attempted to eliminate small pox, some remains and now is a biological weapon threat. The Nazis attempted to eliminate the Jews and the Poles. Today both groups have thriving countries.

Isolation is not a viable option either. Isolation accomplished for the Soviets a miracle in Germany. The Berlin wall and East German barrier created a generation of Germans who do not work. Mao's isolation was no more effective, nor was the US in creating reservations for the Native Americans. Political isolation is not effective either with the failure of Apartheid in South Africa, segregation in the US South and sanctions against Cuba. Isolation is more effective than genocide as Russia managed negative population growth in a world that is expanding exponentially.

The final and only effective option for change is seduction. The seduction of sex, drugs and rock n' roll has spread peace further and wider than all government efforts. When the tanks lined Moscow Square in an attempted coup to restore Communism, the soldiers were sharing rock music and joints with the young people in the crowd. When I saw that on the news, I knew the coup and the Soviets were dead. There was no way the soldiers were going to fire into the crowd. The soldiers had been seduced away by decadent Western values. Seduction will cause people to give up their core values. Seduction will cause people to change rapidly and irrevocable. Seduction quickly becomes a fad with people trampling each other to get in line. The power of running with the bulls in Pamplona is far more effective than all of the fear mongering for the Nazis or the various incarnations of McCarthyism that rises its ugly head from time to time in America.

If we are to win the war on terror, we must change our bait. Government has to first recognize that with each action there are two reactions - positive and negative. To counter the negative reaction there has to be a seduction component to accommodate those displaced from the change. Before we bomb a village in Vietnam (oops I mean Iraq) we have to provide a more profitable and seductive option for those who oppose our plans. Before Sistani can co-op our reconstruction efforts we need to provide a seductive secular option that will make combining religion with government unprofitable. Before we implement a health plan that takes funding away for doctors and hospitals receiving Medicare welfare for doing lab experiments on the aged, we need to provide a path for these talented doctors to provide for the betterment of mankind.