Why the Aughts sucked

It was easier to find things to complain about during the decade just passed. In my piece for the Register wrap-up I focused on 9/11 and America's disastrous response, from the Truly Superfluous Agency TSA to limitation of civil liberties to the ill-conceived Iraq war. Moving right along, there was also the financial crisis, almost entirely -- not quite entirely but almost -- caused by government, which most Americans still blame on "unfettered" capitalism and lack of regulation of the most heavily regulated industry in the country. Trouble is the regulators were pressing banks to write unsound mortgages in the name of affordable housing. Thanks for the help!

And then there's the likely government takeover of health care. This is a strictly ideological cause -- there are problems but no crisis -- but "progressives" have been luisting after socialized medicine since the time of Teddy Roosevelt. In TR's day there was an excuse -- no outright socialist regimes had been established and it sounded good in theory. How anybody can still see anything lovely in socialism and statism after the experience of the 20th century is beyond me. But obviously, lots of people can.

The government still doesn't understand

In my column for Antiwar.com this week, I teed off on the 9/11 anniversary to suggest that the U.S. government still doesn't come close to understanding the threat exemplified by that attack or having a good strategy for countering it. Al-Qaida and related groups are stateless terrorist groups; they can benefit from operating inside a nation-state with the cooperation of the government there, as they did in Afghanistan under the Taliban. But they don't require a state and they don't want to be state-sponsored (as some terrorism was during the communist era). Not only is the military a clumsy and ineffective tool -- at least a military not deeply steeped in counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, as ours wasn't and still isn't, -- it is largely counterproductive in this case.

Al-Qaida, as Rand terrorism expert put it a few years ago, is more like a franchise business than a state or state system. It has a "business" model it likes to teach adherents who can then go out and apply it in their local situation. Even the Rand Corp., hardly a nest of pacifists, issued a recent report saying that police and intelligence work is a better way to approach the terrorism problem than a military approach. Chuck Pena's book, "Winning the Un-War" is the best book-length trreatment of the issue. But to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. (Whether we'll have a hammer-like military when the Iraq misadventure is over (if it ever is) is another question.) So our government fell back on what seemed comfortable and familiar rather than really analyzing the problem and devising effective countermeasures -- not to mention that invading Iraq probably created more jihadist sympathizers than we'll ever be able to kill.

By the way, here's a link to my previous week's column. Sometimes Antiwar uses a generic url the first week a column is up and assigns it a more specific url when the next week's column comes it.

Off track ever since 9/11

It's popular among the War Party to say that 9/11 "changed everything." Of course it didn't, it simply highlighted new challenges the U.S. had to face. Unfortunately, our government and most of those who babble about changing everything show no sign of learning just what those challenges really are. As this Register editorial points out, to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a government with a capable military everything looks like something to be handled militarily. There may be some people down at the second, third, or fourth sublevels of some government departments who have given serious thought to how to deal with fanatical stateless terrorist groups, but we've proven pretty conclusively that invading Iraq wasn't the way to do it.