Administrivia

Note:

I fixed the links in the Links section. Several of them weren't pointing anywhere.

A Line in the Sand

I've carried around a terrible secret for years. Now I'm ready to confess. I supported the invasion of Iraq, and I support a continued troop presence there for the foreseeable future.

My reasons for supporting the war had nothing to do with the leadup rhetoric, which was an obvious put-on. I've known we were going to invade ever since I heard Rumsfeld was made Sec State. Giveaway. Not that anybody listens to me. Other days it just rains.

Let me explain why I think we should stay in Iraq. It's the easier position to defend.

I will never forget that day two years ago when I learned about Abu Ghraib. I was telling my girlfriend how disappointed I was seeing the strategic posibilites of the invasion slip away. She asked if I still thought the invasion was a good idea. Consoling myself, I said, "Well, at least there aren't any more mass graves or torture-chambers." And she said, "Except ours."

We made a "mistake." It's the kind of mistake ethical philosophers generally refer to as a "moral abomination." We did a Very Bad Thing. We took a reasonably stable if obscenely governed nation and turned it into a viper's den of sectarian violence. We've killed their innocents tenfold or more in vengeance for the innocents lost on 9/11. We've made a wasteland and called it peace. While fighting monsters, we have become ourselves monsters. "Mission Accomplished." I'm not referring to the invasion. I'm referring to the occupation and reconstruction.

We've stood by and watched as Neo-Cons applied their endless get-rich-quick schemes to foreign policy, at the cost of every interest America has in the region. Bremmer and his business cronies descended on the cradle of civilization like AmWay salesmen with depleted uranium calling cards. These greedy fools have turned one of the most secular states in the Arab world into the premier breeding-ground for Islamist extremism. And we let them.

Most of all, we've been Good Germans. We've sat and listened for the last five years as the President explained again and again that, "We're fighting 'them' over there so that we don't have to fight them here." In all that time, no one thought to ask how the Iraqis felt about us making their country a football in the latest game of Who-Rules-the-Planet. It never even occurred to us to consider things from the sand-niggers' point of view.

Now, it's time to repent. Our penance will surely be paid in blood, broken dreams and shattered families. But we have no right to flinch from it. We chose this war. Our duty now is not the liberation of the Iraqi people, but the containment of the demons we've unleashed. The single biggest threat to peace in the region today is Iraq. We did that. Now we must stand in the face of that threat as a wall against the sea. It's not enough to sit around apologizing to our grandchildren for our leaders' mistakes. We must act now. We must do what is right in the place where we are.

We decided we'd rather fight "them" over there. We said, "Bring 'em on!" Well, they came. Iraq has become the premier recruitment center and training-ground for new mujahadin, and it has begun exporting terror to the rest of the world. At this point, there are two probable end-games:

1) We keep troops on the ground in Iraq. The Iraqis overcome the limitations of the constitution we bequeathed them. They achieve a sufficiently unified government to drive out the insurgency. Notice I said "drive out," not "stamp out." Iraqi-trained jihadis return to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen to avenge these states' collusion with America. At the end of the day, Al-Qaida is immeasurably strengthened, Iran has its first vassal-state in the Arab world, and America is the most mistrusted and reviled nation on earth.

2) We leave. Iraq becomes divided into three semi-autonomous regions. Ethnic cleansing turns contested areas into no-man's-lands. The country descends into civil war. Turkey invades the Kurdish north to prevent the formation of a unified Kurdistan. Iran enters southern Iraq in support of Shiite sectarians. Syria moves troops into central Iraq in support of the beleaguered Sunni population. Baghdad becomes the flash-point in a massive race-war between Turk, Arab and Persian over the future leadership of the Muslim world.

I keep thinking about George Bush's acknowledged personal reason for invading Iraq: "That man tried to kill my daddy." And then I think what a thousand mothers' sons will do to us one day, if we allow things to continue the way they're going. And all I can say is: We have to draw a line in the sand. We have to fight them there, so we don't lose to them everywhere.

War in Gaza?

It appears the inevitable has happened.

Why, if most Israelis and most Palestinians genuinely yearn for peace, is there this constant violence between them?

Perhaps the biggest driver of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is neither Israel nor Palestine. It's all their neighbors. Perpetuation of this crisis is an essential part of the bread-and-circuses approach of oppressive governments in the Middle East. These countries spend many millions of dollars each year exporting illegal arms and militant propaganda into Palestine, because the often overbearing reaction of the Israelis to Palestinian resistance diverts the attention of the Arab street from more immediate oppression at home. Jews have been highly valued as scapegoats throughout history, after all.

Similarly, Christian Dominionists provide various forms of comfort and aid to proponents of Greater Israel as a way of immanentizing the eschaton. Supporting insane strategies to blow up the Dome of the Rock or reclaim Hebron fits well with some Evangelicals' apocalyptic dreams of total war in the Middle East. And of course for the Neo-Cons, having a regional ally completely beholding to American support can only be a Good Thing.

But foreign interference is not enough to explain this endless bloodshed. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have come to the seemingly rational conclusion that their opponent is insincere in expressing the desire for peace. And there are indeed reasons for perpetuating this conflict on both sides, though it costs both societies unrelenting suffering and global condemnation.

One of those reasons is now emerging, in a way I've predicted would happen for years. The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, though bloody and awful, has been necessary to the survival of both societies. Without the pressure of an immediate external threat, internal frictions would by now surely have led to civil war, as is currently happening in Gaza in the face of Israel's unilateral withdrawal.

There exists an internal dynamic in both Israeli and Palestinian societies with enormous destructive potential. Like the world as a whole, the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a Clash of Civilizations. But this clash isn't between two peoples or two cultures, as usually represented. The real clash is between the secular, liberal, globalist vision of civilization as an arena of human freedom and self-determination; and the fundamentalist, reactionary, tribalist vision of humanity as pawns in a cosmic war of good and evil.

This war is being fought not between Muslim and Christian, nor between Palestinian and Jew, but between moderate and fanatic. The war is not between Bush and bin Ladin. They are instead allies on the side of apocalypse, two heads of a single beast, bent on dragging the rest of the world into their nightmares. In the real War on Terror, "We have met the enemy, and they are us."

Israeli and Palestinian societies are both split into two major camps. One is a basically made up of people not that different from us, or the Europeans, or Japan. Call them the regular guys. They are the salt of the earth: people who just want to do their jobs, raise their families and worship their gods in reasonable peace, prosperity and freedom.

And then there are the other guys: the fundamentalists, the bad people. They are romantic and revolutionary dreamers, radicals of the sort who seemed like just another lunatic fringe until one day they had a strangle-hold on public policy. In Palestine they are best represented by Hamas, in Israel by followers of Rav Kook and other members of the religious settler movement I briefly joined in the 1990s.

Since that's the perspective I know best, it's the one I'll speak from. This side of the story is much less well-known in America. A river of ink has already been spilled on the parallel insanity among Palestinians, Syrian and Iranian manipulations of Hezbolah and Hamas, and the use of Saudi-funded Madrasas to indoctrinate youth into the cult of martyrdom.

Let me explain my take on the situation by means of an anecdote:

Most of my friends by now have seen my "schtender," the wooden book-stand I use when I'm translating something. I bought it at a shop in a part of Jerusalem called Mea Sharim, a little slice of 19th century Poland on the edge of the desert. At the entrance to the borrows and alleyways that make up the heart of the neighborhood, a huge sign hangs over the gate. It mentions the rules of modesty observed by religious Jews and asks visitors not to violate their community's standards. The only rule it specifically mentions is that women should not wear pants.

As I was walking into the shop, I saw a curious sight. A "secular" Israeli couple, dressed in shorts and tee shirts (as befits 110-degree weather), were trying to walk down the one major street running through Mea Sharim. A chasid, dressed in a brightly striped full-length topcoat and fur-trimmed hat, was darting back and forth in front of them, screaming insults and spitting on them. They probably felt as bewildered as I did the day I got lost in Kidron, and Palestinian children started hurling rocks at me.

By the time I came out of the shop with my new schtender, there was no longer any sign of the Israeli couple. There was instead a mob of about 50 chasidim, gathered into a tight circle, at the center of which was something akin to a schoolyard fight. The chasid who had accosted the couple, along with several of his friends, were defending his actions against a contingent from a different faction of chasidim, who accused them of sowing senseless hatred between Jews. Blows were exchanged; there were torn robes and bent spectacles, and a few bloody noses, but it was clearly a brawl between two gangs of nerds.

t was a war of words I was seeing, a dispute over the correct interpretation of Jewish law. It was like the dispute over whether it's okay to throw rocks at cars on the Sabbath, if you set the rocks aside specifically for that purpose before the Sabbath begins. Collecting rocks is clearly a forbidden form of work, but throwing them at passing drivers may be acceptable according to some interpretations.

When I returned to Mea Sharim a week later, all the roads were blockaded by border-guards, and the smell of burning tires was everywhere. Riots had broken out in religious neighborhoods across the country over the disinterment of an ancient graveyard to make way for a bypass. The soldiers, in their heavy green flack-jackets and riot-gear, even looked the part of Vogons. The symbolism was unmistakable, an almost apocryphal example of the conflict between tradition and progress, Jihad vs. McWorld.

Most religious Jews in Israel know the real fight is not against the Palestinians. After all, victory and defeat are in God's hands. The true war is being waged against values of the "hollow men," the secularists, a sinful and corrupt majority whose rejection of God's law leaves Israel exposed to foreign invasion and terrorist attack.

For years, the religious minority has manipulated the Israeli sense of tribal loyalty and exploited the systemic weaknesses of parliamentary government, in order to hold the majority hostage to a host of dangerous and ineffectual policies. The epitome of this is the practice of building illegal settlements expressly so that the army must come defend them, thereby extending the reach of the military into the West Bank and Gaza. And for years, in the name of national solidarity and fear of exposing weakness to the outside world, secular Israel has let this abusive relationship continue.

The nadir of this relationship came with the assassination of Rabin, a calculated and successful attempt to undercut the emerging dialogue between the Israeli government and the recently-formed PA. Subsequent rhetoric about avoiding a witch-hunt, combined with the stolid refusal of the Israeli religious right to accept or assign blame for an act clearly engineered by a handful of incendiary leaders, guaranteed that justice would not be done. Israel faced a crisis of conscious, and its failure to address this split in society contributed in large measure to the subsequent collapse of the Left and the rise of the Neo-Cons, led by "Bebe" Netanyahu. But the only alternative was civil war.

Two things you can be certain of: First, in the eyes of the settlers, Pat Robertson was exactly right: Sharon was cut down by God for betraying Israel to her foreign enemies. Second, if Olmert goes through with his plan to withdraw from the West Bank, there will be blood and bodies. There may well be bombings and IEDs. There could even be civil war, though that is an extreme scenario.

Globalization and the Two-State Solution

This country does not need a new Immigration Policy. Neither does it need a sweeping new Energy Policy, nor a War on International Terror, nor a War on Drugs. What this country needs is a Globalization Policy. America needs a globalization policy because all the most serious problems we face as a nation today arise from frictions and dislocations associated with globalization. It is only by addressing the root causes of these various ills that we can hope to arrive at a coherent vision for the future of our land, its various peoples, and our world.

Globalization is not something we can choose to embrace or reject. It never was. There are those trying to exploit it, like multi-nationals rushing into China, no matter what the cost to American standards of living or the cause of International Human Rights. And there are those trying to resist it, like Labor unions fighting lower domestic wages, or Minutemen guarding the Mexican border. Strangely, the ultimate losers in Globalization push hardest to realize it, while its greatest potential beneficiaries rage against the machine. The question is not whether Globalization will change everything about our world. The question is only how.

But what is Globalization? We certainly hear the term invoked more and more. What does it mean? Why is it happening? What are the demographic, economic and political forces shaping world events into the phenomenon called "globalization?" Where is it likely to go? Who are the major stakeholders in this situation, and what are their fears and goals? What are the real problems we face as a nation, and how might answers to these questions inform our solutions?

To be continued...

Evolution and Public Policy

In his books The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins (father of the "meme") borrows a term from Games Theory to help explain the seemingly intentional direction of evolution and the emergence of complex behaviors, culminating with intelligence and culture. The term in question names the concept of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS). Here's an attempt at a brief explanation:

Strategies are evaluated according to their potential payoff for the players adopting them. For example, in the classic Prisoner's Dilemma (you know, two guys locked in separate rooms, each under pressure to cop a deal by testifying against the other), the optimal result is for both guys to keep silent and thus escape punishment. If both confess, both are equally screwed, but not as badly as if only one confesses. In that case, one guy gets a little time and the other gets lots more than he would have if he'd cracked too.

Prisoner's Dilemma may not seem like much of a strategy game. As a once-off, it's not, which makes it ideal for studying Games Theory, as opposed to say Chess Theory. The strategic aspect of the game emerges over a series of games. Each player can adopt only a single tactic in a single game. But if you're playing a series of games, you can try different combinations of tactics (strategy = combination of tactics), like "confess half the time", so that different combinations of "confess" and "don't confess" yield different payout structures for each player.

If you played a bunch of games like this, you would quickly realize that if either player ever confesses, both players will learn to get the best average score by always confessing. Of course this means a classic game of Prisoner's dilemma has all the dramatic tension of tick-tac-toe.
Classic Games Theory analyzes payout structures in terms of the optimal strategy for an individual player to adopt in a series of games. It evaluates strategies in terms like how long a player can stay in the game by following a particular strategy, or how much the player's final payout will be.

By varying the payout structure, you can change the optimal strategy for an individual to adopt. For instance, say the difference between "both confess" and "one confesses" is slight, and the punishment for the confessor remains relatively harsh. In this case, it will make sense to play "don't talk" more often than not. If the one who talks gets off with a light sentence, because the DA can take credit for a maximum sentence against the other suspect, it will certainly always pay to talk.

That's why cops do interrogations that way. It usually works, because without knowledge of the other player's choice or opportunity for collusion, it's in the rational self-interest of each party to confess. The game is rigged that way. House wins. Except of course the other players have their own way of rigging the game: Death to stoolies! Thus, strategies enter into evolutionary arms-races: Witness protection programs emerge, etc.

Now here's where ESS comes in: ESS looks not at populations of game-players, but populations of strategies. If players can change strategies over a series of games, strategies can be said to have lifespans. Some strategies will be adopted as useful by more and more players (reproduction), while others will be rejected (extinction). Players can also modify existing strategies to create new ones (variation). This means strategies are subject to evolutionary pressure, by dint of the evolutionary pressure on the players (who play longer the better their strategies). Strategies will develop meta-strategies, in order to compete with one another (like, "react to changes in other players' strategies," or "cheat").

Now here's something truly weird: Entropy enters the picture, as the deciding factor in evolutionary stability. To understand how, I have to take on faith something I've read, which is that the equations proving the Second Law of Thermodynamics have been translated from the mathematics of heat transfer to the mathematics of information, so that entropy is now defined as movement toward a condition of lowest overall information in a system. heat/information = 1. Weird.

If that thought didn't break your head (it still makes mine spin), we can apply it to ESS. In any series of elimination games, if there is a great disparity in the final scores, that requires a great deal of information. If everyone gets roughly the same score, that's much less information (for example, it would compress better in a zip-file), thus a lower energy state. So populations of strategies will tend to compete into states of equilibrium, where everyone gets sub-optimal scores, but the overall scores are the best they could be.

So is an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy is one that everyone in a population will eventually adopt? Sometimes. More often, the maximal payout comes with different proportions of the population adopting different strategies. Some babies are boys and some babies are girls. Some people become police and some criminals, some teachers and some lawyers. This fact impacts Evolutionary theory in important ways, for the details of which I'll refer you to Dawkins' books.

The picture of Evolution that arises from Dawkins' analysis of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies reveals that much of what happens in Evolution is not competition between alternative physiologies, but the ongoing evaluation of the comparative advantage between competing strategies. An organism able to rapidly adjust its strategy to circumstances has a huge advantage over one dependent on raw instinct or brute physiology. This fact predestines the development of intelligence, learning and culture as a fatal consequence of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Then Occam appears with his razor to cut God's hand off for stealing the credit.

The implications of competing behavioral strategies should be obvious for genetics, now that Dawkins has spelled it out for us: Genes will develop the ability to replicate strategies not just biologically, but culturally. Genes will evolve memes, as more efficient forms of information-transfer.

The social implications are less obvious. One upshot is that there's almost always a difference between the rational ideal strategy for a population, and the actual policy it implements. This is why the most utopian schemes of Post-Enlightenment Liberalism have failed over and over. It's is just like the fact that, though both players in a game of Prisoner's dilemma choosing "Don't Confess" always leads to the optimal outcome, a calculating player will always choose "Confess" anyhow. There is no more obvious example of this principle than our current Immigration Policy.

Haqdamah

"All things are true."

"Even false things?"

"Yes."

"How can that be?"

"I don't know, man, I didn't do it."