Yesterday, in response to my post on Iran's "victory" over the Bush administration, a direct outgrowth of the almost purposeful misunderstanding of the NIE that is ubiquitous in the MSM, Judge Crater offered a rather typical and banal refutation. In part he said:
At last count the U.S. had three aircraft carrier groups in the Persian Gulf and military bases strung across the region from Diego Garcia to Uzbekistan. The "death eaters of Islam" (an ugly ethnic slur if there ever was one) have no significant offensive military capability. The are no hezbollah warships off our coast.
Your up is down, and down is up interpretation of events in the middle east is absurd. Why hasn't our impending "victory" in Iraq made us safer from these Muslim savages? Why the lament that, "[W]e are not yet ready to stand against them."? Good grief, how many more trillions of dollars and thousands of lives will it take to let you neocons feel safe in your suburban, middle class beds?
An anonymous commenter, (anonymous either by design or through the vagaries of Typepad's balky authentication process) pointed out his historical errors and Jimmy J intimated that the Judge does not understand the nature of 4GW:
The Islamists don't have a powerful military but they do have conviction and will. They are waging assymetrical war, that plans to leverage their terror tactics and the foolishness of postmodern, politically correct apologists in the West into a victory. Can they win? Until the West accepts the challenge and unites in defense against their barbarous plans, they will continue to shed innocent blood, interdict our economies, undermine our political systems, and generally cause headaches for us far beyond anything that is tolerable or acceptable. Which means more trillions of dollars and thousands of lives down the tubes.
It is a cliche that a military prepares to fight the last war; it is just as true to say that a society occasionally prepares to fight the last war but never recognizes how to fight the next war until in extremis.
Dr. Steve has just started a series of posts that may help clarify the nature of our fight and why so many have so much difficulty even understanding that we are involved in a fight. He starts with Myth: Psychopaths are great liars. Part 1 - The lies of psychopaths:
Let me say from the start that there is very good reason to make the claim that psychopaths are pathological liars - they are pathological, they chronic tellers of untruths, and this dishonesty is tied up with their pathology.
After briefly summarizing some research data, Dr. Steve clarifies:
To summarise: psychopaths’ lying and truth-telling do no have the usual markers, and psychopathic speech on its own is not particularly convincing. Perhaps they lie more often than others (?), but psychopaths do not deserve their reputation for telling good lies.
And yet we know that psychopaths are most proficient at deceiving people. How do they accomplish this? Not through their ingeniously constructed lies, but through their manner and accompanying actions.
Ultimately, Dr. Steve notes that the Psychopath does not privilege lies or truth; in other words, his utterances serve a purpose and the purpose and his ability to achieve his desired result determines whether he uses lies or uses the truth.
In other words, to concentrate on the lies of the psychopath is to miss the fact that for the psychopath his truths play precisely the same role as his lies - domination.
Psychopaths are not, in fact, particularly good liars; they spin tales and get away with it because their listeners fail to confront them on the inconsistencies. So, why bring Psychopaths into the mix when discussing the danger from radical Islam? Unfortunately, those who follow the dictates of their Koran (whether it is simply one of many interpretations or the only interpretation, as insisted upon by the Islamists, is immaterial) are explicitly permitted to lie, threaten, cheat, do whatever it takes to dominate the infidel. Whether or not the typical Muslim is a psychopath is not the issue; the issue is that Islam, as practiced in the public sphere, behaves like a Psychopath. Note that it is often the apostate Muslim, most at risk from the reactions of their former co-religionists, who most acutely points out the failures (and questions the existence) of Moderate Islam and Moderate Muslims.
I suspect Dr. Steve will at some point discuss how the victims of the psychopath unconsciously collude with the Psychopath. I touched upon this last week in Undercurrents where I described an analytic treatment that failed to progress until I recognized that I had colluded with my patient in avoiding her underlying rage. She was not in any way a Psychopath, but the dynamics, of unconsciously appeasing her in order to avoid her rage being directed at me, is a sine qua non of interactions with the Psychopath. (Take a look at the Iceman Interviews for a close-up peek into the mind of the Psychopath. You will be fascinated, repelled and disturbed. Imagine being in the room with the Iceman.)
No one likes to think of themselves as a coward. It is damaging to one's self-esteem to imagine being craven and allowing one's fear to control one's actions. That is why so many find ways to rationalize their surrender to the forces of intolerance and hate. Our MSM, which has never shied away from attacking religious beliefs suddenly finds itself terribly respectful of religion when the religion involved is Islam. The New York Times quite easily and repeatedly abandons its vaunted free speech principles when the free speech risks insulting Islam. (And please note that it is taking less and less of an insult to arouse the rage of Islam. We have gone from obnoxious cartoons to teddy bears in the space of just a few years.)
Judge Crater and those like him accuse me of being frightened, and he is correct. I work in New York City, and have many friends and loved ones living and working in New York City, a prime target for our enemies. Judge Crater's problem is that he does not recognize he is frightened, or worse, he actually believes there is no reason to be frightened.
The beauty of 4GW is that in our highly interconnected society, a small investment in disruption can pay tremendous dividends for our enemies. There was a collective sigh of relief when the Omaha mall shooter was found to be a garden variety hate filled lunatic. The liberal response of pressing for more gun laws, in keeping with their fears of aggression, rather than their fears of dangerous individuals, could be reliably trotted out and the implications of the attack completely ignored. Consider an al Qaeda linked or inspired series of mall attacks during the Holiday season. Consider the effects on our economy if 10 teams of suicide murderers attacked 10 malls. It would cost our country billions of dollars and hundreds dead. The only reasons this has not happened yet is that those who protect us, and whose job is immensely complicated whenever a terror surveillance program is publicized, are doing their jobs. Our enemy is constrained only by tactical and strategic considerations and/or lack of current capacity. Since 10 mall attacks (or other attacks on "soft targets") seems well within their capabilities, their forbearance can logically be assigned to successful interdiction and/or concerns of how the impact would redound upon them.
As with the Psychopath, (public) radical Islam can be charming when their victims are strong. Weakness, however, brings out their ruthlessness. Victims who try to appease the aggressor simply make him more powerful and allow him to bide his time and strike when he deems it most effective. We are now in the position of waiting and reacting. Perhaps our enemies will only strike in Europe and Israel. Some will readily blame the Bush administration and the neocons for stirring up a hornets nest and will rush to back away, avert their eyes, and hope that only Israel and Europe will suffer. Unfortunately, every "success" makes a future attack on America more likely and the belief that future attacks will be mere nuisances, is likely to be a vain hope, however much the Judge Craters of the West may minimize the threat.
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