The Israelis have found the way to fight the War On Terror, and it's pretty clear the British are tuning in, but we aren't here in North America, not yet, but we will, I hope.
First, I don't think that War On Terror is the right term, any more than World War II was the War On Submarines or the War On Airplanes. It is a war, though, for sure, between a Muslim militia that's distributed, and us. And how we define ourselves very much explains how we fight them, which we have to do. No choice about that.
Fighting the war using centralized force isn't going to work, as we've seen in London this week. Those bombs could have gone off, despite the fact that they're striking in exactly the same way they did just two weeks ago. It's as if some part of the World Trade Center was left standing after 9/11, and they were able to go right back and do it again, just two weeks later.
Can't turn to government to fight this war. They're going to do what governments do, try to perpetuate themselves. They're going to do things the same way they've "always" done them, and those ways don't work against distributed militias. Now the question is -- do the people have the will, or are we ready to be picked off while riding the subway or working in office buildings, or sitting in coffee shops, or even in our own homes? New York and London are on their way to becoming Baghdad and Beirut. We can't afford to look away from those places, that's the Grapefruit League for what will be major league baseball, in your home town. Look around you, the problem is everywhere. How can you tell whose backpack contains a bomb? You can't. Now what.
The answer to a distributed war is distributed defense. Instead of hiding from people with brown skin, people who speak funny, who look like terrorists, we need to work with them, because (key point) most of them aren't terrorists, but they may come from communities that produce them. Do the communities have an inkling that there's a bomber in the house? On the block? Have we asked? What are the warning signs that a young person has turned? We need to study this, understand it, and then distribute the knowledge, actively, quickly.
I don't find reassurance in police commissioners talking on TV about new techniques of finding bombs on subways. We won't find enough of the bombs to alter our psychology. People stayed home for months after 9/11. The airports, restaurants and shopping malls were deserted. The economy really suffered. It will suffer again. Now, while we have a measure of sanity, we need to make being brown and talking strangely interesting and listen. We need to feel that we can solve the problem, that the deaths are not totally in vain, that we're getting better at preventing the bombing.
Rush Limbaugh and his idiots will want to fight this war with internment camps. Good luck. How big will the camps be? How will you feed the prisoners? And what comes next, when that doesn't work? Even the dittoheads won't want to go there, at least most of them won't.
Let's hope the families know when a kid turns into a bomber, and have the guts to turn him in. Let's get them on our side, acknowledge that they want life to get better, not turn to shit. That's what they're saying. Now, do we have the guts to listen?
# Posted by Dave Winer on 7/23/05; 7:33:15 AM - --
