“Don’t you worry about all of those people being given asylum? Even if only point zero-zero-one percent turn out to be terrorists, that is a significant number when you consider that there are over a million people coming out of Syria.” He spoke softly, and thoughtfully, and the statistical inference is hard to deny, but I think it frames the question incorrectly. “It only took nineteen people to take down the World Trade Center,” he added.
I smiled.
“Hmmmm…kinda like the discussion on immigration here in the US…” I was really trying not to laugh, and certainly not at him, because this was not some setup or intellectual game for him. He was being perfectly earnest – and I mean that in all senses of the word – in his concern. I took a sip of my Moscow Mule, my current favorite poison, and mulled my response.
“Well, let me come at this from a slightly different direction, if you’ll allow me.” He nodded and sipped his tea.
“From the time of the birth of the American Republic until nineteen-thirteen – roughly one-hundred and thirty years, depending upon your date of birth for the United States – the US had completely open borders. Anyone who could get here could come in. Did you know that?” It was a serious question as he wasn’t born here, though he is an incredibly well-educated man. I didn’t want to insult him, but I’m frequently surprised by the almost complete ignorance of most Americans about their own country’s origins and history, especially given the current state of US education.
“I’m not sure if I did. I hadn’t really thought about it.” His accent was a mix of several countries where he had lived, though German predominated, so his “f”s had a slight “v” to them, which I found wonderfully agreeable for some reason.
“Terrorism is hardly a new idea – and the outbreak of World War One was due to an assassination, fundamentally a terrorist act. So, it’s not new. Yet for over one-hundred years the US had zero immigration policy. Or, if you want to claim it was intentional, the policy was ‘open borders.’” He was nodding, and jumped in.
“So you think there’s no risk from these people? What about Nine-Eleven??”
“No, I’m not saying there’s no risk. In fact, my point was to acknowledge that terrorism was certainly an available and viable tactic for the entirety of our history. I’m glad you brought up Nine-Eleven though, because it’s a good segue to my larger point. Americans have become – I hope you’ll forgive the coarseness of the expression – pants-shitting cowards, by and large.” I waited for his reaction.
He sipped his drink – a decaffeinated Earl Grey tea – and nodded his head in thought.
“This is interesting that you say this.”
“At the birth of our nation, we lived under colonial rule. We were fundamentally occupied by the greatest military that had ever been assembled in human history. In 1770, the world knew that ‘the sun never set on the British Empire’ and her Majesty’s Navy was virtually unrivalled, although the French and Spanish were no slouches, either. By comparison, we had nothing that could be even charitably considered a match for the British Army.’”
“Yes. Yes, this is true,” he agreed.
“So, whenever I hear about the influx of ‘Messicans, or Syrians, or dem udder brown-skinned people, I’m brought back to the idea that my fellow Americans are pants-shitting cowards.” I mimicked a southern accent to make a point, though southerners are by no means generally, or solely, advocating closing the borders. Hell, a lifetime New Yorker has suggested he will challenge jus soli citizenship in the Constitution, using the term “anchor babies” fairly liberally, and he’s drawing wide support. Even his opponents on Team Blue advocate some variation on the theme and polls would tend to indicate that Americans broadly agree.
“You see, I always ask this question: is there a genuine concern that somehow we’re going to be invaded and conquered by terrorists?” I paused and let him think about it.
“No. No, of course not. That’s silly. But what about people blowing up buildings, killing innocent people?”
“A fair question, but let me respond with another question, which I apologize for doing, but… would stricter immigration ever be able to completely weed out someone who was determined to come here – legally, let’s assume – and strap a bomb on themselves and walk into a mall and detonate it? The Nine-Eleven hijackers were, for the most part, here legally.”
“No…” he began, though now he seemed less certain, “but screening does help catch some people, right?”
“Maybe. Let’s assume it does. Would you agree it would be impossible to catch them all?”
“Yes, that’s true, but still… aren’t you worried?”
“Me personally? No. If some guy shows up in my neighborhood, I’m perfectly confident that I’ll be able to defend myself and my family if it comes to that. Me and my friends aren’t the pants-shitters. We’re the ones who volunteer to go overseas and settled things with violence on behalf of the rest of the ones who won’t because they’re too afraid to do it themselves. And if push comes to shove, we’ll sure as shit defend the homeland, right in the streets if need be. I’m not terribly concerned about that.
I mean, it was only seventy years or so ago that Pearl Harbor was attacked and Americans had to be genuinely concerned about the ‘what if’ of a follow-on attack. There were coastal watchers set up and German saboteurs were actually captured coming ashore in Maine. There’s a famous Supreme Court case regarding those defendants, several of whom were executed.”
“Really??” he said, incredulous. “I didn’t know this.”
“Ex Parte Quirin was the name of the case. It was actually a consolidation of several cases into one and it had to do with the military tribunals under which the men were tried as saboteurs. That was the evidence against them. They were here to try to blow up several major industrial buildings. Both Japan and Germany were well aware that if the US cranked up its economy, we could outproduce any country in the world and that matters at the strategic level.”
“This is fascinating! Why don’t we ever hear about these things,” he asked.
“I can only conclude because the vast majority of people leading this country have no idea, or don’t care to know, or can’t connect those dots…or, if you’re cynical, that they don’t want people to know and the media does nothing to inform because sound-bites play better than serious discourse on political matters.” I took another sip.
“In any event, to return to your question, of course I worry. I have children. I have daughters and while I’ve taught one to shoot and I know another has been several times, I don’t expect them – or the broader American populace to be trained like me or my friends –”
“Right. I’m glad you say that – because I don’t know how I feel about if I had to defend myself or if other people could do that.”
“It’s a broader question and I really believe we’ve done ourselves a serious disservice. We have an epidemic of obesity, we have an epidemic of dependency on government for the most basic of needs, both are only growing, and we have a growing split between the cultural values – specifically of self-reliance and independence, that our military is built upon – and those of the country it serves. These are not good long-term trends, no matter how many TSA agents keep shuffling people through the turnstiles at the airport, which fundamentally does nothing. It’s security theater.”
“Right. Right. So horrible to fly now.”
Everyone seems to be able to agree on this, yet no one considers that perhaps it means we shouldn’t be wasting billions and billions of tax dollars (that we don’t have) to continue doing it.
The toughest thing about events like the attack in Paris is that there are no simple, easy, good answers – and acting like there are: “Close the border!! No immigrants!! Nuke the middle east!! Kill ISIS mercilessly!!” is rationally indefensible and historically untenable. We have no historical analogue for a determined group of people being discouraged from violence by anything other than violence – and systematic extinction.
I don’t say this with any degree of the joy that most cynics have about the sad state of human affairs. I’m an optimist by nature. I tend to see and assume the best of the world. On the other hand…I’ve been to too many war-torn shitholes to be naive about the depravity of which my fellow homo sapiens are capable. As well as the relative ease with which the most murderous, and horrible, intentions can be rationalized.
As a young pilot, I spent a good chunk of the summer of 1995 off the coast of Bosnia, floating around the Adriatic Sea and planning for the possible evacuation of five United Nations protected enclaves. These enclaves were filled with some UN peacekeepers and Bosnian Muslims, for the most part, members of the Bih, the Bosnia Muslim Army, as we generally referred to them in intelligence briefings at the time. A lot of Americans have almost no recollection of that conflict. If it comes up I bring it up even with contemporaries and I get a blank stare.
The OJ trial was in full-bloom and it was during that same deployment that Tim McVeigh blew up the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. We thought initially we were going to War, then we found out it was an American, and there was this collective exhale by 5,000 or so U.S. Marines bobbing around in the Mediterranean Sea. We were getting ready to spend our summer invading Libya and handing out large cans of retributive justice, American-stylie, and then we had to sit off the coast of Bosnia while those countries and peoples – including Christians and Muslims, primarily – tore each other apart. No one ever discusses that something like 70% of the atrocities in that war were committed by Christians – Bosnian-Serbs principally – against Bosnian Muslims.
I don’t recall anyone suggesting there should be a ban on Christian immigration. Perhaps the State Department took a jaundiced view of Bosnian Serbs coming to the US, but I can find nothing to suggest there was a widespread American outcry over that possibility. In fact, what I do find in researching the matter is that there was very little immigration to the United States until- wait for it…
…the breakup of Yugoslavia and the resultant civil war in the early 1990s produced a flood of refugees. In the U.S. 2000 census, of the 328,547 Americans who claimed Yugoslav descent, about 100,000 were Bosniaks (Bosnians of Muslim descent). In the 2001 Canadian census, 25,665 people claimed Bosnian descent. In both countries, the vast majority of Bosnians were refugees. The earliest Bosnian immigrants settled in Chicago, Detroit, and other industrial cities of the North. In 2000, more than 75 percent lived in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Gary, Indiana. The rapid influx of refugees after 1992 led to Bosnian settlements in New York City; St. Louis, Missouri; St. Petersburg, Florida; Chicago; Cleveland, Ohio; and Salt Lake City, Utah. Bosnian Canadians have gravitated toward Toronto and southern Ontario, mainly because of developing economic opportunities there.
From http://immigrationtous.net/41-bosnian-immigration.html
So. Now let me come to what will be arguably the most controversial point of this post. The $1,000,000.00 question: what should we do about Syrian immigration, and about ISIS more broadly.
Nothing as to the former, and the latter would take too long to outline a coherent strategy that properly factors in all of the competing interests and countries that are now centered around Syria, Iraq, and the other areas into which Daesh has expanded its influence. I hate that people expect that there’s some glib, short answer to a problem like ISIS. It’s not simply that there’s some group of whackos and if we collect them all together and drop enough bombs on them the problem will be solved. There are so many strains in the ISIS problem, from the fact that they are Sunni Muslims, living out a very virulent form of Islam that has a lot of theological support from Wahabbi madrassahs in Saudi Arabia – you know, our “allies” – the same country that produced most of the 9-11 hijackers – and has now opened the spigots on their oil to drop the price down to less than $40 a barrel. That has had a tremendous negative impact on Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its economy. Putin, of course, continues to support Bashir Assad, the ruthless dictator of Syria, whom this Administration (including Presidential hopeful-cum-felon Hillary Clinton) tried to depose and spent tons of money on supplying weapons and training to Assad’s opposition…except that money produced dismal results and ultimately wound up in the hands of Islamic extremists who are enemies of the United States.
I could go on and on about what a complete shit-show Syria is and how much of that is due to the utterly dopey policy of Oblame-o and his former Secretary of State who has even recently claimed that Syria is a great example of the use of “soft power.” Seriously, she actually said that.
Which brings me to my ultimate conclusion about all of this: it doesn’t matter what policy government pursues, you can safely bet it will wind up as a complete fuck-show, no matter what. That seems both dismal and perhaps even self-contradictory, but it’s not. The one thing government, or perhaps I should say “politicians” do not understand is anything more complex than the most recent polls. Seriously.
Let me end with this illustrative example. When I had been in Afghanistan for a while, our tiny little forward base got a visit from a Congressman. I’d give his name, but he’s still in office and I don’t want to embarrass him or cause more trouble than I need to. Anyway, at that time, we were getting rocketed on a fairly regular basis, maybe once or twice a week on average. Generally, they were old Russian 107mm rockets. You would get a little warning before they hit, but not much. Just a whoosh and then they impacted. Every once in a while, however, the bad guys would launch some big ones, either left-over Russian 132mm katyushas, or Chinese made 122mm rockets. They would just “show up,” unannounced. No notice other than the big fucking explosion announcing their impact. Then there would be the silence, as dust and debris settled, and then you’d start hearing the shouting from outside the walls. The unmistakable yelling of people panicking – even in Pashto it sounds the same – and the screams for help.
The Congressman wanted a briefing on “the current situation” so my boss, a former SF officer with a wicked sense of humor, pointed to a map of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the surrounding region on the wall, and said, with a straight face: “If I could orient you, sir. Here,” circling the map, “we have Afghani-nam.” He looked back at the Congressman and his staffer. “To our east is Pak-bodia.” Gesturing, “Further north we have Laos-istan.” He was smiling now; the Congressman wasn’t.
“Yeah, yeah. Okay. I get it.”
He was old enough to appreciate the reference, and the similarly shitty strategies being pursued.
I got tired of listening in and snuck off to do some work. I went down to our TOC where we had some Afghan interpreters working to translate any transmissions we could intercept off of the push-to-talk handheld radios the Taliban would typically use for tactical comms. One of our best Terps came running up to me breathless.
“Sir! Sir! The ACM are using the usual codewords. There is a lot of chatter. I believe they have seen the plane that landed-” the Congressman’s – “and they are discussing rocketing the base…most likely tonight.”
I went back up and relayed the information to the Boss, in front of the Congressman and his staffer. I have to admit I wanted to see the looks on their faces. I got exactly what I wanted.
“What are you going to do?!” asked the Congressman.
“Uhhh, sounds like we’re going to get rocketed, sir. So my guess is we’ll hunker down in those concrete bunkers you see out there until it’s over,” said my boss, rather casually.
“You’re not going to take any action?” said the Congressman, incredulous.
“No, sir.”
“Why not?!” he asked.
“Because you won’t let us fire back over there, sir.” My boss pointed to the mountains in the distance, from whence the rockets would inevitably come. Those mountains marked the rough edge of eastern Afghanistan, but the Pakistanis, whose country didn’t exist back then, never actually signed the treaty that set the Durand Line, which was established by the British…. in 1893… with the emir of Afghanistan. Neither country paid it much attention and neither did the local tribes who lived on both sides of those mountains.
“Okay. Okay, okay. I got you.” The Congressman knew that he wasn’t in a place where he had anything to offer us.
“Sir, you’d probably better get off the ground before sunset, because that’s when they’ll move into place and we usually get hit during the night.”
“Right. I understand.”
And sure as shit he and his aides were gone before sundown.
No matter what policy politicians pursue, it’s always the wrong one because of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even the most well-intentioned laws have blowback, externalities, and produce all kinds of perverse incentives that no Congressman ever considers – and, in my opinion, gives zero fucks about anyway.
Look at college loans, to pick a disparate example. The rise in college costs is due almost entirely to the cheap money available to college kids. Of course, the hitch is that most college kids don’t have the kind of credit to take out $100K in loans, but the government is more than happy to come in and act as guarantor, provided mom or dad co-sign it, generally. These loans are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, wouldn’t you know, and they also survive death. Which has produced the perverse incentives that there are parents who are taking out life insurance policies on their own children in case, god forbid, something tragic happens to their child during, or even after, college, because then mom and dad as co-signers are now on the hook for however much their kids borrowed for that awesome humanities degree – in addition to the tragedy of their child dying. Read that link above – I’m not making it up.
Of course, no one could possibly have intended such a result, much less foreseen such a grim prospect. But THAT is the Law of Unintended Consequences – in full effect. And it is everywhere. And I mean, Everywhere. But nowhere is it more rampant than in the actions of government – and that is because they attempt to pass laws that operate on massive cohorts of people, 300MM in the US alone, now, and they expect that there will be no unintended consequences as a result. It is, as Hayek called it, the Fatal Conceit. It is arrogance of the highest order.
So when people ask me what we need to do about the Paris attacks and I say “nothing” they think I’ve lost my mind. But the fact remains, as I’ve previously pointed out, that the attack, while certainly tragic for every one of those 132 people who were killed and the hundreds who were wounded, it was relatively small. Every year in the US we will lose 1.2 million people to chronic disease. Divided by 365, that is over three-thousand people daily, who will die because of either (a) smoking, (b) a shitty diet, and/or (c) a lack of exercise. 3200 each day. That’s roughly 25 times the people who died in the Paris attack.
And I blame no individual, but only in a disarmed populace can a handful of guys with semi-automatic rifles hold thousands of people hostage and kill them at will. Again, imagine if only a dozen or so of the people in that concert hall were carrying weapons. At that point, the hostage takers now have to worry about getting shot. They have to take cover, they have to worry about being shot, they have to consider the time crunch as the first responders make their way to the site. With a completely disarmed/unarmed populace, however, they have nothing to fear. They treat the concert-goers as sheep, to be herded and slaughtered at a whim.
It must be that I’m the only person to notice that the terrorists have yet to try to take on an armed cohort. And yes, I’m including Major Nidal Hassan’s attack at Fort Hood. Anyone in the military will tell you that on base, no one is allowed to carry weapons unless they are on duty or MP’s. Privately owned guns have to be stored off base or in the armory, under lock and key.
I feel terrible for those Frenchman and other nationals – including an American – who were killed. And I hear that one of the terrorists was likely a refugee from Syria, though most of them were not refugees. Most were homegrown, or from Belgium, and much like the previous failures of intelligence, several of them were wanted and openly known to be terrorists.
What I fear most is that in the hue and cry to “do something!!!” we will once again enact stupid policies, like we did when we locked up thousands of Japanese Americans at the start of WW2. If we have learned nothing else, I should hope that we’ve learned what an awful, immoral, shitty thing that was to do. While Islam may contain the seeds of a destructive ideology, it does so for such a small percentage of the rather ordinary, unassuming Muslim population in America – and around the world – that I hope we can (for once) learn that sometimes doing nothing is really the best course of action. In fact, perhaps if we rolled back some of the anti-freedom, anti-liberty, anti-nanny state legislation and enabled people to be more self sufficient and independent, we wouldn’t need to have some giant security apparatus to protect us. Maybe if we inculcated people with a sense of belonging to a culture that allows people to be different, so long as they don’t infringe on their neighbor’s right to do the same, we could start to rebuild the strong sense of community that makes it difficult for terrorists to hide among us, even in areas with large populations.
But given what I’ve seen in the press and out of the mouths of our idiot political class, I think…naaaahhhhh. We’re going to get to see the full panoply of stupidity in the coming months and years, while the media helps stoke xenophobic fears about people with brown skin and/or those who pray to Allah.