www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2004-08-08-1.html
Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card August 8, 2004 The War of Stories Orson's Observation: For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. Card's Corollary: There is no subject on which anybody knows everything. I recently read a valuable book called Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. The back-flap bio of the author, Lee Harris, talked about how he entered Emory University at age fourteen and graduated summa cum laude. Well, I entered BYU at age sixteen and graduated with high honors with distinction -- while on academic probation. He's got me by two years, but I think my academic probation thing trumps his summa cum laude. My point is, it's always kind of sad when somebody's bio still has to point to things he did when he was fourteen. What matters is how smart, wise, and/or informed you are now. And even if you're the smartest person in the world, it doesn't mean that your judgment is immune to distortion. We all bring our previous assumptions and expectations to every bit of data or experience we acquire, and see it all through the lens of our own minds. And there are two key insights, delivered early in the book, that made it, for me, well worth reading. As Harris says, "It is a common human weakness to wish to make more of our contribution to the world than the world is prepared to acknowledge; it is our fantasy world that allows us to fill this gap." The peril to the world is that for those consumed by a fantasy ideology, everyone who is not actively supporting the fantasy becomes a prop whose only value is to be a prop as the fantasist makes his dream come true. His clearest example is the nation of Ethiopia when it was invaded by Mussolini's Italian army in the 1930s. The League of Nations tried to persuade Mussolini to stop. Ethiopia tried to behave in ways that might persuade Mussolini to stop. What nobody recognized was that there was no behavior on Ethiopia's part that could prevent Mussolini's invasion, because Ethiopia was not a player in Mussolini's fantasy of a reborn Roman Empire with himself as conquering Caesar. We are in a similar situation, not just with Osama, but with radical Islam: They have an all-consuming fantasy ideology, and our actions are irrelevant. Everything we do will be interpreted according to their fantasy, and all our actions will be construed so as to support it. In a letter to Mullah Omar, Osama bin Laden wrote: "Keep in mind that America is currently facing two contradictory problems: "a) If it refrains from responding to jihad operations, its prestige will collapse, thus forcing it to withdraw its troops abroad and restrict itself to US internal affairs. This will transform it from a major power to a third-rate power, similar to Russia. "b) On the other hand, a campaign against Afghanistan will impose great long-term economic burdens, leading to further economic collapse, which will force America, God willing, to resort to the former Soviet Union's only option: withdrawal from Afghanistan, disintegration, and contraction" (p. Whether Osama's predictions come true or not, the point is that he stands ready to interpret all outcomes as supporting his fantasy ideology. In effect, then, what we are fighting is not a particular group of men, but a group of stories, and while armies can do a great deal against stories (the story of Nazism, for instance, was rather thoroughly done in by the combined military strength of many nations, as was the story of Japanese superiority and imperial destiny), a story can keep an enemy alive long past the point of military defeat. The 9/11 attacks, then, were theatre, not a military action with concrete goals, says Harris. Look how all of America's actions are interpreted by the Arab/Muslim world: When we want to save the non-Muslim blacks of Sudan from the genocidal campaign of the Islamicist government and its surrogates, the story told throughout the Muslim world is that this is all a lie, there is no such campaign, and America simply wants to control ... And the places were we intervened for Muslims -- Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait -- are ignored or explained away. They cannot see us, except as props in their own internal drama. It is ruthlessness -- being willing to perform even the most terrible acts in service of a cause or campaign -- that triumphs. Here's the obvious example: In Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government brought in out-of-town troops to put down the peaceful, unarmed citizens' revolt. But in the old Soviet Union, when Russian tanks confronted Yeltsin and his fellow demonstrators on the streets of Moscow, they did not fire. The hardline junta that was in the midst of a coup against Gorbachev had qualms. In that moment, because they were not ruthless, they lost; just as, in Tiananmen Square, because they were ruthless, the Chinese Communists remained in power. Another example: General McClellan utterly failed against General Lee because McClellan could not bear to risk anything. He could not move until victory was guaranteed -- which it never is, so he never took any decisive action. Grant, on the same terrain, ground the armies of the Confederacy down until he won -- because he understood that only the ruthless prevail in war. This does not imply that to win, America must be as wasteful of human life as Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. What it does mean is that we cannot defeat them by means short of absolute destruction of them and their armies of "martyrs," because any appeasement, any forbearance, will be interpreted by them as victory and proof that God wants them to continue. Sadly, Harris spends most of his book in support of a weird and baseless theory that all of civilized history can be interpreted as a struggle between "family" (which he defines as what I would call "tribe" or "clan") and "team," which he treats as a state cooption of the adolescent gang. There is a tiny shred of truth in this, though it's merely a part of a far larger tension between the reproductive unit (the mating couple and their offspring) and the larger community (which can be tribe, clan, city, state, or, yes, gang). The result is that Harris puts his powerful intellect in the service of a fundamentally shallow and unworkable idea. The rest of his book is still valuable and I'm glad I read it, but he has fallen into the common error of intellectuals: the belief that because an idea excites them, it is the "key." I call this the "everything theory," and most intellectuals, when you scratch them deeply enough, have one. Other Voices If you read only Harris, you might have one picture of the world. But you can't read any source and think you have "the" truth. For instance, in that same issue of Atlantic Monthly, there is a review of Imperial Hubris, a book "written anonymously by the former head of the CIA unit devoted to assessing and tracking Osama bin Laden" (p. The same author wrote the prescient Through Our Enemies' Eyes, which was published before 9/11 but ignored by almost everyone. According to the review, the author rips into the current administration but offers no comfort to Democrats, either. "He's scornful of liberal notions that the campaign against al-Qaeda should be pursued as a law-enforcement problem (he argues persuasively that al-Qaeda is a worldwide Islamic insurgency, not simply a terrorist organization, and that America must pursue a 'savage' military policy against it); and he favors a less multilateral approach to national-security policy and a far more ruthless use of military power than the Bush administration embraces" (p. Reading Harris's book, if you get caught up in his worldview you can start to see everything through his eyes. But reading even a review of Imperial Hubris, you start to think, But this guy really knows Osama, he's right! Because (unlike Harris) he believes that Osama has specific war aims, he advocates a "dramatic foreign policy change" (p. The fact that this would result in a holocaust, as the ruthless Islamicists carried their fantasy upon the bodies of Israeli Jews, seems irrelevant to those who think that only American lives and American freedom and prosper...
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