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COMMENTARY
June 11, 2011
Limits of technology
From the outer limits of our solar system, the Voyager spacecraft - launched onethird of a century ago - are still reporting back. Riding the solar wind through the vast magnetic bubbles they have detected and described, they seek the "heliopause" - a boundary where the domain of our Sun yields to the pressures of interstellar space.It takes 16 hours now, for messages from Voyager 1, travelling at the speed of light, to reach the Earth. The tiny vehicle, conceived in the 1960s - whose main mission to the gas giants ended in 1980, with magnificent views of the braided rings and jewelled moons of Saturn - still keeps her parabolic antenna turned to the people back home, still answers to their instructions, still gathers and transmits data from a dozen scientific instruments. Voyagers 1 and 2 have both performed far beyond expectations, and are a tribute to the extraordinary skills of the engineers who designed and assembled them, two generations ago; to what the human animal is capable of accomplishing. Today, still more advanced technology is being used to strike terrorist lairs in Pakistan and Yemen, towards the perimeter of the world we understand. Counting Afghanistan as one, Iraq as two, and Libya as three, this is War Four, in a decade-long series. It is being reported as a "secret war," in all the media. The idea behind this latest foray is what the Obama administration must consider a "no brainer." Islamists have all but overthrown the Yemeni government; the ruler, our nominal ally, was gravely injured and exported to a hospital in Saudi Arabia; his subjects have been celebrating his departure in the streets of Sana'a. There is a "window of opportunity" while "Al-Qaeda in Yemen," and their variously-designated fellows, are exposed. The U.S. military is trying to hit them while they are lunging for power, but before they have obtained and consolidated it. (At which point the file is passed from the Pentagon to the State Department.) Through drone attacks, "pinpoint" bombings, and the insertion of special forces, the Americans appear to have picked off a couple more on their most-wanted list, and done unknown damage to enemy assets beyond that. By all means, happy hunting to them. But "no brainers" require no brains, by definition. One takes the obvious course, in doing something that has no visible downside. In our contemporary colloquial, one justifies the action by invoking the syllable, "Duh!" Through approximately four decades of arguably adult life, I have taken a dimmer and dimmer view of "no brainers." I like to invoke instead my "Iron Law of Paradox," which holds that the more obvious an action is, the more it should be suspected. The whole idea of push-button warfare should be under examination, given the universal military history of failed bombing campaigns. Generation after generation is oversold on the possibility that a determined enemy will disintegrate if we hit a few prime targets. The boring, old, tried-and-true military axiom was that, if the bombing is not part of a broader effort, including a method to hold territory, it will be ineffectual. It will create more enemies than it kills; it will galvanize and embolden a population against you. It will call forth reprisals. "Asymmetrical warfare" is our enemy's response to more than a generation of powerful and expensive feints from the West; of punches that were always finally pulled. Al-Qaeda and friends have utterly mastered the art of costing us big, with minimal investments themselves. Islamist terrorism is itself their response to effete western ideas of defence and deterrence. When the Royal Air Force bombed the odd tribal target in what is now Yemen (in the old days, when Aden was a Royal Navy port), they did so only as a warning. The British Empire lasted as long as it did, because the imperialists mastered this art of signalling. The message was: "You may see no tommies on the ground now, but you will see plenty if the trouble persists." Peace is maintained for so long as your enemy knows it is in his best interest; that any breach of the peace will bring terrible consequences - to him. And peace is what an American strategy of backing the Islamists in Libya, opposing them in Yemen, and just watching in Syria, is not going to achieve. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq made sense, but only for as long as our Islamist enemies could believe we would not be retreating. Once it became clear they had only to outlast us, the effect was lost. That is a hard thing to say, but I'm afraid it is true. We dream of defeating this human enemy with brilliant applications of the latest technology. But dreams like that belong to the conquest of the outer solar system. At the frontiers of civilization, only the human touch can work. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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