Look Ma, Logic!

For the past few days Slate has been offereing some of the most cogent pieces of writing on the "war on terror" that I've yet read. The series, written by Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, uses logical reasoning to offer a possible resolution to our vague and hovering war.

My husband once opined, after watching yet another night of depressing evening news, that if someone wants to kill you, then the only way to ever be safe after that is to make them not want to kill you anymore. Wright says something similar.

We have to understand that terrorism is fundamentally a "meme"—a kind of "virus of the mind," a set of beliefs and attitudes that spreads from person to person. One way to squelch terrorism is to kill or arrest the people whose brains are infected with the meme, and the Bush administration has done some of that effectively. But some forms of killing and arresting—especially the kinds that get us bad publicity—do so much to spread the meme that our enterprise suffers a net loss.

In other words, fighting to stop terror does no good at all if when you're done you get more terrorists than you had when you started. Makes sense to me. So how should we fight terror? With Democracy and economic recovery.

We can instead intervene at the level of economics and politics, and if we're successful, then the radical variants of Islam will lose support; radical "memes" will find fewer brains willing to host them....

This would have several benefits: 1) It would give young men an outlet for economic ambition, diverting them from radical pursuits. 2) It would give young men an outlet for political ambition by abetting pluralism; after all, global capitalism brings modern information technologies that are powerful tools of political expression and of interest-group formation. 3) It would expand person-to-person contact with the West in a natural, enduring way; when it comes to nurturing multicultural tolerance, there's nothing like doing a mutually profitable deal with a foreigner. 4) It would expand the number of affluent Muslims who, by virtue of dependence on trade, have a stake in preserving world order against terrorist disruption, and in nourishing their country's reputation as a stable place for foreign investment.

In other words, if we treat Middle East nations as equals in our foriegn policy (economically, politically, and otherwise) then maybe they won't hate us anymore. Again, makes sense to me.

It's a definite must-read.