by Andrew
We are all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars. Molecules that do not understand politics, polices, or differences. Over a billion years, we foolish molecules forgot who we are and where we came from. In desperate acts of ego, we give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps, and pretend that our light is better than everyone else's. The flame reminds us of the piece of those stars that lives on inside of us. The spark, that tells us, you should know better. The flame also reminds us, that life is precious, as each flame is unique and it goes out, it's gone forever. There will never be another quite like it.
Anyone who has ever taken a course in statistics is probably familiar with the concept of Type I and Type II errors. The concept is simple enough: a Type I error is assuming that something is true when it is false, while a Type II error is assuming that something is false when it is true. The frustrating thing about the two types of errors is that you cannot simultaneously minimize both of them. The harder you try to avoid Type I errors, the more likely you will make a Type II error, and vice versa. If you decide you're going to only accept a hypothesis if you are 99% certain it is correct, then a test that shows that you can be 95% sure it is correct will not be sufficient evidence for you, and so you will reject the hypothesis even though you are 95% sure it is correct, therefore taking a pretty good chance you will commit a Type II error. What makes these errors interesting is that they apply well beyond the rather staid world of statistics.
Let's take, for example, the possibility that any given individual at Guantanamo Bay is, in fact, an active combatant. I will define active combatant as someone who will, if free, do what he can to kill Westerners and further the cause of militant Islam. It is difficult for us to know for certain about many of those captured and brought to Guantanamo Bay; if they were not captured while being observed in action against U.S. forces, then they're likely there because someone else turned them in. While it is possible some of them were turned in legitimately, we know that at least some were turned in because they angered someone who had the ear of an American and who could therefore turn them in as al Qaeda simply as a form of retribution. So, for each person captured, the U.S. has to make a decision: are they active combatants we should detain, or are they simply people who had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Unfortunately for those people taken into custody, all the incentives in this equation point to avoiding Type I errors. If the U.S. releases someone who then takes up arms against the West again, there may be unpleasant questions regarding who made the decision to release someone who was a danger to the West when they were already in custody. If, on the other hand, the U.S. holds on to people who pose no real threat, who's going to care? Sure, there are people like Katherine who work very hard to point to such injustices and try to bring them to people's attention, but she and those like her have an uphill battle. For people not paying much attention to the issue, the fact that known al Qaeda personnel like Khalid Sheik Muhammed are at Guantanamo is probably all they need to know. After all, the conditions at Guantanamo are pretty cushy, right? You get an arrow on your cell floor pointing to Mecca, Halal meals, a roof over your head, etc. They're probably living better in Guantanamo than they are at home. And, in fact, that may be true, if we discount the rather important question of personal freedom, but it seems evident many people are willing to sacrifice the freedom of some foreigners if it means we in the West may be a little safer. So a few Type II errors are a small price to pay.
This is a particularly seductive argument because there is some truth in it. A nontrivial number of people are going to die in this war. Osama bin Laden and his ilk would kill all of us if they could, and they will succeed in killing some of us. And in our efforts to kill the bin Ladens of the world, we will kill many people ourselves. Even if we were to close out our efforts in Iraq and stick to striking at known terrorist targets, we will make mistakes (Type I errors of a different kind) and will kill innocents in our quest to prevent attacks on our innocents. Given those facts, there is a temptation to err on the side of protecting our own. The men and women who died in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and on board the hijacked aircraft were much like us. The men and women who die from Western bombs or who languish in Western prisons are The Other, people whose life and customs are so vastly different from our own it is difficult for us to empathize with them, and all too easy to rationalize their death or imprisonment.
There are numerous arguments against such rationalization. I am particularly inclined towards two: the moral, and the practical. From a moral point of view, I have a great deal of reverence for the principles the United States is supposed to stand for. We have, over our long history, honored those ideals in the breach more often than not, but that does not undermine their importance. And our failures of the past do not mean that we cannot act properly now. The United States is supposed to stand for things like freedom and justice. In the past, our willingness to honor those ideals has bought us deserved standing in the rest of the world, moral authority, as people were discussing earlier this week. More importantly, it made us different. It made us special. We didn't torture people, we didn't wage unjust wars, and when we did err, we recognized our mistakes and tried to make good on them. That might not matter from a strictly practical perspective, but it means a great deal to me personally.
Does moral authority get you a lot? Probably not; nations have interests, not friends, and being popular overseas does not necessarily translate to increased leverage in the diplomatic arena. But I don't think it hurts. Jonathan Rauch quotes (subscription required) UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Molloch-Brown's claim that many otherwise moderate countries are siding against the United States simply because doing so is politically advantageous. Regardless of how you feel about the UN, the point is valid; Tony Blair's political woes stem in no small part from his willingness to stand beside the United States, and it seems likely his successor will move Britain away from the United States if only to protect his party's prospects. Given that we in the West are all in this war together, from a strictly realpolitik standpoint it shouldn't matter how we all feel about one another, but politics frequently leads to people cutting off their nose to spite their face, and President Bush's ability to rile the Western world against him and his policies may well have already led to some instances of that.
More importantly, we are engaged in a counterinsurgency fight, and winning those means the battlefield is of limited utility at best. We all remember the famous claim, the North Vietnamese never beat the U.S. on the battlefield, and that may be true as far as it goes. But the North won the war, and that is all that counts in the end. By that same token, if the U.S. defeats militant Islamists wherever it can find them, but more and more countries flock to the banner of militant Islam, we will lose this war as well. And when that factor is entered into the calculation, Type II errors become a lot more important than Type I errors. Even were Pakistan to fall into the hands of militant Islam, their ability to hurt us is extremely limited. Assuming the worst case, perhaps they could destroy a few American cities with nuclear devices. I do not wish to understate the devastation such an attack would cause, but it would not destroy America. And given the fact Pakistan faces a nuclear threat directly over its eastern border, the chances they would give away some of their weapons for a strike at the U.S. and open themselves to direct attack from India (not to mention the likelihood of retaliation from the U.S.) is a questionable assumption. But every person we hold who doesn't belong there is at least one more person we are turning against the West. The more often we do this, the more people we can count on radicalizing sufficiently for them to take action against the West. This is the kind of equation we can overcome only by killing more radicals than we create, and in counterinsurgency this is next to impossible. We are therefore much better off accepting the risk of committing Type II errors by releasing all but those prisoners we are absolutely certain are active combatants and rolling the dice on the rest. Even if many or most of those we release try to act against the West, their ability to inflict harm is not that great.
I happen to believe that this war is an existential war for the United States. Not because militant Islam can destroy us, but because we appear determined to destroy ourselves in our attempt to win the war. It's time we start turning that trend around and focus on those qualities that make our civilization worth fighting for. Otherwise, the success or failure of militant Islam will be a sidenote in our history.
Recent Comments