Now this is a surprise... two posts in as many days?!
As most of my well-informed (and stunningly attractive and intelligent) readers may know, tensions along the Israeli-Lebanese border have been heating up. Several weeks ago, there were barrages of rocket attacks on Israeli towns in the northern Galil, and several infiltration/kidnapping attempts on IDF positions. Just today, Kiryat Shmoneh was hit by Katyusha fire. Needless to say, Israelis are not happy - they pulled out of Lebanon over five years ago precisely to end this sort of violence.
The Jerusalem Post had an interesting editorial that matches much of what has been recommended by a number of Israeli sources in the last few months. To summarize: The old model of Israeli retaliation on terrorist sites after an attack needs to be replaced by direct raids and retaliation on the governments that support such terrorist organizations - in this case, most notably Syria (though other editorials do not feel that Iran and the PA should be free of said attacks).
This is not news - there have been statements coming out of IDF High Command for quite some time that seem to agree on most points. If Hezbollah continues to attack targets in northern Israel, Israel will begin to attack targets in Syria (likely military installations and terrorist training grounds, using IAF strikes).
The logic, the article claims, is thus: Syria is reacting to intense international pressure by attacking Israel through its proxy. As the rest of the world refuses to do anything other than talk, Syria must be taught forcefully that it will directly pay for using such tactics.
I feel that this article may have a point, but its logic is flawed. In another JPost editorial (I can't seem to find it anymore; roughly 2-3 weeks before this post), the author was claiming that while no one would like to see a nuclear Iran, Israel could survive with one, given their enormous deterrence capability. The article suggested improving Israel's nuclear and retaliatory powers even further so that Iran would be foolish to start a nuclear war.
Both of these articles assumed something quite dangerous. They assume that Iran and Syria are rational players in international politics. (I don't mean rational in the colloquial sense, but rather in the political science context.) Can Syria truly 'learn' that its behavior in reacting to international pressure will have dire consequences from Israeli retaliations - and will this translate into better policies? Syria knows that Israel is a leashed guard dog - it may bark, it may even bite anyone who gets close enough, but it is being held back from truly ruinous retaliation by the US (and, to a lesser extent, by other nations). Even if it is scared by the Israeli threats (and eventually, actions), will Syria make the connection between this and its actions?
I think not. Similarly, I could argue that deterrence in Iran only works assuming that Iran is rational.
IDF High Commands knows this more than I do. Why are they developing this new policy toward Syria? I think that the true target of this policy is not Syria, but rather the rest of the world. The rest of the world realizes that Israel is just waiting for a chance to really mess with Syria. They fought a proxy war with Syria for 20 years to no real end, and never really got to damage them much in either of the major wars they fought directly with the country. If the international community can be spooked by Israel's more provocative actions, they may bring even greater pressure to bear on Syria to shape up.
The danger of this, of course, is that if Israel is too aggressive, the attention will shift from Syrian intransigence to Israel, and the opportunity will have been lost. For now, the world sympathizes with Israel on its northern border... but for how long? I wonder.
What is much more worrisome than Syria, though, is Iran. Israel cannot have a logical reason for believing that deterrence will work. And they have only made vague noises about attacking Iran. In reality, most 'experts' seem to think that it would be extremely difficult to carry off. Iran's nuclear facilities are dispersed and well-protected, and are at the very edge of the IAF's striking distance. More difficult would be the presence of a huge American force directly between Israel and Iran, meaning that Israel would either have to skirt around Iraq, or suffer the consequences (either political or military) of infringing on US-controlled airspace.
Thus, Israel seems to have no real options in dealing with Iran... and the world's diplomatic efforts seem to have failed in the light of new Iranian president.
Israel must hope that Iran is rational. That is not the most reassuring of thoughts.
Any suggestions?
26.12.05
Can individual beliefs be abstracted to a communal level?
I was in a bookstore this evening, and as usual I quickly browsed through the 'current affairs' section before continuing my shopping. There wasn't really anything new there, but something about the collection of books - the zeitgeist of the times, if I can steal a term - something struck me. I suddenly was convinced down to my bones that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world. I had a moment where I felt like a complete stranger, looking at the world as if anew, and thought to myself, 'Wow. This place is messed up in a really sad way.'
Okay, okay, 99% of my readers are not surprised by this (or, rather, since I doubt I have 100 readers, one might say that one reader is completely unsurprised, and the other is only 2% surprised). Nor am I, really - I've known this for years, but was overwhelmed by the ringing truth of this thought in my head.
Why, do you ask? Well, permit me an excursion into the past, and I will presently explain it. Oh, and apologies if I write a bit oddly today; I've been reading too much Paarfi lately.
Since a fairly young age, I've kept abreast of news, at least on the barest levels. My parents always encouraged us to read the newspapers, and I took an active interest in increasing numbers of world news topics as I grew older. It always seemed a good idea to have a firm grasp of current events, but by the time I was 14 or 15, I began to be intrigued not by the news itself, but by the underlying subtext.
I began to first ask the hows of the world - how are decisions made and carried out, how do events occur as they do, etc... and these answers inevitably led me to ask the more ultimate whys. For the last 5 or 6 years, then, I've developed a hobby of trying to understand why the world works the way it does. I've spent quite a bit of time reading histories, political science texts, essays, news analyses, economics, dabbling in sociological theory, etc, in an attempt to answers these questions. Obviously, I have only attained a cursory understanding of each topic (scholars in any of these fields could undoubtedly leave me in the dust), but I've aimed for a global understanding of the driving forces of world events.
There are plenty of ideologies out there to explain things, from popular to scholarly, and from emotionally based to the most rigorous of logics. I feel that most of these fail in that they base their understandings on a few basic theses of human interaction and behavior, whereas true motivations are much more complex. Some of the more interesting bits I've seen have tried to model events and interactions by chaos theory or by evolutionary pressures, but even that fails as it tries to quantify too many variables that are unquantifiable (is that a word? now it is).
Whatever the root causes, though, this leads to the world as it is today. And the topics covered in this section of the bookstore were revealing. There was a large emphasis on empire building, clashes of culture, humanitarian failures, failures in systems of government, increasingly limited resources (in a presumably closed system), struggles for cultural and political supremacy, and the personalities driving all of these events. You can fill in the blanks for specifics regarding your country's current events (or global politics), but that's a function of the specific snapshot in time, not of the underlying state of the world.
What is bothersome about this all is that most individuals would not say that our world should be in that form. Oh, for a specific decision or state, they may side one way or another, but fundamentally people do not work on the same principles that the world does. This curious contrast between the motivations of individuals and the events of the world is probably why there exist the aforementioned scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) disciplines.
How does the sums of billions (well, trillions) of human interactions, actions, and reactions create the world as we see it today? Ignoring any partisan influence, I think that everyone would agree that starvation is a bad thing. Or that the deaths of millions annually in human-organized slaughters (ie, war) is similarly unwanted. Or that people should be given as much choice in their destinies as possible, so long as they do not impinge on the choices of others (yes, the interpretations of this can be quite varying, but the fundamental idea is one that most people could agree on, no?). No one can seriously say they do not care about equity of one sort or another, from resources to 'rights' to 'choice' or any other concept that they find overridingly important. So then, why does the world have such obvious discrepancies?
I will bring up some specific points from current events just to drive the point home. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, it seems that stripped of all of the ideologies, there should be no fundamental disagreement between the two sides. Oh, yes, there are people who would like to wipe Israel off the map - along with a few Israelis who wouldn't mind wiping most of the Arabs out. But when you get down to their actual values - completely bypassing concepts of 'nationality' and 'religion' and such that drive them - they would probably have very little reason to fight, as it would be much more productive to work in tandem.
In the United States, we've recently been outraged by (or firmly supportive of) our government's invasion of our privacy and reductions in personal liberties. For some reason, we have come to a situation where many feel that our two desires for personal security and personal liberty are at odds. With such seemingly disparate concepts, how has this occurred? Theoretically, everyone would love to have the maximum of both.
I could go on, but you get the point. Individual choices and ideals, when abstracted to communal or global ones, fail to be realized. Now, some people would argue that this is merely because we have imperfect systems - and that is true, we do have extremely flawed systems. But I wonder if somehow, in this leap from the one to the many, the sum of our interactions somehow makes a utopia impossible. Something causes a fundamental clash of our individually held beliefs (the barest of which are nearly universal) when they come to the fore.
And this causes a world that most of us shudder to contemplate. So, then - should we even bother measuring the state of the world by our individual beliefs, or by some other rubric?
Hmm.
I know this isn't really that clear or organized, I was just rambling in a stream-of-consciousness after my odd feeling at the bookstore. But it is quite fascinating to consider how this all works.
Okay, okay, 99% of my readers are not surprised by this (or, rather, since I doubt I have 100 readers, one might say that one reader is completely unsurprised, and the other is only 2% surprised). Nor am I, really - I've known this for years, but was overwhelmed by the ringing truth of this thought in my head.
Why, do you ask? Well, permit me an excursion into the past, and I will presently explain it. Oh, and apologies if I write a bit oddly today; I've been reading too much Paarfi lately.
Since a fairly young age, I've kept abreast of news, at least on the barest levels. My parents always encouraged us to read the newspapers, and I took an active interest in increasing numbers of world news topics as I grew older. It always seemed a good idea to have a firm grasp of current events, but by the time I was 14 or 15, I began to be intrigued not by the news itself, but by the underlying subtext.
I began to first ask the hows of the world - how are decisions made and carried out, how do events occur as they do, etc... and these answers inevitably led me to ask the more ultimate whys. For the last 5 or 6 years, then, I've developed a hobby of trying to understand why the world works the way it does. I've spent quite a bit of time reading histories, political science texts, essays, news analyses, economics, dabbling in sociological theory, etc, in an attempt to answers these questions. Obviously, I have only attained a cursory understanding of each topic (scholars in any of these fields could undoubtedly leave me in the dust), but I've aimed for a global understanding of the driving forces of world events.
There are plenty of ideologies out there to explain things, from popular to scholarly, and from emotionally based to the most rigorous of logics. I feel that most of these fail in that they base their understandings on a few basic theses of human interaction and behavior, whereas true motivations are much more complex. Some of the more interesting bits I've seen have tried to model events and interactions by chaos theory or by evolutionary pressures, but even that fails as it tries to quantify too many variables that are unquantifiable (is that a word? now it is).
Whatever the root causes, though, this leads to the world as it is today. And the topics covered in this section of the bookstore were revealing. There was a large emphasis on empire building, clashes of culture, humanitarian failures, failures in systems of government, increasingly limited resources (in a presumably closed system), struggles for cultural and political supremacy, and the personalities driving all of these events. You can fill in the blanks for specifics regarding your country's current events (or global politics), but that's a function of the specific snapshot in time, not of the underlying state of the world.
What is bothersome about this all is that most individuals would not say that our world should be in that form. Oh, for a specific decision or state, they may side one way or another, but fundamentally people do not work on the same principles that the world does. This curious contrast between the motivations of individuals and the events of the world is probably why there exist the aforementioned scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) disciplines.
How does the sums of billions (well, trillions) of human interactions, actions, and reactions create the world as we see it today? Ignoring any partisan influence, I think that everyone would agree that starvation is a bad thing. Or that the deaths of millions annually in human-organized slaughters (ie, war) is similarly unwanted. Or that people should be given as much choice in their destinies as possible, so long as they do not impinge on the choices of others (yes, the interpretations of this can be quite varying, but the fundamental idea is one that most people could agree on, no?). No one can seriously say they do not care about equity of one sort or another, from resources to 'rights' to 'choice' or any other concept that they find overridingly important. So then, why does the world have such obvious discrepancies?
I will bring up some specific points from current events just to drive the point home. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, it seems that stripped of all of the ideologies, there should be no fundamental disagreement between the two sides. Oh, yes, there are people who would like to wipe Israel off the map - along with a few Israelis who wouldn't mind wiping most of the Arabs out. But when you get down to their actual values - completely bypassing concepts of 'nationality' and 'religion' and such that drive them - they would probably have very little reason to fight, as it would be much more productive to work in tandem.
In the United States, we've recently been outraged by (or firmly supportive of) our government's invasion of our privacy and reductions in personal liberties. For some reason, we have come to a situation where many feel that our two desires for personal security and personal liberty are at odds. With such seemingly disparate concepts, how has this occurred? Theoretically, everyone would love to have the maximum of both.
I could go on, but you get the point. Individual choices and ideals, when abstracted to communal or global ones, fail to be realized. Now, some people would argue that this is merely because we have imperfect systems - and that is true, we do have extremely flawed systems. But I wonder if somehow, in this leap from the one to the many, the sum of our interactions somehow makes a utopia impossible. Something causes a fundamental clash of our individually held beliefs (the barest of which are nearly universal) when they come to the fore.
And this causes a world that most of us shudder to contemplate. So, then - should we even bother measuring the state of the world by our individual beliefs, or by some other rubric?
Hmm.
I know this isn't really that clear or organized, I was just rambling in a stream-of-consciousness after my odd feeling at the bookstore. But it is quite fascinating to consider how this all works.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
