Moonbats on Parade

The man that was entrusted with inspecting Saddam Hussein's genocidal regime said this yesterday:

The US must abandon its "war on terror" to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, according to the former United Nations' chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix,.

The US foreign policy of pre-emptive strikes against any perceived weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat, its development of new types of nuclear weapons and the "Star Wars" missile defence shield risked fuelling a new global arms race, said Dr Blix.

Dr Blix's warning came in a report, released yesterday, proposing ways to bring about global nuclear, biological and chemical disarmament.

The report by the independent international Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (WMDC) said the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war on terror have led to the stagnation and abandonment of international cooperation on WMD monitoring and disarmament.

In what will be seen as thinly veiled reference to the 2003 Iraq war, the report said unilateral military action had failed to stem the threat of WMD, with the cost of many lives.

I've spent the better part of 5 years being puzzled by the Left. When I look at events that occur around the world, and put them into context with the history I've learned, it is practically laughable to read the types of things that they put their name to.

Take Hans Blix here. Here he lectures the United States claiming that we are encouraging our enemies to proliferate WMDs because we are setting the example of skirting international organizations.

Now, chronology is very important in history. Last time I checked, September 11, 2001 came before March 19, 2003. My memory, plus subsequent Google searches, have failed to reveal any international institutions that al-Qaeda consulted with before they decided to hijack four airliners and smash them into two-skyscrapers filled with civilians, a government building housing our defense department, and lastly, instead of the White House or Congress, an open field in the middle of Pennsylvania.

The Left can say these things deadpan and with complete seriousness, because it isn't about getting it right, it is about proving their narrative correct. Pesky things like "facts" and "evidence" are irrelevant in the minds of those that are trying to further a transnational progressivist agenda that, at its very core, is based on fallacy. For nations to come together under one roof, one has to assume, as in game theory, that all who gather, come as saints. Well, what happens when you bring a few sinners to the game?

There's been a lot of analysis of this, and it turns out that honesty isn't the best policy. One guy decided to run a computer tournament; people were permitted to create algorithms in a synthetic language which would have the ability to keep track of previous exchanges and make a decision on each new exchange whether to be honest or to cheat. He challenged them to see who could come up with the one which did the best in a long series of matches against various opponents. It turned out that the best anyone could find, and the best anyone has ever found, was known as "Tit-for-tat".

On the first round, it plays fair. On each successive round, it does to the other guy what he did the last time.

When Tit-for-tat plays against itself, it plays fair for the entire game and maximizes output. When it plays against anyone who tosses in some cheating, it punishes it by cheating back and reduces the other guys unfair winnings.

No-one has ever found a way of defeating it.

Now let's analyze two different and even more simplistic approaches; we'll call them "saint" and "sinner". The saint plays fair every single round, irrespective of what the other guy does. The sinner always cheats.

When a saint plays against another saint, or against tit-for-tat, the result is optimum but more important is that everyone gets the same result. When a sinner plays against another sinner, or against tit-for-tat, everyone cheats and the result is still even, though less than optimal.

But when a sinner plays against a saint, the sinner wins and the saint loses.

Which brings me back to the point of all this: Is there anything I would rule out in war? Nothing I'd care to admit to my enemies, because ruling out anything is a "saint" tactic. The Tit-for-tat tactic is to be prepared to do anything, but not to do so spontaneously. In other words, if the other guy threatens to use poison gas, you make sure you have some of your own and let him know that you'll retaliate with it. That means that he has nothing to win by using it, and he won't. (A war is a sequence game and not a single transaction because each day is a new exchange. If you gassed my guys yesterday, I can gas yours today.)

The world is filled with saints and sinners. When you put them into context of nation-states, where despots are granted the same "rights" in the international arena as liberal-democratic countries, you are already setting up a system for failure. Remember, despotic rule isn't just sitting there in a predisposed, natural state within certain countries. It takes work--things like murder, assassination, many times mass killing--to hold onto power.

If there was an international organization that made membership contingent upon certain guaranteed rights of its citizens, it would be a better start (although I remain incredibly dubious). But, just as with the League of Nations, the UN was more of a pragmatic remedy to fight against a serios problem at that time. To halt Soviet expansion after a war that killed millions, territorial sovereignty was what was to be protected at all costs. The UN was a useful tool to that ends (Soviet expansion was halted for the most part), but after the fall of the Soviet Union, it really had no use anymore. The problem is, we gave despotic regimes 50 years to position themselves in areas of power within the international community, while they solidified the power of their own regimes within their borders.

So, this brings me to the Iraq war. What the United States was able to do with the invasion shattered an ideal that transnational progressivists held so dearly. The UN, the embodiment of pure transnationalism, was deemed a fraud the minute the Third Infantry began its dash to Bagdad. Its most powerful member called it out in front of the world and exposed its ill sought intentions. Instead of being an institution designed to protect the rights of individuals, we find that there was an institutional scam that robbed millions from the Iraqi people, while Saddam, the provider of this lucrative shakedown, was allowed to stay in power.

The US not only exposed the UN, it continued down the path to fight the Islamic fascists that are bent on finding ways to kill innocent people. The Arab world is failing. Not failing in the way that a kid who gets bad math grades has the option to get his GED, but failing like a liver exposed to 30 years of 3 bottles of Smirnoff-a-day drinkin'.

Transnational progressivists pretend to care. I'm sure there is an amount of genuine sympathy there. But think it is more like the feeling you get when you pass a bad accident on the road--you initially might be a little shaken up, but within the next few miles your back to thinking about how much the guy in front of you pissed you off when he drives too damn slow in the left lane without moving over.

The world isn't perfect and Lord knows the United States is NOT blemish free (no such place will EVER exist). But, when you have an entire group of people that refuses to take any substantive measures to curb a whole nihilistic-death culture bent on destroying the liberal foundations the West was based on, then you read the kind of agitprop that Hans Blix delivered above.

Unfortunately for the world, we have been forced to look in the mirror and evaluate what we believe and stand for. The fascists know what they stand for, but the West is beating itself to death in trying to figure those questions out.

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Posted by 10 fingers 6 strings at June 2, 2006 08:24 AM | TrackBack