Public Policy Considerations

How should the United States react to the atrocities of September 11?
For sure it should bend every effort to seeking out the still-living
guilty and bring them to justice.  But there is a larger question to
be answered: how do we enhance the security of the United States in
such a way as to minimize the possibility of such an atrocity, or a
similar atrocity, again taking place.

There are ``security measures'' to be taken.  Airport security and
border security can and should be beefed up.  But it is clear that we
cannot retreat into a ``Fortress USA'', making the movement of people
substantially harder than it is now, for two reasons.  First, we
should be throwing out the baby with the bath water; we cannot lose
sight of our core values and freedoms.  Second; such measures will
ultimately be futile; clever men, full of hate, willing to die, will
always be able to frustrate our most frantic defensive efforts.

Let us look a little more closely at what we already know about the
hijackings and murders of September 11.  A lot of smarts were evident.
Planes full of jet fuel were selected.  They were hijacked, it seems,
by men coming onto them using carefully chosen connecting flights.
But --- so it seems at present --- the only technical component of
these acts was the knowledge of how to steer these planes and keep
them in the air for a short period of time.  The weapons of choice of
the perpetrators seem to have been knives.  Knives!

As I said earlier, the actual perpetrators, now all dead, seem to have
been a small number of Clever men, Full of hate, and Willing to die;
let us call such people CFWs.  Now the number of CFWs world-wide is
difficult to estimate.  Of hate the world is full, unfortunately.  But
cleverness is in short supply everywhere, and combining this with the
willingness to die . . . we can surely say that the proportion of CFWs
in most populations is small.

I make here also the hypothesis: CFWs are seldom at the disposal of
governments.  If true, this is a point that is extremely significant.
Democratic governments, respected by their people, would seem to have
the highest chance of recruiting CFWs.  But introspection, backed by
observation, shows that there is a difficulty here.  People in a
democracy, with only minor quarrels with their governments, seldom
tend to be full of hate.  The Ted Kaczynskis of this world --- Mr K
seems to have been clever and full of hate --- are usually on the outs
with their representative governments.  And people who are clever and
unafraid to die cannot, methinks, be ordered to die by dictators.
If this hypothesis is true, it is an important point to be kept in
mind by us all.  For it is, accordingly, extremely unlikely that
Saddam, or Khadafi, or the Taliban, have at their disposal a great
number of CFWs.  

[ One hears in the US in these days, and not only from uneducated people,
the need to increase our missiles and our tanks and our fighters.  We
are of course very good at building hi-tech stuff.  But it is in my
opinion necessary to apply the reasoning behind the aphorism: "To the
person with only a hammer, all problems are nails."  We can not secure
ourselves against CFWs with missiles, tanks, and fighters.  We must
equip ourselves with more than these hammers. ]

I am not psychologically trained and I find it impossible to guess at
what makes a CFW.  But it seems clear that we can heavily detract from
their effectiveness by making the sea in which they swim a hostile one.
Unfortunately there are many parts of the world which seem likely to
be breeding grounds --- fertile soil, if you will --- for the nurture
of CFWs.

We were all distressed by the pictures from various parts of the world
showing crowds dancing and exulting at US tragedy.  But from the point
of view taken here, these crowds represent a significant security
threat for the United States, for in such places can the CFWs find
security to plot and prepare.  We must do our best to bring the crowds
over, if not to our side, still to the recognition that no one is
served by these tragedies.

Why do they cheer?  I don't know.  We are told it is because of our
pro-Israel policy, and this is perhaps a component.  I don't believe
we can do very much about this.  We were present and assisted at the
birth of Israel, we have favored Israel throughout its history, and it
would be cowardly and cruel to change our policy at this time.  Israel
and the US are tightly intertwined and there is not, nor should there
be, any chance that this policy will change.

However, the US possesses many advantages in the ``struggle for the
minds and hearts of men.'' The US is the envy of the world.  Rich
beyond dreams of avarice, free beyond the hopes of most of mankind, it
sits ``on top of the hill'', exuding Coca Cola, airplanes, and rap
music.  I suggest that it can do more.  In the common parlance, we can
``improve our image.''

I suggest that we join the rest of the human race in our joint battle
against a common enemy.  The enemy I have in mind is AIDS.  I suggest
that we increase our efforts to combat AIDS ten-fold, perhaps a
hundred-fold.  I have done no cost analysis, but I suspect that the
cost of such a program would be miniscule in comparison with the costs
we are suffering from the blows of September 11.  I would hope that
AIDS drugs could be brought to every part of the world --- Egypt,
Afghanistan, Indonesia, China --- and programs to help the infected be
massively sustained everywhere.  The thought is not original --- an
AIDS ``Marshall Plan'' has been called for by many --- but here the
suggestion is made, not just because of the good it can do, but
because of the enhanced security it could bring to our country.  

What enhanced security? one may ask.  My answer: the world can hardly
help but take notice of an America that, as well as producing Coca Cola,
airplanes of all kinds, and popular music, uses a reasonable proportion
of its wealth to fight hideous disease.  I suspect that even in Cairo,
Baghdad, or Ramalla, many people will be impressed by massive United
States efforts against AIDS, should we care to make them.  And it only
takes one person to turn in a cabal of CFWs to the authorities.

As Kofi Annan has said: "There is one world.  Ours."  And by binding
ourselves tighter to it, we can, I hope, decrease the ability of
demented CFWs to injure us as they did on September 11.

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