Sunday, January 24, 2010

Where to now on war.

We are mired in a state of war with militant Islam, with a cold war with South American Marxism brewing on the side. Our armies are not holy warriors fighting for Christendom but generally humanists who can't tell friend from foe. Our weapons kill civilians or sanctions starve them. We have no good intelligence tools and the ones we do have are open to manipulation by both sides.

We are under attacks from entities that go beyond the nation state and perhaps supersede it. I don't believe the US government blew up the twin towers on 9/11. I don't believe they were that capable of organising or concealing such an action. I do believe that that something like Al Qaeda could and did organise 9/11 and 7/7. Clearly all the armies and rockets of the west are no match for the simple tools of improvisation, fanaticism and self sacrifice. That is not new as the IRA, the weathermen and the Oklahoma bombing all testify.

To wage war we must deal with the fact that our enemies leaders don't march out and face our leaders in personal combat. They hid behind an army of conscripts, brain washed 19 year olds and fanatical believers. Al Qaeda holds its planing meeting at weddings so that the cost of attacking them is great. Despots and deluded politicians whip their populations up to stand with them. We are forced to mow down millions to kill one man or false idea.

Isolationism and non-aggression are not defences. Free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of travel and immigration, freedom to change religion are all provocations in the eyes of Islam, communism and socialism.

We can't keep liberty bottled in our territory. Everything is global: faith, belief, truth. The air we breath and the resources we own are all claimed by despots or would be despots some where.

The simple decision to not allow imams to blare their calls to prayer over Swiss cities with minimal Moslem populations has made neutral Switzerland into a target. The decision to ban the veil in France may sound harsh but in areas that allow the full veil girls who don't ware the garment are attacked. Acid is thrown in their face. This happens in the west as well as the middle east. The burqa also hides criminals and terrorists. Western women's refuges are overwhelmed with women and Girls that are fleeing such attacks. Accepting apostates as refugees or honouring their property rights is a provocation to most Islamic cultures. Honouring any property rights of a refugee fleeing communism is an offence to communism. Even their education and the refugees clothes are the property of the state according to some left wing groups.

Even if a austrolibertarian republic were created it would by definition need to have open borders, free speech, freedom of weapon ownership, the right to perfect private encryption. Courts would be private with the risk of both a Moslem and Marxist private judiciary arising. To crush such sharia judges or any of the above liberties would amount the creation of a non libertarian state.

In such a society statist rebels and foreign agents would invade without weapons. Buying them on arrival, their communications and planning would be encrypted and could not be monitored or used in the courts as a result. Any immigrant refugee could buy up weapons and wage unofficial war to free his family. Instead of a few entangling treaties we would have a hundred unofficial, uncontrolled and amateur operations killing thousand each and provoking every external entity.

The absence of a foreign policy is still a foreign policy.

We need new tools, idea's, solutions. I believe there are good ideas like non lethal weapons, robotic sentries and vehicle inspectors. New frontiers on the sea and space. Somehow we, who don't believe in the planned economy, must plan out way out of this mess.

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