Stardate 20020809.1649

(On Screen via long range sensors): In my field of computer science, there was a period in the 1970's and 1980's when, in addition to the bulk of us who were out in the real world getting useful work done, there were researchers who were actively pursuing the holy grail of artificial intelligence. The brain is just a computer, and whatever it is that we're doing, it should also be possible for a computer to do.

The quest for AI actually goes back much further than that. In this, as in so much else that we do, the astoundingly prescient Alan Turing had already delved deep into the issues before any computers existed at all. Turing also demonstrated the limits of the kinds of computers we use, before they even existed. Turing was one of the great minds of all time, and his accomplishments are all the more amazing when one considers that he was only 42 when he committed suicide. How would our field have developed if he'd been there to guide us during the formative years of the 1950's through the 1970's? It's one of those things we'll never know.

Early experiments in AI during the 1960's failed, but the computers of that era were profoundly limited and no-one was really surprised. But the problem was that AI projects kept failing. Indeed, there's never really been anything remotely resembling a success in the field, and that's caused some to begin to examine fundamental assumptions.

I have a wonderful book called "No Way!" which is an anthology of essays considering the nature of the impossible in a wide variety of fields and human endeavors, such as physics, medicine, economics, and even such things as child rearing. (One article argues that it is impossible to be a perfect parent, and that attempts to do so are ultimately harmful.)

One article in it discusses the state of artificial intelligence research at the time, and begins to make a case for a fundamental error. The problem was that directly or indirectly all of the existing programs were based on deduction. He argues that true intelligence is impossible without induction, and I think he's right.

Deduction is prissy; it refuses to play unless it knows it can win. It requires sufficient information of high reliability, and when that is available it yields an answer which is nearly certain. Otherwise it refuses to play, yielding nothing. Induction is more freewheeling; it deals in probabilities and works with data of doubtful quality; it judges likelihoods and comes up with answers based in inadequate data. It extrapolates. It includes guesses. And sometimes it gets the wrong answer. But it is much more broadly applicable than deduction, and can often get the right answer in cases where deduction refuses to even make an attempt.

Unfortunately, we as programmers understand deduction far better. Deduction is logic; it's mathematics. Deduction is an extremely powerful tool which has served us well, but in many cases it simply isn't enough. And the problem is that we do not have as well developed a mathematics of induction as deduction.

The real world doesn't cooperate with deduction. It's necessary to take chances, to make guesses, to work with inadequate information and information of doubtful validity. We all do it all the time, and most of us don't even realize it. Oddly enough, there are people out there who do understand how we think well enough to use it against us, and we call them "stage magicians". What they do is to present us with a sequence of events such that when we fill in the details for ourselves (which we all constantly do) that we do so incorrectly, resulting in an impression of what happened which is both different from reality, and which seems to be inexplicable and even impossible. A girl gets into one trunk, and the magician then walks across the stage and opens another, and she steps out again. She must have teleported, something we don't believe is possible. Or, perhaps, she's twins, and the first girl is still in the first trunk, and the second one which was identically dressed was already waiting in the second trunk.

By the nature of induction, it is not possible for it to always be correct. If it became sufficiently conservative and careful to avoid error, it would reduce to deduction and become useless for dealing with the problems of the real world.

And if it is not possible to always be right even about normal events, where the only limitations are inadequate access to information, then how much more difficult must it be in military intelligence, where you're trying to determine the intentions and capabilities and plans of a determined enemy who is doing his best to fool you?

I think that most people don't understand the kind of thing which is involved in military intelligence. The kind of data which is used for analysis is sometimes extraordinarily indirect and diffuse. In the era of radio, for instance, one of the most useful forms of intelligence data has been traffic analysis. Simply knowing who is talking, and to whom the messages are being sent, and how much they feel the need to say, and where they're physically located when they transmit, can with proper effort tell you a lot more than you might think even if you can't actually read the messages because they're in a code you haven't cracked.

Occasionally signal intelligence manages to put together a complete picture. In the spring of 1942, American code breakers working in several locations managed to virtually completely crack the Japanese fleet code, known to the Americans as JN-25. Based on information transmitted by the Japanese, American intelligence managed to conclude that they planned to attack Midway island in June. Ultimately this was confirmed when the Japanese transmitted the entire plan of the campaign in that code to all the units which would be involved, and it was intercepted and completely decoded and translated.

But it's extremely rare for military planners to have data that complete. That particular event is noteworthy precisely because it was exceptional. And a different event in WWII demonstrates the opposite side of that same picture: Operation Fortitude. It is the largest, most elaborate and possibly the most successful and historically influential case of deception in the history of warfare; it completely fooled the Germans into thinking that the Normandy landing was intended as a feint whose purpose was to pull their troops out of the Calais area, so that the "real" landing could then happen there without opposition. In actuality, its purpose was to con the Germans into keeping the majority of their mobile forces frozen in Calais waiting for an attack which never came, so that they could not be committed to stopping development of the Normandy beachhead.

In discussions about whether we should or should not actually invade Iraq and remove the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein by force, there are many issues. It is an extremely complicated problem, and one where the answer is by no means obvious. Some people think that no attack is necessary because there isn't any problem that needs to be solved; Saddam isn't a danger and can be ignored. Such people actually argue that the sanctions should be lifted, without any further attempts to find weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) because they believe the assurances of the Iraqi government that they all were destroyed.

Such people are, fortunately, quite rare and to most of us they are operating in a state of denial. For most rational people, the subject comes down to one of two choices. Both agree that there is a problem (though there is considerable debate about what it is) but some think that it is possible to solve it by waiting it out. Others, myself among them, think that the longer we wait the worse the problem will become, and the only sensible course is to eliminate it now before the cost of doing so becomes even greater, even though we know that doing so will cost a great deal, in money and blood and pain and suffering and dead bodies.

But it's difficult to be totally convincing on either side, because we're all working inductively and much of the disagreement is about the value we assign to various indirect pieces of evidence, and the way we extrapolate to fill in the cracks, and what probabilities we assign to various future outcomes, and finally how important different end results are in the grand scheme of things.

In some cases the arguments have been a bit reductionist. Recently, I wrote the following:

I cannot prove what follows but I'm willing to bet money on it: since the inspectors were ejected, Iraq has been going full-bore on development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. I believe that they have substantial stocks of nerve gas, probably have weaponized anthrax but I do not believe they have yet produced a nuclear weapon. Their excuse for ejecting the inspectors was that the WMDs had all been found, there were none left, and that it was time to end the process and remove the economic sanctions.

The reality is that the entire several-year process of weapons inspection was one big cat-and-mouse game with the Iraqis doing their best to hide what they had, but with the inspectors actually making some progress and finding things. Since the inspectors were ejected, the Iraqi line has been that they have none any more. I believe they are lying, and I believe that if true effective inspections were to begin again it would quickly become evident.

Demosthenes reacted to that as follows:

He's very careful to caution that he doesn't know whether Iraq has these weapons, and I'll credit him for that... but throughout the rest of the entry, he proceeds from the assumption that such a thing has been proven, when (as I showed a few entries ago) it is not only not proven, but sounds like a fever-dream of the American right as they thrash around for an ends to justify the means of invading Iraq and removing Saddam. (They can't do it just because they don't like him... they need some sort of justification, however weak.)

The problem, in essence, is that he assigns duplicity to one side, but ignores the possibility of it on the other. He argues that Iraq pulled a "cat and mouse game" to prevent inspectors from seeing ongoing weapons projects, but neglects to mention that American authorities have been accused by rather a lot of non-Iraqis of using the inspectors as intelligence tools to prepare for attacks on Iraq. This is a perfectly valid concern on the part of the Iraqis, and on the part of the U.N.- doubts as to the impartiality of the inspectors reflect badly on the U.N., not just on the United States, and the U.N. doesn't want to be seen as a puppet of the United States. (well, any more so.) Yes, Iraq doesn't want American inspectors, but Iraq has a damned good reason and Den Beste should know it.

Part of the confusion here is my fault, part is deliberate obfuscation by Demosthenes. Demosthenes is creating a false dichotomy: either I can prove that those weapons exist, or else it must be a paranoid fantasy on my part.

My part in the fault was that I thought I was suggesting that my conclusion about Iraqi WMDs was based on induction and that I assigned a high probability to the conclusion. But because it is the result of induction, it isn't possible to prove it, because inductive conclusions aren't susceptible to proof. (If they were, we wouldn't have needed to use induction.) That particular article was already 2000 words, and to talk about those weapons and the evidence which suggests that they exist would have made it even longer. It would also, I thought at the time, represent a distraction because I was trying to show the basic strategic logic.

So it's true that I assumed throughout the rest of that article that those weapons either exist or that there are active and intense efforts in Iraq to create them. I still believe that. But it isn't paranoid raving on my part; there's a lot of good reasons for that belief. I didn't create that out of whole cloth, in an attempt to synthesize evidence to justify my position.

I can't prove it. But here are a few links which show the general trends. First is a report from one of the UN weapons inspectors who worked on finding and destroying biological weapons and the capability to produce them, describing how the Iraqis actively worked to hide them and why it was that he thinks that they didn't totally succeed. He thinks they still have a program to develop bioweapons, and notes that such activities are small and extremely easy to hide.

Here's a report written by an Iraqi defector who was a scientist working in Iraq's nuclear program. This is a briefing from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies showing what they think is the current state of Iraqi WMD capabilities, and the potential for the future.

Certainly PBS is not known these days for being hawkish. Frontline's web site has a list of resources about Iraq and its attempts to acquire WMDs. They include this paper from another of the weapons inspectors describing the difficulties of working in Iraq and the degree to which the government there actively sought to impede the process. This report describes some of the concealment used in Iraq to hide their program to develop nuclear weapons. Here's a report from Europe written in 1998 describing what UNSCOM had accomplished, and what remained to be done. It was written just as Iraq kicked out the weapons inspectors. (It more or less describes the efforts of UNSCOM as a partial success, which of course also implies that it was a partial failure.)

This is another article about Iraqi deception and how it actively worked to impede the disarmament program. This is an analysis of just how much effort Iraq had already put into developing nuclear weapons at the time of the Gulf War.

None of this is proof. I don't have photographs I can cite which show Saddam with a big grin on his face standing next to something on the ground which has the words "Atomic weapon" written on it in Arabic. But real proof isn't possible in this situation until long after the fact. By the time we have proof, it will be too late. There are really only two ways to acquire real proof: invade the place and look around without the Iraqi government impeding us in any way, or wait until a weapon goes off somewhere. Given that we're trying to decide whether to invade, and trying to prevent such a detonation, we must act before proof exists.

Which means we have to fall back on induction because it means we have to make a decision based on inadequate evidence. We have to judge probabilities, and make decisions based on incomplete information. We have to use what's available, and make extrapolations and guesses to fill in the missing gaps. And we might be wrong. That's life.

Part of induction is to decide not just what the chance is that a given conclusion is wrong, but also what the consequences are for a false positive or a false negative, and decide based on that which way to err. If we are incorrectly optimistic, and do not take adequate action now to prevent development of WMDs, then there's a significant chance that such a weapon would be used against us. I consider that alternative to be far worse than any other outcome scenario I have seen from anyone, an alternative worth almost any price to avoid. I do not want Atlanta turned into a radioactive crater, or any other American city, and I'm not even willing to tolerate a 5% chance of such an event. And given a historical track record of immense efforts on the part of Iraq to develop all kinds of WMDs in militarily useful quantities, and their clear efforts over the course of several years to hide them and impede all efforts to destroy them, I think that there's a high probability anyway that the Iraqi government has not given up on those ambitions.

On the other hand, if we're incorrectly pessimistic, it means we'll fight a war that probably wasn't necessary. That's certainly very bad for whatever nation we attack, but the cost to us of such an outcome is much lower than the effects of having one of our cities nuked.

So when I write further on the subject of Iraq, I will indeed always assume that they are actively working to create such weapons. That's because I consider the probability of it to be so high as to be near certainty (which is why I'd be willing to bet money on it) and the consequences of assuming that they are not and being wrong are intolerable. Betting on them doing it is the prudent choice.

There are two other pieces to the nightmare scenario, which is that after developing such weapons that Saddam might give them to a terrorist group who might then use them against us. Each of these has probabilities associated with it, just as does the calculation of whether Iraq is trying to develop WMDs. However, they're not as certain.

However, before I proceed, I need to deal with another objection Demosthenes makes, both in this quote and elsewhere. He cites a report which shows a credible case for the possibility that UNSCOM may have included American spies, working to collect information for ulterior purposes. He asks me, in essence, that based on that, if I was one of the Iraqis wouldn't I too have kicked the inspectors out?

Of course I would. But that has nothing to do with anything, because I have no interest in being fair. I'm partisan; I want my side to win whether it "deserves" to or not, because I like my side and care about it. I'm not interested in playing a fair game, I want to win. This isn't the playing fields of Eton, and the stakes are too high for anything else. Moreover, I fully expect the Iraqis to have the same attitude as I do, and I'm convinced that they too are not interested in fairness. The fact that I understand what they did doesn't mean that I have to support it, forgive it, or avoid working to reverse it. If what they did, even if justified, is counter to my interests (or those of my country) than I (or my country) have a legitimate interest in working against that.

However, Demosthenes is also muddying the waters here, with another reductionist argument. By identifying what is arguably a legitimate excuse for the Iraqis to eject the weapons inspectors, he implies that this is the one and only reason they did so. Humans are rarely that simple, and there's no reason to assume that there may not have been other reasons as well.

In actuality, while it may have been true that some of UNSCOM's activities were covers for American espionage, I don't think that was the primary Iraqi motive for ending the inspections. What I think is that it made a convenient excuse for propaganda purposes, so it's what the Iraqis publicly claimed. I think the real reason was that UNSCOM was actually making significant progress, and actually was near to success and was near to virtually eliminating Iraq's capability to develop WMDs, despite years of determined effort by the Iraqi government to avoid that fate.

During the entire several year period of UNSCOM, it was clear that Iraq's policy was to try to somehow make it through so that the inspectors would be pulled out and the sanctions lifted without actually totally eliminating their WMDs and their means of developing them. Once it became clear that they were truly facing loss of what was seen by them as an extremely valuable strategic asset, they had to adopt more extreme measures. Continuing to let UNSCOM operate had become intolerable, so Iraq kicked them out, and justified it by claiming that they were spying for the US. It certainly helped matters that this may even have been true, but the truth of the claim was hardly necessary; the point was that they needed an excuse to cover up for the true reason, which was that they were willing to do anything to prevent total loss of their WMD program.

The one thing we do know is that all testimony by everyone involved said that the inspectors had not completed their efforts when they were ejected. Irrespective of whether Iraq had a legitimate excuse for doing that, it means they still have the wherewithall to create those kinds of weapons.

So proceeding forward, what is the chance that Saddam might leak a weapon of some kind to friendly terrorists for use against Israel or the US, or some other friendly nation.

One argument offered by Hesiod is that Saddam is a rational actor, and that deterrence can work. Thus it doesn't matter whether he develops WMDs because he'd never let them be used against us, knowing full well that we'd retaliate and not being willing to accept the consequences of that.

1) Saddam Hussein has to be suicidally insane.

Not just merely nuts. Not merely a sociopath. But, literally, suicidal. Why? Because even my grandmother knows that if Iraq attempts to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States, Saddam is a dead man. D*E*A*D. And not only Saddam. But his family, his military infrastructure and personal, and half of Iraq.

2) Saddam is a blithering idiot who will turn over weapons of mass destruction to suicidal terrorists who will get him killed.

Saddam is a ruthless, evil bastard. But he's not stupid. It is vitally important for Saddam to be a complete moron in order for the "attack now" crowd's arguments to have any legitimacy. You really think that Saddam will hand over nuclear material and technology to Osama Bin Laden? Right. Saddam is not exactly LOVED by Al Qaeda. They see him as an ally of convenience. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Eventually, however, Saddam's natural enmity with the Islamic radicals will make them a threat to him. Ironically, the idiotic talk of taking out Saddam HELPS him with the very radical Islamic terrorists we are worried about.

3) Saddam can destroy the United States.

Yup. That's the biggest laugher of the bunch. The worst Saddam can do to the us is to somehow detonate a crude nuclear device in one of our major cities. A terrible event, if it occurred, but not crippling to the United States. I happen to believe that the United States is far more resilient than the "attack now" folks think we are. This means, in practical terms, that unless Saddam takes us out, he's a DEAD man. Of course, such an attack should be avoided. But, I believe Saddam is not stupid enough to actually attack us first, without provocation. Not because he's a nice guy. But because he's rational, and wants to save his own skin.

That last is a rather odd assertion: it's OK if a couple of our cities get nuked. We can take it. It doesn't justify an attack now, as long as our nation overall isn't destroyed. Since Iraq doesn't actually have the ability to defeat us, we can ignore any capability and intent it might have short of that goal, and simply absorb the damage when it happens.

Oh, really? I don't believe that Iraq is capable of defeating us militarily, but I do think that it now has weapons which are capable of causing what I consider intolerable damage to us, and that he will develop better ones, and more of everything, as time goes on. I consider the loss of a city to be unacceptable, and believe that it is more than sufficient justification for our action now to prevent even that result.

But that's not really the core of Hesiod's argument, which is instead that Saddam is a ruthless, evil bastard, but basically rational and not a blithering idiot, and thus can be deterred against use of those weapons against us.

Demosthenes makes a similar point:

His argument that Saddam is somehow not subject to deterrence is equally weak: that Saddam will arm a terrorist group, and thus gain "plausible deniability". The weakness in this argument is actually encapsulated in Den Beste's own arguments, which show that the United States is looking for a reason to invade, and plausible deniability won't be enough to stop it. Stephen knows this, I know this, and there's no doubt whatsoever that Saddam knows this. And yes, Stephen, deterrence works for nukes, too. Nukes are the reason deterrence exists- chemical weapons were only "deterred" in WWII because of Hitler's distaste for them, and in WWI not at all. Saddam wouldn't nuke Washington because Baghdad would end up radioactive glass and he'd be slaughtered by Americans three weeks after the fact. Period. You can maybe argue that a genuine nut might launch without thinking, but Saddam isn't crazy, and while he's fond of foolish chances he's not going to commit the global equivalent of suicide-by-cop.

Both of them ignore several aspects of this.

First, it isn't just Saddam we have to fear. He isn't immortal, and once Iraq has nukes they'll be available to whoever happens to rule that nation, and anyone who becomes friendly with them, for a very long time. Perhaps Saddam can be deterred. Can we deter whoever succeeds him? Or whoever comes after that? What happens if we get a leader there who is suicidally insane? Given the record of leaders in that part of the world, this is far from a remote possibility, and since the stake we're playing with is the potential for losing a million American lives, we must be extremely careful.

Another point is that even if such weapons don't get used, once they exist they make a difference anyway, because they can be used as a deterrent against us. This, by the way, is an aspect of the issue that I also missed, but which was pointed out by Porphyrogenitus. (Which is part of why public debate is valuable; he helped fill in a hole in my argument.) And not just on the level of "Don't nuke me because if you do I'll nuke you back." It can be used as leverage against us to impede much else we may choose to do in that area, and severely limit our ability to influence the course of events there.

Actually, I suspect that the reaction of a lot of people to that prospect is, "And your point is?" Many actually think that the US is the problem, not Iraq. The reason there's a war, the reason there's international conflict, the reason for nearly all the world's ills is that the US is too large, too rich, too powerful, and too greedy. We do too much, own too many weapons, consume too much, and because of that we unbalance the world. All the world's problems ultimately could be solved by having the US disarm, as the Europeans did, and turn down the thermostat on its economy so that everyone stopped living on a per-capita GDP in excess of $35,000. We should all live on $20,000 like the Europeans do, or even less. For instance, James Durbin says:

Maybe we take a step back and try to live more minimalist. Cut back on our spending. Cut back on our consumption. Cut back on our rhetoric, and simply try to help those nations out that could best benefit from our help. Maybe the countries in our own backyard that have been asking for help for the last hundred years. We don't have to live like savages - but our current methods of consumption aren't healthy. And they lead us to places like Iraq. Iraq is not important to the United States if we don't need oil. If we don't need oil. Neither is Saudi Arabia, or most of the Middle East. Our friendship with Israel is important, and the money we give them is important to their survival. In the end, our policies are really for our economic good - as we have shown in the last fifty years.

Our consumption - our greed - has led us to a place where believe we must police the world to keep ourselves afloat. That can be comfort for the millions of people we have saved, given hope to, and lifted up with our aid. It also if fuel for the fire of the tens of thousands we have killed or made destitute. On balance, we have done a pretty good job. But can we fix the problems of the world? What if we can't, and we continue to spiral down into a centralized, socialist and self-loathing mess of a country? What good can we do then?

In other words, if we just start acting like good world citizens, then they will cease to hate us and stop attacking us, and we won't need to worry about that issue anymore. Just go ratify Kyoto like good little boys, and the war will end.

Which brings me, finally, to the article which inspired this entire ridiculously long post. Much of this analysis, by everyone involved, makes a fundamental assumption that Saddam, and other leaders of Muslim and Arab nations and groups, think more or less like we do -- or that they are insane. Thus if we conclude that they are not insane (and Saddam clearly is not) then we must conclude that they are rational and that the principles of deterrence can work against them. As such, it won't matter if they acquire nukes because we can guarantee that they'll never use them against us.

I don't like the word "insane", which Hesiod uses in this context. Demosthenes uses the word "crazy", and I don't like that word, either. For one thing, this is yet another reductionist argument, arguing that there are only two alternatives and claiming to prove one by demonstrating that the other is false. For another, there is no consensus meaning for those words, but in common use and within this context, perhaps the best meaning is that someone is insane if they consistently act in ways that are inexplicable to the others around them.

Lee Harris, writing in Policy Review, makes a plausible case that al Qaeda's leaders may actually be insane within that definition. That doesn't necessarily mean that they can be diagnosed as suffering from one of the forms of mental illness described in DSM IV, which unfortunately is part of why I dislike the terms "insane" and "crazy" within this context. What they imply is that if someone doesn't think like we do, then it's because they suffer some sort of mental illness. It's not that simple.

It's ironic that this amounts to a multiculturalist argument: it's possible for someone else to rationally think in ways which are completely inexplicable to us, leading them to act in ways we would have a hard time understanding and cannot influence.

In the aftermath of last September's attack, various activists for various causes looked at what had happened and saw what they wanted to see. Though they themselves were horrified by the attack, nonetheless it was clear to them that al Qaeda was motivated by the same kinds of things that they were:

What did it all mean? In the early days, there were many who were convinced that they knew the answer to this question. A few held that we had got what we had coming: It was just desserts for Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty or the predictable product of the U.S. decision to snub the Durban conference on racism. Others held, with perhaps a greater semblance of plausibility, that the explanation of 9-11 was to be sought in what was called, through an invariable horticultural metaphor, the “root cause” of terrorism. Eliminate poverty, or economic imperialism, or global warming, and such acts of terrorism would cease.

He also describes how those on the other side of the political spectrum tried to look for equally rational explanations of the attack of other kinds. Then he says this:

This common identification of 9-11 as an act of war arises from a deeper unquestioned assumption — an assumption made both by Chomsky and his followers on one hand and Hanson and National Review on the other — and, indeed, by almost everyone in between. The assumption is this: An act of violence on the magnitude of 9-11 can only have been intended to further some kind of political objective. What this political objective might be, or whether it is worthwhile — these are all secondary considerations; but surely people do not commit such acts unless they are trying to achieve some kind of recognizably political purpose.

Behind this shared assumption stands the figure of Clausewitz and his famous definition of war as politics carried out by other means. The whole point of war, on this reading, is to get other people to do what we want them to do: It is an effort to make others adopt our policies and/or to further our interests. Clausewitzian war, in short, is rational and instrumental. It is the attempt to bring about a new state of affairs through the artful combination of violence and the promise to cease violence if certain political objectives are met.

Lee suggests an entirely different idea: instead of these acts having been a means to some sort of goal, perhaps they were an end in themselves. Perhaps the purpose of last September's attack was to launch an attack, for philosophical or religious reasons. Maybe last September's attack was an ultimate form of worship, an act of religion or patriotism, a form of personal actualization, and as such the aftermath and consequences of the attack didn't matter to those who launched it, or to those who helped them.

He justifies this terrifying concept by describing what's known as a "fantasy ideology", where someone creates a fantasy about the world and then seeks to make it real. It turns out that it's happened many times in the past, and it is part of what make the actions of some leaders so difficult to understand. I won't try to explain it; read his article. I find his argument, at least with respect to al Qaeda, extremely persuasive, and if he's right, then it turns out that last September's attack wasn't even against us, as such. They weren't attacking America because of any specific characteristic of America, or because of anything we might have done or not done in the past. We were a symbol, a place which fit the requirement for carrying out their ultimate act of fantasy and it would have happened here no matter what we'd done.

To be a prop in someone else’s fantasy is not a pleasant experience, especially when this someone else is trying to kill you, but that was the position of Ethiopia in the fantasy ideology of Italian fascism. And it is the position Americans have been placed in by the quite different fantasy ideology of radical Islam.

The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand?

As the purpose of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was to prove to the Italians themselves that they were conquerors, so the purpose of 9-11 was not to create terror in the minds of the American people but to prove to the Arabs that Islamic purity, as interpreted by radical Islam, could triumph. The terror, which to us seems the central fact, is in the eyes of al Qaeda a by-product. Likewise, what al Qaeda and its followers see as central to the holy pageant of 9-11 — namely, the heroic martyrdom of the 19 hijackers — is interpreted by us quite differently. For us the hijackings, like the Palestinian “suicide” bombings, are viewed merely as a modus operandi, a technique that is incidental to a larger strategic purpose, a makeshift device, a low-tech stopgap. In short, Clausewitzian war carried out by other means — in this case by suicide.

But in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide is not a means to an end but an end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into that of martyrdom — martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has always assigned to martyrdom.

In short, it is a mistake to try to fit such behavior into the mold created by our own categories and expectations. Nowhere is this more tellingly illustrated than on the videotape of Osama bin Laden discussing the attack. The tape makes clear that the final collapse of the World Trade Center was not part of the original terrorist scheme, which apparently assumed that the twin towers would not lose their structural integrity. But this fact gave to the event — in terms of al Qaeda’s fantasy ideology — an even greater poignancy: Precisely because it had not been part of the original calculation, it was therefore to be understood as a manifestation of divine intervention. The 19 hijackers did not bring down the towers — God did.

And if this is so, then there is no way to reason with them and no way to stop them short of annihilation. They don't care what we think or what we do or what we promise to cease doing. They don't actually care all that much even what we are, except to the extent that we continue to represent a target of adequate symbolic power for them to use in their religious pageant. It's difficult, in fact, to conceive of anything we could do to convince them to turn their attention elsewhere, short of destroying ourselves or converting our nation into an Islamic Republic.

Is this insanity? Well, it isn't paranoia or schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. But equally it means that they are not "rational players" in the traditional sense of game theory.

Lee is discussing al Qaeda and the other terrorist groups which support radical Islamism. To some extent, what he discusses may also apply to some of those who are currently responsible for the terrorist attacks on Israel.

The question I would like to discuss is the extent to which this kind of mindset might govern the actions of Saddam or whoever succeeds him. I don't believe that Saddam has the same dream as bin Laden, or anything even remotely close to it.

But when I started thinking in these terms, I began to wonder whether he might have a different one, equally divorced from my own view of the world. His would be more along the lines of the one Lee describes for Mussolini, which I think might best be described by borrowing a term from American history, one of "manifest destiny". I think Saddam's dream is to reunite the Arab nations, which once were a single nation but were split up after the end of colonialism. He invaded Kuwait as the first step of that process, and I believe that if he'd been left alone at that point he'd be working on incorporating the other Arab nations around him into a confederation or empire ruled from Baghdad, either through negotiations or by coercion or the use of force.

Though his conventional forces were very large by the standards of the third world, it was clear even in the 1980's that they were not adequate for this great work. He needed something better; he needed weapons which were much more efficient. He needed weapons which were cheap and effective and far more devastating than those he had. This ambition, this dream, could not be accomplished with jets and tanks.

He needed nukes.

He didn't need them to destroy us, or to destroy Israel. He needed them to threaten Riyadh and Damascus, and to deter any attempt by anyone outside the region (especially us) from preventing him from creating his empire.

Again, I can't prove this. But that doesn't mean this is a drug-induced fantasy on my part. There are strong hints about this, in his actions of various kinds, and I see a pattern there. It's not certain, but it's too great a possibility to ignore.

And if it is true, and if this actually is his motivation, then in fact he is "insane" in the sense that his actions will seem inexplicable to us, and also in the sense that it means he won't react to our actions in ways we expect. If this is his motivation, then the possibility of us nuking his nation may well be acceptable to him, as long as he himself can survive the attack. If this is his motivation, then he will be willing to do nearly anything in order to get access to nuclear weapons, because they are the key to his dream of an Iraqi empire dominating the Arab world. (Which would explain the extremely tenacious resistance to the inspectors, and also the final decision to kick them out when they got close to ending his ability to develop such weapons.)

It also means that his goal in acquiring nukes is not so much to use them against us, as to be able to threaten to do so. Given a situation where it became necessary to carry out that threat, he'd use the means available to him which had the highest chance of success, which might well include leaking them to a terrorist group. As long as there was a substantially higher chance of that group using that weapon against us than against him, then it would accomplish its purpose of being a threat against us. Remember, it's the threat that counts, not the execution, because we are rational players and would indeed be deterred by it. If both we and Iraq use nukes against the other, it would be perceived by us as an unacceptable outcome. So an Iraqi threat against us, even if not anonymous and not plausibly deniable, might still be able to accomplish Saddam's goal of getting us to stop preventing him from working to achieve his dream.

And if this is indeed his motivation, then all the alternatives suggested by those opposing the war would fail, most of which rely on some form of tightened monitoring and improved blockade for however long was necessary. For instance, Hesiod recommends the following:

How about a major policy speech in which the President lays out, say, 5 steps Saddam has to take to get sanctions lifted, and to avoid an invasion? For example:

1. Allow immediate, unfettered, absolute and indefinite international access to all suspected or potential sites within Iraq that may contain weapons of mass destruction.
2. Allow immediate, unfettered, and absolute authority to international aid agencies for the distribution of food and medicines within Iraq.
3. Allow immediate, unfettered, and absolute access by either the International Red Cross or the Red Crescent to all political prisoners within Iraq.
4. Have a monitored, free and fair election within 6 months.
5. Limit Iraqi armed forces to a very low number, including limited numbers of heavy armor, troops, and ZERO fixed-wing military aircraft.

This will put all the onus on Saddam Hussein to produce tangible results, which cannot be gainsayed by either the international community, or the nations of the region.

This list is not exhaustive. And I am sure there are other creative possibilities out there. But, the point is that there are OTHER options to get Saddam to play ball besides an invasion.

Such an offer would be a major victory for Saddam. I think Saddam would agree to this proposal, or at least seem to, because it would maximize his chance of achieving his dream. It would prevent us from attacking, which is the main point, and once the immediate danger of that was eliminated then the "immediate, unfettered, absolute access" would turn out to be delayed, impeded and conditional, as he worked to try to preserve his nuke program long enough to create bombs. (And the "monitored, free and fair election" would turn out to be about as free and fair as the one which happened in Zimbabwe.)

His strategy is delay. He needs time. Once he has his nukes, everything changes. He can negotiate with us at a much more equal level, and he can make credible threats against us. He can tell us to stick our weapons inspectors where the sun doesn't shine. Until then, he has to work from a position of weakness, so he's using every delaying tactic he can find.

And in the mean time, I think he'd even be willing to cut his conventional forces, because those can be rebuilt once he has nukes and can use them as a threat to end economic sanctions. (Besides which, once he has nukes he won't need anything like as large of a conventional force in order to achieve his dream of an Arab empire.)

That's why he reopened dialog with the UN about a resumption of inspections. Negotiations take time, and time is a gift to him. But once the discussions actually started, there was little progress. When demands along the lines of Hesiod's for unfettered access were made, the Iraqis refused to consider them. There was even a statement by an Iraqi official that if inspections were to resume that they should not "be intrusive" which rather defeats the point, wouldn't you think? What is the purpose of only inspecting where the Iraqis tell you it's OK?

One of the reasons I think that this may be true is because some of his actions already seem inexplicable. It's difficult to understand all the sacrifices and all the effort that the Iraqi government has been willing to make over the course of the last ten years simply to retain access to the ability to continue developing nuclear weapons. Any rational player (ahem) would have realized a long time ago that the price was too high, and that he could have a much better situation if only he'd give up that ambition. Saddam has never been willing to, and his attempts to develop nuclear weapons begin to approach the irrational.

But it makes sense if it is seen as some sort of holy political talisman, as the essential step in achieving a great dream. If indeed his true goal is establishment of some sort of empire by the use of nuclear blackmail, then there is probably nothing we can do to stop him or deter him, unless we invade.

None of this is certain, but for me at least there's too great a chance that it might be true to ignore, and if it is right and if we guess wrong, then eventually he will nuke one of our cities, no matter how, when we finally come into conflict with him. And to us it will seem the act of a madman, and to him it will be the final fulfillment of a dream. And a lot of Americans will be dead.