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The article started off OK, and was strong in the middle, but finished weak. A general rule of persuasive writing is that your strongest argument should be your last, and your second-strongest should be your first. Thus, for all their credentials, it looks like these fellows would benefit from retaking English 101.
Here are all of the problems I could spot on a cursory examination:
| quote: | | The administration has taken some successful steps to counter terrorism, such as improved airline and border security, |
This is an unsupported assertion. Nearly every time the new airport security policies are tested, they fail. Border security, likewise, has failed to make any empirically supported improvements.
The so-called improved security comes at a cost of money and time to citizens of America and has produced no demonstrable benefit. How can this be classified as a "successful step to counter terrorism?"
| quote: | | Furthermore, the administration ... and it has failed to address the political contexts-failed states and repressive regimes-that enable and facilitate terrorism. |
But this is precisely what the Bush administration has been doing (whether or not they've done it well is another issue entirely). They've invaded Iraq and Afghanistan precisely to "address the political contexts-failed states and repressive regimes-that enable and facilitate terrorism."
This is a direct contradiction with the claim that the administration has overemphasized military responses, unless one is to claim that failed states and repressive regimes can be adequately addressed without a military response. It wouldn't be prudent to make that claim however: it is in direct conflict with historical fact. In fact, the U.S. tried that very thing with an embargo against Iraq - the result wasn't a fix for "repressive regimes," it was a massive and widespread increase in poverty throughout Iraq.
The fact is that you must use military force in order to adequately address these problems. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
| quote: | | E. Weakening International Institutions: The Bush administration has been hostile to a whole set of multilateral institutions that are central to enhancing international law and security, from the International Criminal Court to nearly all multilateral arms control and disarmament efforts, including the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions, the ABM Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. |
This is baseless speculation. There is no evidence to suggest that any of these international institutions would reduce international terrorism. In fact, the evidence indicates that they would be more hostile to measures taken to prevent terrorism. For example, the UN has spent a lot more time and effort interfering with Israel's ability to defend itself from terrorism than it has actually stopping terrorists from attacking Israel.
Why now should we believe the key to the prevention of terrorism lies in these failed institutions?
| quote: | | F. Failure to Attack Root Causes: The Bush White House has failed to address the root causes of international terrorism and the social and political contexts in which such terrorism thrives, including repressive regimes, failed states, and the way in which poverty and inequality can create conditions of support for terrorist acts. Addressing the basic causes and conditions that facilitate terrorism in no way implies appeasement. Rather, it reflects both a pragmatic commitment to diffuse terrorism's political roots and a normative commitment to respect the values the United States preaches. Yet, heedless to the time bomb of widening global wealth disparity, the Bush administration has taken advantage of the crisis surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to justify its pursuit of an expanded trade and investment liberalization agenda. This agenda fails to address the central challenges of reducing poverty and inequality and of promoting sustainable growth in developing countries. |
There's so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. First of all, it demonstrates a failure to understand the basic relationship between causality and human behavior - it borders on being a complex cause fallacy, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that it's merely selective observation. It also demonstrates a failure to understand real-world economics.
Yes, it's true that repressive regimes, failed states, and poverty sometimes appear to create conditions for the support of terrorist acts (not inequality, though - more on this later). I would also add insufficient education to the list. But they are neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for terrorism to arise, and it is fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning to suggest that they are the "source" of terrorism without providing evidence of a causal link. In reality, there isn't even a strong correlation between any of these conditions and terrorism - it is a fact that there are and have historically been many socities in more severe conditions in which terrorism did not arise, and it is also a fact that terrorist acts can arise in even affluent nations.
Basic behavior study tells us that there are two things required for an organism to take an action:
1. It chooses to do so (via reason, instinct, reflex, et cetera).
2. It is able to do so.
So, an effective behavior control policy would be one which reduces either the likelihood of someone choosing to carry out an act of terrorism, or that reduces the ability of someone to carry out an act of terrorism.
But the evidence isn't there that reducing poverty and replacing repressive regimes will decrease the likelihood of people there choosing to carry out an act of terrorism. It is merely conjecture.
A good place to start is with the following question: what makes someone choose to commit an act of terrorism? Is it poverty? Repression? No, it is neither of these things - the vast majority of repressed people in poverty do not commit acts of terrorism. Rather, it is the belief that an act of terrorism may produce a desirable effect. The best way, therefore, to debunk that belief is to demonstrate, over a significant period of time, that commiting an act of terrorism brings about undesirable effects rather than desirable ones.
Now, let's step back from the examination of an individual's decision and look at a larger societal picture. Suppose we had a society we called "Society X." People in Society X are poor and frequently commit terrorism. Now suppose that every time someone in Society X commits an act of terrorism, we distribute USD $1,000,000 among them to reduce poverty in an attempt to solve the problem. Would this policy be effective towards the goal of reducing terrorism? Obviously not: it would create a situation in which it is in the self-interest of members of that society to carry out terrorist attacks (preferably not suicide attacks, but terrorist attacks nonetheless). But suppose we ignored that and kept giving Society X money whenever they carried out a terrorist act. Now suppose there's another society nearby - call it "Society Z." People in Society Z are just as poor as though in Society X - even more poor now that we've pumped all that money into Society X. But the people there have never been known to carry out terrorism. They are, however, known to have the power of observation, and they see how much money people in Society X are making by using terrorism. Well, it wouldn't be a bit of a surprise if those people in Society Z decided that it might be a good idea for them to start becoming terrorists, too.
The crux of the problem is that it's not just appeasement that encourages terrorism, it's doing anything that might be viewed as positive by terrorists in response to terrorism. Unfortunately, reducing poverty is one of those things. Creating free societies instead of dictatorships might not be, however: the situation in Iraq indicates that terrorists are quite opposed to democracy (probably because it would reduce their ability to recruit).
Lastly, two of the proposed policies (reducing poverty and reducing inequality) are in direct conflict. We can measure economic inequality by examining the gap between the "rich" and the "poor" :
It's a rather primitive graph, to be sure, but it is essentially accurate: the rich don't become "more wealthy" at the expense of the poor (as wealth redistribution advocates would have you believe) - they simply become "more wealthy" faster than poor people do.
If you were to plot a different (but related graph) showing the relationship between the size of the gap (e.g. the amount of inequality) to the rate of increase of the wealth of the poor, you would see that the bigger the gap between rich and poor, the faster the poor gain wealth.
The reason for this is simple: poor people spend most of their money on basic necessities: food, clothing, housing, et cetera. What little they have left is usually spent on entertainment. Wealthy people have enough money to pay for all of those things, and then have plenty left over. If this money were redistributed to the poor, the poor would spend it on more expensive clothing, more and more expensive food, larger housing units, and more quantity and more expensive forms of entertainment. This is because the increase in wealth for the poor per capita would be relatively little - since there are so many more poor than rich. In the hands of the rich, however, such an abundance of money leads them to use the extra money for what is most logical: investment into things which will bring them even more money. It is the dollars of the wealthy, not the poor, which fund the economic growth and construction of economic infrastructure which leads to an increase in overall productivity and a higher standard of living for all citizens. Logically, the more excess wealth that the rich have (represented roughly by the "gap" between them and the poor), the more growth and infrastructure they can and do fund - and the faster productivity and prosperity increase.
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