REVIEWING THE DELETED SCENE – PART III
To continue the examination of Dr. Barnett’s deleted scene on System Perturbation that I began in Part I. and Part II. we’re going to look at the rules # 4-6 today. As usual, Dr. Barnett’s text is in bold, my commentary is regular text.
“What’s really at risk in a System Perturbation?
Rule #4: In response to System Perturbations, horizontal systems tighten up vertically, but vertical systems tighten up horizontally?
After 9/11, a horizontal system like the United States will tighten up its rule sets by forging more comprehensive cooperation between local, state and federal agencies, or along vertical lines of authority. Horizontal systems like the U.S. naturally fear that their distributedness is their weakness, when in reality, it is their strength. But tightening up along vertical lines only makes sense, sort of defense-in-depth philosophy that is more logical than, say, states coming together per se. In a vertical system you tend to see the opposite sort of response: when the Great Leader finds his rule under attack, he starts reining everyone in because he is never quite sure who to trust. So you see crackdowns on untrustworthy groups and more palace guards. That was basically Saddam Hussein’s tack across the nineties after the U.S. booted Iraq out of Kuwait: he kept creating new, ever more trustworthy troops to surround him, and he put those troops under his most trusted relatives. More generally in response to 9/11, we saw plenty of vertical political systems around the world use the excuse of the global war on terrorism to target dissidents, separatists, and the like, reclassifying everyone as a terrorist and seeking the U.S.’s blessing for that designation. So what is at risk here is basically the civil rights of citizens the world over, because a vertical shock can easily send even the most horizontal systems over the top in their search for security.”
That strikes me as a reasonable analysis and one we really need to pay attention to on the margins because the down the line costs are surprisingly high in a lot of ways. Giving obnoxious enablers of Islamist terrorism like Cat Stevens the boot is about right. With Tariq Ramadan , a famous scholar with somewhat shady connections, we wander into a gray area in terms of cost-benefit analysis to U.S. policy. When budding scientists and mathematicians from India, China, South Korea, Russia- many of whom after studying in American universities decide to stay here permanently and contribute to our economic and technological preeminence – decide a U.S. visa isn’t worth the security restrictions hassle, we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Somehow I think we can take precautions to screen out young Islamist males belonging to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaida without targeting 180 I.Q. Asian physicists and genetic engineers. Long term this trend represents an economic disaster far worse than 9/11 – we depend on foreigners to fill about half of our annual hard science Ph.d slots – there are no ” substitute goods ” for these kinds of brains. If they aren’t here, they’re not here and critical opportunities simply get lost.
Visa and security policies needs to be reevaluated to target – yes target – only Islamist activists and their financial supporters with the precise specificity once reserved for likely Eastern bloc spies. We did not search grandmothers, wheelchair bound Dutch parapalegics and elderly Congressman at airports in order to prove that we were not discriminating against Slavs when we were looking for KGB agents. Visa entry and security screening needs to be removed from the hands of gumshoe bureaucrats at Homeland Security and PC fools like Norman Mineta and handed over to FBI and CIA counterintelligence professionals.
Rule #5: Vertical scenarios scare horizontal systems more, while horizontal scenarios scare vertical systems more.
Page 1 of 3 | Next page