by
Angelo M. Codevilla
A New Year’s wake-up
call from the International Business Times: “In their annual End of Year poll,
researchers for WIN and Gallup International surveyed more than 66,000 people
across 65 nations and found that 24 percent of all respondents answered that
the United States “is the greatest threat to peace in the world today.”
Pakistan and China fell significantly behind the United States on the poll,
with 8 and 6 percent, respectively. Afghanistan, Iran, Israel and North Korea
all tied for fourth place with 4 percent.”
This
confirms what international travelers sense: whereas not so long ago foreigners
saw Americans as the embodiment of peace and freedom, a plurality now see us as
a source of trouble for themselves. For more people than not, being on
America’s side now means being on the side of trouble. Why? And what is that to
us?
As ever in
human history, the reputation of “dangerous to peace” does not attach itself to
nations that trample over others as victorious aggressors, or whose power looms
ominously. Rather, it is yet one more dangerous indignity heaped upon those who
are perceived as weak and inept. That perception means that more and more
people are likely to deprive us of our peace.
The
question for us Americans to ponder as we enter into yet another election year
is: how, since 9/11, did our leaders manage to use this country’s mighty
military; how did they manage to sacrifice some 10,000 American dead and 30,000
crippled for life, to kill several hundred thousand foreigners while spending
between two and three Trillion dollars, in a way that earned us no peace abroad
or at home and the title of “greatest threat to peace in the world” to boot?
How has all this effort made more and more people hostile to us?
We may see
part of the answer in a December 29 Wall Street Journal feature by Philip Mudd,
deputy director of CIA’s counterterrorism center 2003-6 and senior intelligence
adviser at FBI 2009-10.
We should
take Mr. Mudd at his word that our Best And Brightest have been in charge since
the beginning, and have followed a consistent plan: “We met every afternoon in the CIA director’s conference room at 5. At
the FBI director’s conference room, we met every morning shortly after 7.” Nose to the grindstone, early and
late.
These high
officials believe that America is beset by a shadowy spider-web of
international rogues, and that the path to our peace lies in mapping that
network. “How best can we clarify the blurry picture of an emerging terror
conspiracy overseas or in the United States? How can we identify the key
players and the broader network of fundraisers, radicalizers, travel
facilitators and others quickly enough so they can’t succeed? And how do we
ensure that we’ve mapped the network enough to dismantle—and not merely
disrupt—it?”
Their
answer, since they pretend to be agnostic about that network’s composition, is
to gather as much data about what everyone in the world is doing and then to
sort it by sophisticated mathematical algorithms to isolate “gossamer
contacts…in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data,” and then to focus their
investigations. To do otherwise – to start from openly available facts about
who wants to do what to whom would be “profiling” of the racist kind.
But,
technology has enabled our wizards to combine socio-political agnosticism with
effectiveness: “The fastest, most efficient solution to mapping a network of
conspirators lies in following digital connections among people. And as digital
trails expand, digital network mapping will increase in value…link cellphones,
email contacts, financial transactions, travel and visa information, add in
whatever else you can find, and …Bingo! Within a day, you can have the
beginnings of an understanding of a complex network. Even so, an analyst has to
ask other questions. Where did the conspirators travel a year ago? Five years
ago? Who did they live with? Who did they sit next to on an airplane? [for
that] Investigators need an historical pool of data.”
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