At 10:36 PM 17/12/04 -0500, JDG wrote:
snip
And Dave, how is this any different from accusing supporters of the Iraq War of trying to "suggest" connections between Iraq and 9/11?
I have no idea why anyone would think there was no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq.
In short, humans go to war either because (A) "war memes" build up on a population looking at bleak prospects or (B) they are attacked. The two modes are additive and there are complicated feedback paths in the modern world.
These mechanisms dates back to the stone age and are an evolved way that keeps hunter gatherer population in balance with their supporting ecosystem. (After the big cats could no longer keep the rock-throwing primates in check.)
Population growth lower than economic growth keeps (A) from being activated. That's the case in a lot of the non-Islamic world. For various reasons, the Islamic world's "income per capita" has been falling, both because the culture is not particularly suited to western technological advances and their high birth rate.
This provided the conditions where OBL's meme set and related ones can pick up warriors, and support from the population.
That's the origin of the 9/11 attack. Stupid of course, but we evolved in conditions where it made sense for genes to build brains with these psychological traits. If you were in a small tribe facing starvation, an insane attack on a larger tribe where all the males of the little tribe were killed was better for their genes than starving. Why? Because most of the time the young women were booty and became wives (or second wives) in the victorious tribe. (And against the odds they might win.)
Those young women carry the genes of the dead warriors. (See Hamilton if you don't already grok inclusive fitness of genes.) At the rational level OBL's followers did not have a clue as to *why* but the underlying evolved psychological mechanisms were (worst case) after "better prospects" for the unborn children of their female relatives fathered by the better off "tribe" they attacked.
Ok, so the US "tribe" was attacked on 9/11 by OBL's "Islamic tribe" and went into war mode due to (B).
Additionally, though the US has not suffered a lot in total income, there has been a massive internal shift in income with a large fraction of the population facing bleak times. (Few starve, but the war-meme mechanism only need a relative drop to be biased on.) To the extent a substantial fraction of the population faces bleak times or thinks they are, they are that much more willing to support war.
And how did that get us into this Iraq mess?
Once a tribe is attacked and goes into war mode rationality really suffers. It's not different from the damage to rationality that come from the build up of insane war memes in a tribe with bleak prospects and happens much faster. Under those circumstances tribes follow leaders who are often less rational than their supporters. In this case the US had the misfortune of a leader who had a preconceived notion of what he wanted to do to gain glory.
So what happens? The US overruns Iraq. Of course other than being Islamics, they had nothing to do with 9/11. Still, had the US been able to bring up the economic prospects in Iraq fast enough, they might have gotten away with it. Now the bad economy there is a powerful driving mechanism supporting war memes, PLUS the fact that Iraq was attacked. The ongoing upheaval makes economic improvement next to impossible.
Unfortunately understanding what is happening hasn't led to an acceptable proposal for what might be done about it.
A completely *mad* proposal would be to swap out the Iraqi population with Texans. It's not impossible from a logistics point of view. Both sets of people would see enough of a rise in income or prospects to turn off war mode.
But in any case, there is a solid connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq.
Keith Henson
PS. Don't tell me I swapped it around, I know that. :-)
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