Re: [iwar] The assumption of MAD
From: Ross Stapleton-Gray
From: amicus@well.com
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From: Ross Stapleton-Gray
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Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 23:13:47 -0400
Reply-To: iwar@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [iwar] The assumption of MAD
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At 02:40 PM 10/24/00 -0700, Dan Ellis wrote:
> What happens to your (probability) model when somebody decides
>that they have nothing to loose [sic] by being destroyed?
...
>Now, I do NOT
>assert that this is the belief system of any population of people or
>nation. However, people with this mindset exist (see for example the
>recent murder suicides on *US* soil--ie, the shootings in our
>schools)! They can exist in any population. And, as soon as you get
>somebody like this with sufficient influence and power, something bad can
>happen.
> So, what do you think? Is there a way to deal with such a world
>view? How do you account for that in your probability models?
I'd argue that it's one of the critical roles of diplomacy, to give the
other guy something worth living for. While our military can, guaranteed,
reduce any given 100 square mile spot on the planet to glowing, radioactive
glass, that's, ideally, not necessary, and certainly not sufficient, per
the example you cite: the player with nothing to lose may just decide to
get into the record books by the size of the hole he digs for himself *and*
others.
Something worth living for could be anything from stability and peace, to
kitschy consumer comforts. It doesn't have to mean giving without
getting... we don't need to pay tribute to other countries (a la buying off
the Barbary Pirates). Done right, you encourage other populations to elect
(or tolerate) only governments who'll play by mutually beneficial rules.
Personally, I'm extremely disappointed by U.S. relations with Iran, as one
case in point re what you get when diplomacy fails. Our popular, domestic
view is that this is a rogue state whose history starts with its
overrunning the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, and holding American
diplomats hostage for over a year, and then subsequent involvement, through
proxies, in regional terrorist acts that cost several hundred American
lives (if we include the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon). Their view
of us is as a rogue superpower which engineered a coup to oust its elected
leadership to install a more compliant despot in the 1950s, and then
subsequent involvement, through war-time assistance to its hostile
neighbor, in the deaths of tens of thousands in the 1980s, and then there
was the Airbus shootdown. The news of this last week was of judgments in
U.S. courts for some of the victims of Iranian actions, to the tune of a
couple of hundred million, that the U.S. government will apparently try to
take from seized assets... the U.S. settlement for the Airbus shootdown
amounted to something like $62M.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54644-2000Oct21.html
(doing the math, Terry Anderson's family gets $41.2M, while the families of
each Airbus victim get $0.25M apiece)
I think we'd do a lot more toward regional stability to get Iranians hooked
on using the Internet to share agricultural research, say, than nursing
grudges in the U.S. Senate, when the perponderance of bad behavior may have
come from our side...
Ross
_____________________________________________________________________
Ross Stapleton-Gray TeleDiplomacy, Inc.
director@embassy.org 2503 Columbia Pike, Suite 118
Arlington VA 22204
http://www.telediplomacy.com +1 703 685-5197 / 5257 fax
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