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The Impossible War
So too with myriad state programs, among which is the global War on Terror. To shore up the war, there has been no shortage of rhetoric. No expense is spared on arms escalation. There is no lack of will. The effort has the backing of plenty of smart people. It is backed by threats of massive bloodshed. What is missing is the essential means to cause the war to yield beneficial results. Of all the billions of potential terrorists out there, and the infinite possibilities of how, when, and where they will strike, there is no way the state can possibly stop them, even if it had the incentive to do so. Consider
the most obvious evidence of failure, as pointed out by Congressman
Ron Paul in a stellar address at the Mises Institute ( What is being described as a triumph of the police is actually an example of the spectacular failure of government-provided terror control. The Pentagon patrolled the skies. The police thought about nothing else. Hotlines rang constantly. After every shooting, police barricades interrupted traffic flows for miles. Profilers with a lifetime of experience were busy fitting the pieces together. But after weeks of work, and more than enough clues, authorities were no closer to catching or knowing anything about the sniper or sniper team than they were after the first victim fell. As details emerged after the capture of John Allen Muhammad, it turns out that he was not an amazing sharp-shooting genius but a thug whose only training in shooting was provided courtesy of the US taxpayer. What's more, he was practically begging to be caught, calling the police to brag about a past crime, the scene from which fingerprints had been taken. In the end, he was caught only thanks to a private individual who matched the license and the description from the radio aired over the objections of the police! And until he was caught, the biggest nation-state in the history of the world, armed with 10,000 nuclear warheads and funded with nearly a half trillion dollars per year, was being humiliated and left cowering in the face of one military-trained thug and a gun. The prevalence of violence in the US together with a global war on terror is the equivalent of the simultaneous existence of the War on Poverty, and grueling poverty in Anacostia, a few miles from the Housing and Urban Development headquarters. The more the state tried to eradicate poverty, the more it created, because the programs themselves fed (inadvertently or not) the very conditions that they were trying to alleviate. So it is with the War on Terror. Behind terrorism is political grievance, mostly having to do with frustration at the activities and arrogance of the state and its violations of rights. This is not speculation. This is the word of the terrorists themselves, from Timothy McVeigh to Osama Bin Laden to innumerable suicide bombers. The pool of actual terrorists (like the poor in the War on Poverty) is limited and can be known, and they are the ones the state focuses on. But the pool of potential terrorists (and potential poor people) is unlimited, and unleashed by the very means the state employs in its war. Hence, not only does the state not accomplish its stated goals, it recruits more people into the armies of the enemy, and ends up completely swamped by a problem that grows ever worse until the state throws in the towel. In the meantime, the target population is able to make a mockery of the state through sheer defiance. As more and more were added to the ranks of the poor and the intended beneficiaries of the programs themselves began to mock the state's benevolence, people began to speak of the failure and collapse of the Great Society. Of course the welfare state still exists, but the moral passion and ideological fervor is gone. In the same way, we will soon begin speaking of the collapse of the War on Terror. The
failure to get the sniper is only the beginning. Bin Laden is still
loose, and everyone knows that there are hundreds or thousands more
Bin Ladens out there. Terrorism has increased since the war began. The theorist who first saw the collapse of the ideology of the nation-state, Martin van Creveld, was asked about this in an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He was refreshingly blunt:
But
can't the state just kill more, employ ever more violence, perhaps
even terrify the enemy into passivity? It cannot work. Even prisons
experience rioting. Another bracing comment from van Creveld: "The
Americans in Without
admitting defeat, the Americans finally pulled out of But
wouldn't that mean surrender? It would mean that the state surrenders
its role but not that everyone else does. Had the airlines been
in charge of their own security, 9-11 would not have happened. Whatever
political motives the sniper has would not exist. Bin Laden would
have a hard time gaining recruits. Muslim fundamentalism would be
dealt a serious blow, for no longer would In
all the talk of war on The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is suppose to achieve, and will only end in creating more of the same conditions that led to its declaration in the first place. In other words, it is a typical government program, costly and unworkable, like socialism, like the War on Poverty, like every other attempt by the government to shape reality according to its own designs. The next time Bush gets up to make his promises of the amazing things he will achieve through force of arms, how the world will be bent and shaped by his administration, think of Stalin speaking at the 15th Party Congress, promising "further to promote the development of our country's national economy in all branches of production." Everyone applauded, and tens of thousands of landowners and factory managers were shot pursuant to that goal, but in the end, even if he did not know it, it was impossible to achieve. October 23, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com
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There
are some things that a state just cannot do, no matter how much
power it accumulates or employs. Some proposed policies are just
impossible. It was 
Llewellyn
H. Rockwell, Jr. 