Sieges, Assassinations, and Other Great Terrible Ideas

Some day someone will make a movie that will go something like this.  A country with a massive ego will begin to comprehend that its relevance on the global stage has been crippled by political pettiness at home.  Flourishing federated fiefdoms of patronage so desperate to pander to their benefactors that they can no longer keep an ear on the vox populi and its growing dissatisfaction with wealth asymmetry and race and class police state human rights abuses proliferate and strain to raise their identity above the cacophony of trivial indifference.  Citizen complicity is secured through manipulation of consumer prices and energy but the half-life of apathetic tolerance is minimal.  The protagonist country has a monetary system that is entirely exchanged on vulnerable digital clouds where records of debits and credits fly across Rackspace and EC2 Elastic Clouds.  And then the country - realizing that it's gotten ahead of its own illusions - decides that it needs to create a plausible self-destruct mechanism so that, should its citizens or debt holders ever come calling to redeem the promises it has made, records of exchanges past can be erased and a giant reset can be manipulated.  The less verifiable the self-destruct, the better.  The more anonymity, still better. 

So the country innocently hires two popular Generation Y-not actors to create a film about the assassination of the most unverifiable antagonist on the planet.  Now it's not just any antagonist.  This one has to have the plausibility of the necessary self-destruct button outlined above.  And that self-destruct button happens to be the ability to detonate a nuclear device over - I don't know - let's just say a massive cloud server installation on the west coast of our protagonist country.  Not a property-incinerating surface 20 kiloton yield - just a gamma and electromagnetic pulse emitter that has a solar maxima production sufficient to take out $2 trillion of power grid infrastructure and conveniently erase the records of what the protagonist country owes its investors.  And to top it off, our protagonist country places into its own legislative record a SHIELD Act  that details the script for the attack only to have it killed by Senators who suggest that a cyber-attack is more risky.  So the protagonist country winds up acknowledging - and doing nothing about - its own single point catastrophic vulnerability. 

And then, lo and behold (there, how about a little literary suck up to the season), said film is made; said protagonist country names said antagonist as was foretold in the script in 2010.  Within a few days of being named the cyber aggressor and slapped with a UN resolution calling said antagonist to be referred to the International Criminal Court for alleged human rights abuses said antagonist responds with a threat to "bolster its nuclear capacity." 

Obviously the paragraphs above would be the fantastical illusion of conspiracy theorists, right?  Or, has anyone actually had the audacity to consider that maybe we live in a time when conspiracies, hijinks, tomfoolery, and heinous crimes and torture actually happen?

I found it amusing that President Obama elected to normalize relations with Cuba - admitting to the abject failure of our 1960 embargo - while expanding his arrogant posture with Russia, deepening his vitriol regarding North Korea, and looking sideways at an expedient apathy regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran in the interest of uniting and arming common allies against a contrived for 24 hours news black flagged enemy. 

About 2,600 years ago, Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon decided that his empire would regain relevance to the growing influence of Egypt by laying siege to Jerusalem.  He used inconsistent embargo and siege policy to rapidly erode any semblance of the moral authority that had been built by his predecessor Hammurabi - the source of considerable inspiration for the United States' own Thomas Jefferson.  That strategy worked for a few short years until Cyrus the Great of Persia poured through the impenetrable walls of Babylon in a bloody torrent washing the Babylonian empire into oblivion to never rise again.

Sieges and assassinations have been variously and ineffectively deployed across the course of human history and - Newt Gingrich's insistence notwithstanding - they don't work.  Whether it was Temujin (aka Genghis Khan) crushing the Jin Dynasty in Beijing 800 years ago while in the same year, King John was commencing the First Barons' War at the Siege of Rochester only to lose the castle a year later to the French, or the Ottoman's knocking off the Mamluk Sultanate in Cairo, sieges, embargoes and dramatic executions have been the desperate infantile reflex of despots across humanity and they have not become better with age.

Napoleon used the genius idea of siege and embargo on Great Britain in retaliation for the carnage wrought at the Battle of Trafalgar.  This great idea saw Britain's economy grow nearly 2.5X and the cost of maintaining the ill-conceived blockade actually drained the coffers of France and Europe. 

We didn't lose the Cuba standoff this past week with President Obama's announcement.  In fact, having a giant petroleum refinery anchored off the southern U.S. coast so that we can drain the vast oil reserves under the Gulf of Mexico is likely a protectionist move that will unintentionally enrich some Democrats and Republicans quite nicely.  We lost our moral high ground when we chose the embargo in the first place.  And then, we bloodied any shred of credibility by maintaining our off-shore, not-so-out-sourced torture chamber at Guantanamo Bay.  Human rights abuses in North Korea and China?  Really!  Did any one read the redacted accounts of only those tortures sterilized enough for Fox and CNN? 

See the problem here is actually not that complicated.  Using the monotony of our perceived economic might - an illusion created in the vacuum of a devastated Europe and Japan at the end of the Second World War - and vigorously enforcing freedom and liberty at the barrel of a gun or from Rudolph-the-Red-Nose MQ-1 Predator - paid for by a complicit public trained to fear everything that isn't like us, we've come to the end of our grisly theater production.  Our outrage doesn't sound credible because we're the hypocrite.  Our morality lies bleeding on our streets at the hands of justice.  Our Great American experiment - our "City upon a Hill" - burned in the conflagration of witch trials unleashed by the very Puritan John Winthrop sermons which gave us the metaphor in 1630.  We The People have never been our best when we surrogate our values and morality to the realm - no matter the realm, no matter the period of history.  And the only path We The People can tread that will not be the tired recitation of each wilderness past will be one where WE take responsible stewardship for our lives and the lives we touch. 

And as for the coin of the realm… well, watch for a solar flare - of either solar or manufactured origin.  Whether it’s a belching sun or a provoked villain manufactured for prime-time we'll pay the price for our digital reality soon enough.  And then, We The People can actually start all over again and maybe try a path untaken which, in fact, might make all the difference.

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