The most important point in this article is in the last paragraph: “Life does not exist in a laboratory vacuum, where scientists can pare away genes to some Platonic purity. Life exists in a tapestry, and the species with the smallest genomes in the world survive only because they are nestled in life’s net.”
We live in a network of interdependent interconnected life.
The job was to find captured Viet Cong guerrillas and to interview them. Over the next few years, they came up with 61,000 pages of transcripts. Those transcripts were translated into English and summarised and analysed.
Goure took those analyses and he gave briefings to all the top military brass in the American military establishment. And every time he gave a presentation on the Vietnam Motivation and Morale Project, he said the same things:
that the Vietcong were utterly demoralised
that they were about to give up
that if pushed a little bit more, if bombed just a little bit more, they'll throw up their hands in despair and run screaming back to Hanoi
It's hard to overestimate just how seriously Goure was taken in those years. He was the only man who understood the mind of the enemy. When dignitaries came to Saigon, their first stop would be the villa in Rue Pasteur, where Goure would hold forth at cocktail parties with insights into this strange, mysterious enemy they were fighting.
He'd be picked up by helicopter and whisked to aircraft carriers off the coast of Vietnam, so he could brief the top military brass who had flown in from Washington. They used to say that Lyndon Johnson would walk around with a copy of Goure's findings in his back pocket. What Goure said formed the justification for US policy in Vietnam.
Everyone believed what Goure said, with one exception – Konrad Kellen. He read the same interviews and reached the exact opposite conclusion.
Years later, he would say that his rethinking began with one memorable interview with a senior Vietcong captain. He was asked very early in the interview if he thought the Vietcong could win the war, and he said no.
But pages later, he was asked if he thought that the US could win the war, and he said no.
The second answer profoundly changes the meaning of the first. He didn't think in terms of winning or losing at all, which is a very different proposition. An enemy who is indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all.
The ability to rapidly ingest, identify, monitor and exploit relationships, trends and collective thought evolving out of Internet-based social networks will be the most critical analytic capability requirement of the next decade. The fact that these networks exist in plain sight, are vastly dense, and capable of near instant mobilization of populations represents their most exploitable feature and their greatest challenge.
We keep wondering: ‘Why do they hate us?'
Well, maybe some people are mad because we are doing things
that we would regard as unjustified and heinous acts of war
if anyone dared to do them to us.
— Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy magazine
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift
is approaching spiritual doom.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
As noted in Empathy Note #1, we live in a world where smaller and smaller groups have access to more and more destructive capability. This technology-driven danger presents us with an odd transformational imperative in which proactive love, trust and caring for each other have become more practical – I repeat: practical – than our usual strategies for self-protection.
Imperial power
Self-protection at the national level usually goes by two names: “defense” and “security”. Unfortunately, those two words have often been used as PR cover for policies that looks more like empire – the use of military, diplomatic, and economic force (informed by surveillance and supported by educational and cultural dominance) to make sure that other peoples do what the power center wants them to do.
Phi Beta Iota: We consider Somalia and Yemen to be two perfect candidates for any coalition that wishes to wage peace instead of war. Bury them in solar power, desalinated water, hydroponic agriculture, and free celluar and Internet access. Then get out of the way as they create wealth and with wealth, legitimacy and stability.
The most important point in this article is in the last paragraph: “Life does not exist in a laboratory vacuum, where scientists can pare away genes to some Platonic purity. Life exists in a tapestry, and the species with the smallest genomes in the world survive only because they are nestled in life’s net.”
