Back in 2003, as the insurgency in Iraq started to pick up speed, I did some thinking about the inherent asymmetry between the goals of the two sides in the conflict. For the US to achieve victory, they had to essentially fix the country and make everything work again. For the insurgents to achieve victory, they just had to keep breaking things. Obviously, breaking things is very much easier than mending them: it was pretty clear that the insurgency could blow up infrastructure and murder people far faster and less expensively than the US could put Iraq back on its feet. It struck me then that putting yourself in a situation where your conditions of victory are very hard to accomplish and your opponent’s are very easy is probably a tactical error.
Fast forward eight years, and that same asymmetry is repeated, this time in the American political arena. For the President to achieve victory, he needs to fix a thoroughly broken economy, while burdened by the costs of two wars, lavish tax cuts, and at least two rounds of buying off the Wall Street vandals who trashed the economy in the first place. All his opponents at home need to do is prevent him doing that. So the Republicans have been conducting an insurgency of their own, blowing things up and generally putting roadblocks in Obama’s way at every turn. Once again, one side’s victory conditions are nearly impossible to achieve, while the other has a much easier task.
Of course to conduct a spoiling campaign - as the Baathist ‘bitter-enders’ and the jihadis of Al-Qaeda in Iraq did, and as the Tea Party and their servants in Congress now seem to be doing - requires a measurable contempt for your fellow citizens, a feeling that it doesn’t matter how many innocents get caught in the cross-fire as long as the hated enemy doesn’t accomplish his goals. But some people don’t have a problem with that.
In a scene that could have come from one of his novels, the Canadian author Peter Watts has been arrested by US border guards and faces charges of assaulting a federal officer. Watts and his companion both deny that Watts assaulted anyone, but ‘assaulting an officer’ is the kind of charge that’s very easy to make and very difficult to fight. In such situations, even touching an officer can be labeled ‘assault’ and once the charge has been made, law enforcement agencies will usually do everything they can to ensure a conviction.
Watts is, in my view, one of the better SF writers writing today, and one who has yet to have the recognition that he deserves. While that doesn’t have any bearing on the question of whether he’s innocent or guilty of the charge, it does mean that my sympathies are with him and that I hope he wins his case.
Update: Peter Watts has posted his account of the incident.
The 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is to be deployed in the United States and will be available to deal with, among other things, “civil unrest and crowd control”
. The BCT will be trained and equipped to use ‘less-lethal’ weaponry.
