[Nettime-bold] [RRE]Imagining the Next War

[ryan shaw <ryan@sadtomato.org>]

[from the red rock eater news service, url below]:



  Imagining the Next War:
  Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

  Phil Agre
  http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/

  14 September 2001
  4300 words


When political leaders refer to Tuesday's attacks in New York and
Washington as "war", what do they mean?  It used to be that our
concept of war was defined by a set of boundaries.  Nation-states
fought wars to defend their borders.  They fielded armies, and
those armies fought along front lines.  Soldiers were separate from
civilians, and the military domain was separate from the civilian
domain.  Soldiers ran the war from day to day; the civilian leadership
gave the big orders and sat back.

Those boundaries no longer apply, as much evidence shows:

(1) If you want to destroy someone nowadays, you get into their
infrastructure.  You don't have to be a nation state to do it, and
if they retain any capacity for retaliation then it's probably better
if you're not.

(2) Because the fighting is all on television, the fine details of
the fighting become political matters.  Soldiers complain bitterly
about politicians' interference, not understanding that technology
has eliminated their zone of professional autonomy.  The politicians
are *right* to be interfering.

(3) The US military thought that the Republicans would save them from
the Democrats' boundary-breaching conceptions of the 21st century
world, but Donald Rumsfeld's abortive reform efforts -- which are
really attempts to transpose the traditionally narrow view of military
affairs into a science-fiction key -- have only clarified how archaic
the traditional conception of warfare really is.

(4) During the campaign, George W. Bush harshly criticizied the
"nation-building" activities to which military personnel have been
assigned in Kosovo and elsewhere.  The truth was that nation-building
is a geopolitical necessity in a totally wired world, and that the
soldiers themselves *like* serving in Kosovo -- they know that they
are doing something useful for once.  The nation-building goes on.

(5) In the old days, the industry that produced military equipment
was almost entirely separate from the industry that produced civilian
equipment.  But economies of scale in the production of technology,
especially information and communications technologies, have grown
so great that the military must buy much of its equipment from the
civilian market, even though the civilian equipment is not hardened
for military purposes (or even, in the case of computer security, for
civilian purposes).

(6) Even airplane hijackings have lost their old boundaries.  It
is becoming clear that the people in the plane that crashed in rural
Pennsylvania had extensive communications to the ground, and knew
about the first attack on the World Trade Center.  Boundarylessness
in that sense actually defeated the hijackers, at least to that small
degree.  We have become so accustomed to boundarylessness that we
didn't find it even faintly odd that people in hijacked airplanes were
have complicated telephone conversations with people on the ground,
saying goodbyes to their families, and so on.  The whole institution
of airplane hijackings now has a new script, replacing the one from
the 1970s.

Thus far, however, we have not been compelled as a society to define
what we mean by "war" in this weirdly pervious world.  Of course,
defense intellectuals have not been short on definitions.  Many of
them claim to rue the loss of these boundaries, even as they embrace
a conception of military matters that includes absolutely everything.
War, on these expanded conceptions, no longer needs to be conducted
between states.  Privately funded groups can wage war, "asymmetric"
to be sure but destructive all the same.  Even lone individuals can
engage in acts of "war", and the individuals who released the Code
Red worms may have inflicted economic damage (at least according
to reported estimates, and not including of course the damage in
human terms) comparable to that of the people who attacked the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon.  The defense intellectuals have also
expanded the definition of "war" to include many domains besides
the mutual killing of soldiers and blowing up of ships and factories.
One speaks, for example, of "cultural war".  Some military experts
even lecture on political opposition as a form of "war", explicitly
treating nonviolence within the same doctrinal framework in which
they talk about invasion and bombing.

War, in this broadened sense, is everywhere and everything.  It is
large and small.  It has no boundaries in space or time.  Life itself
is war.  The soldier's zone of autonomy returns, but nothing else
is left.  Notice, however, that the defense intellectuals' conception
of boundaryless war is not the only one possible.  It holds no place,
for example, for "nation-building" activities, or for the integration
of political and military concerns that military officers complain
about.  Far from replacing the traditional conception of the military,
the new conception generalizes it.

Referring to the attacks on the east coast as "war" gives expression
to our emotions about them, and feels proportional to the magnitude
of the atrocity.  But if the definition of "war" has shifted beneath
us, then a declaration of war is an even graver matter than it used to
be.  Let us take a moment, then, to ask what we are getting ourselves
into.  The Bush administration started using the language of "war"
well before they were willing to say who they thought was responsible
for the attacks.  That in itself is probably not unprecedented; the
idea of something mysteriously blowing up is hardly new.  What is less
precedented is the lack of any clear suspect who was either a foreign
nation state or a domestic organization.  Suspicion from the beginning
has falled on a man named Osama bin Laden, and reasonably enough given
his involvement in earlier attacks.  But even to assign responsibility
to this one man is entirely misleading, since bin Laden, at best,
operates at the center of a far-flung and loosely-knit network of
individuals who are united more by philosophy than by organization.
They are certainly not a hierarchical military along the traditional
lines -- lines that Western militaries have themselves long abandoned
for many purposes.

The problem posed by this nontraditional terrorist "enemy" has
often been understood in purely military terms: how do you destroy
something that has so little connective tissue?  If you blow it up,
it just grows right back.  The United States has plenty of experience
fighting loosely organized opponents, for example in Vietnam, and that
experience is not good.  Nor was the Russian experience in Afghanistan
any better.  But the new situation is even worse, and in several
ways.  We are not going to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers
to Afghanistan.  I'd be surprised if we send hundreds.  And whatever
we do, every step will be on television.  Everyone involved will
have cellular telephones.  We will be doing the messiest thing in
the world, and we will be doing it in the most visible possible way.

But we should also understand the problem in political terms.  What
does it mean as a *political* matter to declare war on a network?
This, it seems to me, is the greatest danger of all.  The only moral
justification for war is to preserve the conditions of democracy.
Revenge is not a sufficient motive, except insofar as it preserves
the conditions of democracy by serving as a deterrent.  Otherwise the
matter should be treated as a crime and handled by the institutions
of the police and criminal courts.  Are the conditions of democracy
in fact under threat?  It is possible that they are, and I would
expect the government to present enough evidence of such a threat
before placing the country in a condition of war.  The question of
justification is particularly important in the present case given
the dubious conditions under which George W. Bush assumed the office
of the president.  His continued rule is also a significant threat
to the conditions of democracy, even though his methods were largely
nonviolent.

Let us say, then, that George W. Bush commences a war against Osama
bin Laden, or even against the greater abstraction of "terrorism".
What happens then?  A state of war is a serious thing.  States of
war have routinely been used to justify censorship, the curtailing
of civil liberties, and the repression of dissidents.  States of war
are also understood to require the opposition in the legislature to
moderate its otherwise essential functions of criticism.  Calls are
issued to stand behind the political leadership and to display unity,
with the implication that the enemy is watching and that failure to
unite is tantamount to treason.  These are not healthy conditions for
a democracy; indeed, they are the opposite of democracy.

War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that
the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy
would resume once their conditions had been reestablished.  Civil
liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not
entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their
scope while retaining their same overall form.  Even in conditions
of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and
civilian sides of society are maintained.  But war, we are told, no
longer works that way.  No such boundaries are possible.  It follows,
therefore, that "war" in the new sense -- war with no beginning
or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and
civilian -- is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice,
not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually.  If we
conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to
declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy.  War, in this
new sense, can never be justified.

In reality, the problem here does not originate with technology
and the military doctrines that respond to it.  It is in the nature
of democracy that its conditions are contested.  The conditions
of democracy are institutional, first of all, and institutions are
human things.  They live nowhere but in people's minds, and in the
language, artifacts, and practices by which people deal with one
another.  Democracy, like every institution, is something that people
collectively learn to do.  It is a skill.  Its central conditions are
intellectual: people continually reproduce the skills of democracy
if they continue to believe in it.  Democracy rests on beliefs.  Yet
the beliefs at the foundation of democracy are themselves controversial.
They are reargued most visibly when prominent legal controversies
come before constitutional courts.  But they are also reargued every
time that the institutions themselves are used.  Democracy is an
institutional framework for the conduct of disputes among organized
interests, and the groundrules that this framework provides must be
interpreted and applied in the case of each dispute that comes along.

The ideal of formal democracy as dispute within an agreed framework
of rules is taught in school, but in the real world of democracy the
combatants have fundamentally different visions of what that framework
should be.  Democrats believe that the people can and should govern
themselves, and that all institutions should be reformed to provide
a high degree of access and participation to the people whose lives
they affect.  Conservatives, by contrast, believe that society should
be organized hierarchically and directed by a narrow elite, and that
institutions should be invested with a high degree of authority to
which the people reflexively defer.  Conservatives differ on the
question of whether the formal institutions of democracy are valuable
and should be retained, but their main emphasis is on circumscribing
those institutions in both their processes and their powers.

Conservatism has come in recent centuries to be overlaid with a
liberal philosophy whose keyword is "freedom", and the conservative
movement must continually renegotiate the borderlines between
authority and freedom as organizing principles of society.  But the
freedom that conservatism dictates is first and foremost the freedom
of the market.  And conservatism in actual practice rarely conforms
to idealized pictures of the free market, given that large business
interests tend to be central to any conservative political coalition.
The longstanding tradition of business rent-seeking under conservative
rule reasserted itself from the opening days of the Bush government,
in the guise for example of subsidies to the oil industry to promote
energy development that the market was already providing for, and
we can expect that rent-seeking to intensify in the conditions of
intimate government-industry relationship that characterize war.
Business managers, after all, have a fiduciary responsibility to
return profits to their stockholders by whatever means, whether
legitimate commerce or lobbying, represents the best return on
investment, and undermining the conditions of democracy has proven a
solid investment over many years.  Libertarians who join conservative
coalitions are simply trading one form of government interference in
the market for another.

The almost inherent crisis of democracy, and the actual nature of
conservatism, become clearest in conditions of war.  The conditions
of war are almost identical with the social vision of conservatism,
and it is no surprise that conservatives are so eloquent when the
possibility of war arises.  Conservatism has always been profoundly
opposed to the popular exercise of reason, supposing it to lead
inevitably to tyranny, and wartime is ideally suited for the absolute,
polarized, us-and-them forms of thinking that are the opposite of
rational thought.  In this sense, democracy as such is profoundly
threatened by an absolute evil such as Stalin's regime in the Soviet
Union or the attack on the World Trade Center -- not because of the
military danger it poses, real as that may be, but because of the
danger that it poses to the collective reason of a democratic polity.
Indeed, the depth of the danger was already clear before the attack,
for example in Rush Limbaugh's astonishing argument that the leader
of the democratic opposition, Tom Daschle, resembled Satan simply
because he opposed all of George W. Bush's policies.  And it has
become clearer since the attack in the argument by many prominent
conservatives that the coming wartime condition will require a
diminution of civil liberties.

The new military doctrine of war as a total phenomenon -- war without
boundaries -- is nothing except conservatism.  It is conservatism
expressed in different language, rediscovered starting from different
concerns, but it is the antithesis of democracy in the same way that
conservatism is.  Yet military officers in democratic countries are
often ambivalent about the new doctrine.  They understand that the
legitimacy of the military as an institution rests on its claim to
preserve the conditions of democracy, and they understand more clearly
than most civilians the potential for institutional catastrophe that
can never be far from the surface in a society with a standing army.
That is why it is especially unnerving that the United States military
in recent years has developed a culture that sees itself as separate
from, and morally superior to, the supposedly decadent society that
it supposedly defends.  Conservatives have energetically reinforced
this tendency, portraying democratically minded governments as hostile
toward the military and encouraging the military in its tendency to
become a rent-seeking interest group like any other, to the point that
the officer corps now skews very strongly Republican compared to even
twenty years ago.

The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden,
then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society,
and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will
undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which
democracy rests.  It will be war without end, without boundaries,
without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression
of an impulse to vengeance.  Far from the Gulf War image of televised
war as a morbid video game, it will be what the defense intellectuals
call infrastructural war, and in the most general possible sense: war
that reaches into the finest details of daily life, reengineering the
most basic arrangements of travel and communications in a time when
everyday life in a mobile and interconnected society is increasingly
organized around those very arrangements.

The main precedent for this looming war is the boundaryless pseudo-war
against communism, and yet the precedent is misleading.  The Cold War
was a war of the mind at home and a war of the jungles in the distant
locales where conflicts were conducted by proxy.  Its foundation was
the intellectual control that, for a time and to a remarkable degree
still, prevented those proxy wars from registering in the minds of
a populace that otherwise was fairly free.  Infrastructural war is
something quite different.  The Cold War promoted a paranoia of a
quite abstract sort: the hidden traitors that supposedly lay behind
the social ideals of reformers.  Infrastructural war promotes a
paranoia of a different kind: the ramifying maze of blind spots in
the security arrangements of a technological society which a highly
skilled enemy might exploit.  Thus the uncanny sense of violation
that compounds the sheer violence of the attacks on the east coast,
and thus on a less dramatic level the myth-making around security
vulnerabilities in "cyberspace".

The Cold War's most misleading legacy is an ideology that totally
misconstrues these dangers.  The great drama of the Cold War was a
supposed conflict between two organizing principles: centralization
and decentralization.  Never mind that the Cold War societies of the
First World were in fact highly centralized both in their industrial
structure and in the central role of their permanent-war governments;
despite this, the end of the Cold War is supposed to have vindicated
a system of self-organizing decentralization that is robust against
dangers of many types.  In reality, the infrastructure of our highly
technological society is centralized in many ways.  There are three
economic reasons for this: economies of scale, which tend to promote
monopolies; economies of scope, which tend to reorganize products and
institutions in terms of successively more generalized layers; and
network effects, which tend to create uniformity through the need for
everyone in an interconnected society to be compatible with everyone
else.  In reality, the decentralization that truly is one component of
technological society rests upon an institutional and infrastructural
framework that is necessarily uniform in many ways, and that is poorly
suited to the kinds of decentralized administration that the ideology
of the Cold War would promote.  The more sophisticated our society
becomes, the more complex and all-encompassing this framework gets.

So what to do?  First we need a new concept of war.  This is not easy,
partly because the world has changed, but also because our concept of
war is intimately tied to our concept of democracy.  It follows that
we can't get a new concept of war without getting a new concept of
democracy, and the process of getting a new concept of democracy is
dangerous in itself.  The military intellectuals' new concept of war
is flawed because it starts from the military and simply follows the
logic of interconnection until the military domain encloses everything
else.  Instead, we need a broader conception of security that has a
number of dimensions, and that incorporates the dialectical relation
between the military and political domains that is inherent in a world
without clear boundaries.  Instead of permanent, total war, conducted
under rules that subordinate democracy to an authority that draws its
legitimacy from the absolute evil of its foe, we need a conception of
permanent, total security, conducted under rules that keep the ends
squarely in view.  Those ends are the preservation, indeed expansion,
of the conditions of democracy.

Total security, however, does not mean total control of society by
"security forces".  In an infrastructural world, security cannot be a
force, something exerted from the outside, a lid kept down or a shield
put up.  Instead, security is a matter of design.  Infrastructure
is something designed, in the sense that it is a human artefact, but
the infrastructure that our society possesses right now has not been
designed with anything approaching a full conception of its relation
to a democratic order.  When infrastructure is designed to serve a
narrowly technical set of requirements, or, worse, when it accretes
haphazardly in layers like the software code that we suddenly had
to decompile en masse with the approach of Y2K, it becomes riven with
blind spots, with vulnerabilities that, in the long run, only multiply
the chaos that technology had always been thought to solve.  The fact
is, our current infrastructures are profoundly insecure.  This has
been documented over and over, and it is entirely absurd that we have
learned to tolerate the worms that swarm continuously over the world's
networked computers, trashing information and randomly broadcasting
sensitive files.  These worms have not killed anybody yet, but the
shoddy security systems in the country's airports are another matter.
The catastrophe at the World Trade Center provides an opening for a
period of real design -- design that adopts as its requirements *both*
of the conditions of democracy: the closing of security holes and
the protection of civil liberties.  The necessary designs are partly
technical and partly institutional.  The current arrangement of having
the airlines pay for the security personnel at airports, for example,
has been comprehensively discredited, and even the strictest of
opponents of centralized government appear to appreciate the need
to federalize a system whose incentives have heretofore been set up
exactly backward.

But secondly, the conception of security that our democratic society
needs must take seriously the all-encompassing nature of modern
industrial society.  A technological society must be democratically
legitimate, above all, because it cannot afford to have an outside.
The people who conduct terrorist actions against the United States are
fundamentally driven by a need to make us feel their pain.  Along with
natural human sympathy and outrage, the people in many countries have
responded to the attacks in New York and Washington by observing that,
at last, the United States knows what it's like.  Media commentators
in the United States have often asserted, no doubt without thinking,
that the magnitude of the recent attacks has been without precedent
in history.  This could not be more false, as the people of Nanking,
London, Dresden, or Hiroshima could explain, or those of Hanoi,
Baghdad, or Dili.  The United States' consciousness has been shaped by
its geographic isolation, but now infrastructural warfare has provided
an attacker of a way of piercing that isolation, and thus of piercing
that consciousness, forcing upon the people of the United States the
consciousness of a people who must fear, at one level or another, that
they will be invaded and killed.

Americans' imaginative distance from the rest of the world has been
one reason why it has been so easy to keep from American public
consciousness the nature and magnitude of the atrocities in which
the American government and its close allies have unquestionably
been culpable.  A large portion of the population of East Timor,
for example, was slaughtered by the genocidal regime that ruled
until recently in Indonesia with the active approval and support of
the United States.  Counterinsurgency against a small and primitive
peasant rebellion in Guatemala in the 1980s was conducted through
a deliberate policy of simply killing large percentages of the
population, with the active support of an American government that
ridiculously claimed to have little knowledge of what was happening
and no power to stop it, even as prominent religious conservative
organizations in the United States praised the Guatemalan leadership
for its claims to be acting in the name of God.  Israel constantly
takes people's land away from them and treats them as second-class
citizens in their own land, and no amount of bad behavior by them
or their coreligionists in other countries can justify many of the
Israeli policies, nearly all of which the United States supports both
financially and diplomatically.

None of this mitigates the attacks on innocent people in the World
Trade Center, or even the attacks on military personnel in the
Pentagon.  The people who conducted those terrorist attacks are
entirely responsible for what they did.  They are evil, and they
made themselves evil by choice.  Nearly as evil are the religious
authorities who provided the ideological basis of this terrible
self-making with their spurious justifications for suicide bombings.
Yet the call to war is precisely a call for us, formerly citizens
of a democracy, to remake ourselves in the image of that evil -- to
ignore all evil deeds of our own, and instead to project all of our
own failings into an enemy who grows ever bigger, ever more inhuman,
with every exaggeration of the extent of the danger and the need for
revenge.  The call to war is not legitimate: it is not capable of
delivering what it claims to deliver.

Should we go out and get the people who blew up our buildings?  Of
course we should.  If we can't get them nonviolently law, should we
start dropping bombs on impoverished countries?  Maybe we should, if
it will actually achieve the stated goal.  A world that has graduated
beyond the traditional conceptions of war may not be able to avoid
military action, regrettable as it always is.  Evil is real, whatever
excuse it might present.  The important thing is to draw a distinction
between military action, as the exercise within a framework of
international law of the power of a legitimate democratic state, and
war, as the imposition of a total social order that is the antithesis
of democracy, and that, in the current technological conditions
of war, has no end in sight.  We can reorganize our infrastructure
along more intelligent lines, and we urgently should.  But more
fundamentally, war will end only when the rest of the world enjoys
the same institutional conditions of justice and freedom that we
do.  We can hasten that day by supporting civil society, education,
reconciliation, institutional reform, Internet connectivity, and
nonproliferation throughout the world.  Or we can retreat into a
conservative conception of war as a way to live our lives.  That is
our choice now, in our policies and in our hearts, as we decide how to
act on the pain that we feel.

end




_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold