davidvoegtle.net

Bush’s Terrorism Paradox

February 11th, 2006

I can’t find a good article discussing the particular part about the speed that I want to talk about, but a few days ago, Bush made a speech (I think the one in Manchester, NH), in which part of what he talked about was the continued threat of terrorism. I listened to it on NPR on the way home from school, so I apologize for the sketchiness of what I’m reporting on.

Anyway, what really struck me was that Bush said something to the effect that Americans must remain vigilant and on alert to terrorists. However, he also said that his administration had made a lot of progress in the area of fighting terrorists. And he said that Americans were safer than they were 5 years ago and that al Qaeda was weaker.

I guess we might be safer. It’s hard to say since I don’t know of any real credible reports that we’ve faced a major attempt at infiltration for the purposes of terrorist activity since 9/11.

There’s the LA plane thing, but come on. They were planning to hijack a plane for the purpose of a suicide attack using shoe bombs? How do you hijack with shoe bombs when the passengers and crew must know that you’re going to kill them all anyway by crashing the plane into something? Without a minimal ability to believe that you can ultimately survive, there’s no incentive to act for self interest alone. Flight 93 taught us that.

So then I started thinking about the number of “al Qaeda no. 2″s and “no. 3″s that it seems we’ve captured or killed or otherwise confirmed are no longer out “there” making trouble for America. I don’t have an exact count, but it certainly seems like more than one or two #2s and #3s.

So where is this all going? I guess to me I have to wonder if Bush & Co. aren’t pulling a modified Zeno’s paradox on us. If you aren’t familiar, or it’s been a while since you took that introductory philosophy class (where this crops up usually), Zeno’s most famous paradox (and it’s several reformulations) involve the concept that, in Mathematics, is called the limit.

Basically, it goes like this: imagine yourself standing twenty feet away from a wall. To make it to the wall, you must cover the distance between yourself and the wall. In order to cover the twenty feet, you must cover the first ten feet. But before you can cover the first ten, you must cover the first five. And so on; in other words, you must always cover first half of any distance that you are seeking to travel before you can go the full distance. Since distance may be infinitely divided (at least conceptually), it seems that you must travel over an infinite number of small points.

To us, this confusion over the idea is somewhat silly, but to the classical and medieval philosophers this paradox proved to be a conundrum for centuries. Only after Newton and Liebniz finished the foundations of the Calculus did we begin to understand how to deal with the infinities of the infinitely small.

Which brings us back to Bush and terrorism and al Qaeda. Are we being hoodwinked by a challenge that goes back to classical Greece? Are we always getting safer, al Qaeda always weaker, but yet never reaching our goal? What are the conditions of victory, and how do we know when we’ve reached them? Are we actually working towards a “goal” at all? Or are we instead battling a chronic condition that we just have to deal with and not seek victory over?