The Long War

I’m scrabbling around trying to get a lot of my disorganised thoughts on the War on Terror into proper relation.

The “long war” rationale for the Iraq war is essentially a return to the Heinlein theory that in a world of nuclear weapons, potential enemies cannot be tolerated. The Middle East is a threat for the indefinite future, and therefore must be reshaped politically to remove the danger.

The problem with the theory for me is the scale of its ambition. The project aims at achieving a world, in the relevant 10-30 year timescale, where no medium-sized industrial nation capable of developing nuclear weapons will be hostile enough to be a risk of passing on the weapons to terrorists, or using them.

The strategy doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% successful to be worthwhile, if a partial success would reduce the danger. But a partial success, while reducing the pool of potentially lethal enemies, might well at the same time increase the danger from those remaining in the pool, mostly by increasing their motivation to obtain nuclear weapons as a deterrent.

This is why, in the division of long-term projects I made in the previous piece, the project falls on the “hubris” side. We can be reasonably sure that having more fertile land, or having cheaper energy, 30 or 50 years in the future will be a good thing. It’s difficult to say how good, but the beneficial nature of these things are robust with respect to all sorts of unpredictable developments.

It’s not obvious in the same way that having a military presence in the Middle East will be a good thing. It might well be, but it easily might be a bad thing – there are well-known downsides to empire. The rationale for undertaking the project relies on a number of assumptions about political, technological and economic developments over several decades. They are not silly assumptions, but in combination they are not at all reliable.

Against that objection, there is a “desperation” argument. That says that the long-run prospects as they stand are so bad, that even if an attempt to remove the nuclear threat has a low chance of success, it is a chance worth pursuing, because it’s the best chance we have.

Again, I think that’s too pessimistic. I don’t know how we will deal with the increasing nuclear threat over the coming decades, but as a statement of ignorance of the future, that is not particularly interesting. Something may well turn up. I’m not saying we should assume it must, but the “desperation” argument assumes that nothing will turn up, and I think that is invalid.

A brief history of Nuclear War

In 1945, one nation had nuclear weapons. By 1949, there were two. 1964, five. Today, probably nine.

By now, any industrial nation could develop fission weapons if not actively prevented. Any advanced nation could probably develop fusion weapons.

A matter of a decade or two, it will be possible for half the countries on Earth to make nuclear weapons. A while ago, I suggested that one day a kitchen device would be able to synthesize arbitrary chemicals; if nanotechnology fulfils its promise, then uranium enrichment could become a garage activity. Twenty-five years? Fifty? I can’t see it taking a hundred.

Since 1945, various strategies have been put forward to protect against nuclear attack.

One of the first suggested was world conquest. Robert Heinlein was very insistent in the 40s that the only sane course was for the USA to conquer the entire world before any potential enemy could develop nuclear weapons.

Disarmament was another widely recommended option – stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

The two strategies that were actually pursued were deterrence and non-proliferation. Deterrence worked – and innovations such as submarine-launched missiles reduced the first-strike threat. But as the number of nuclear powers increases, the reliability of deterrence falls, as the possibility of a concealed or deniable attack increase, and there is more chance of a foreign power being desperate or crazy enough to not care about deterrence.

Non-proliferation may have slowed down the spread of nuclear weapon technology, but in the long run, it is failing.

So how bad is the long-run outlook? It is seriously worrying. If, in 2060, the likes of Mohammed Siddique Khan and his associates (or Timothy McVeigh, or David Copeland) can produce a few atomic bombs in a house, it seems inevitable that sooner or later we would see a level of destructive nuclear terrorism which could totally destabilize our society – in the way that present-day terrorism – with home-made bombs, sabotage, and assasination – simply can’t.

What about the nearer future? Say 2025 – enriched uranium is still outside the reach of the hobbyist, but there are 100 or 200 potential or actual nuclear powers in the world. Some of them are politically unstable. Some of them are our enemies. How long can such a situation endure without a society-destroying state or state-sponsored-terrorist nuclear attack?

It’s very difficult to say.

Somehow, I’m just not too worried by all this. It’s just too hard to predict politics that far into the future with any confidence. You can pick one issue – nuclear proliferation – and project and speculate as to how it will develop, which is what I’ve done. What you can’t do is take all the other areas which might change the environment, and predict how all of them will develop over decades. What countermeasures might be developed? How will the world economy change? How powerful will satellite surveillance become? What totally unexpected technological, political or economic development will change the game beyond recognition?

That’s not a conclusive reason for letting the future fend for itself. I’m trying to draw a distinction between the forseeable consequences of our actions, which we must evaluate and include in our calculations, and the attempt to predict and manipulate the state of the world in the far future, which is hubris. Projects which will bring long-term benefits are certainly worthy of consideration, whether they be irrigating the deserts, or developing new energy sources, or anything else useful – we are not sure how valuable their results will be, but if, appropriately discounted, our best estimate is that they will pay for their costs, then they are worth doing. But projects whose value depends on particular assumptions as to the state of the world in the far future – that we will be allied to certain types of government, or that the balance of state versus individual power will move in a certain way – well, given the right assumptions almost any policy can be justified, including policies of “bringing forward” future and actually quite unlikely conflicts to the present.

Update: A more alarming assesment of the current nuclear threat from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Tivoisation

Speech by Richard Stallman on GPLv3. He spells out the controversial DRM-related part of the new draft license.

The basic change is that if someone, … provides you a binary, then he must, as part of the requirement to provide the source code, give you whatever it takes to authorise your version so it will run.

Considerable thought has gone into this. Eben Moglen supplemented the explanation:

If Manufacturer A wants the software he sells in the hardware to stay one version forever, he has a simple way to do it: he can put the software in ROM. He has no power to modify it, and the user to whom he gives it has no power to modify it. That doesn’t violate GPL version two and it doesn’t violate GPL version three, in current draft.

We will not publish a draft that would be violated by that conduct. What we object to is the attempt to say “I will keep the right to modify the software, but I won’t allow you to have the same right of modification that retain” because that’s simply a technical way of evading the requirement of the licence to pass along all the rights you got.

The question here is over bundling. Tivo sell you a system comprising software, hardware, and services. If the software is derived from copylefted Free Software, recipients must be given the rights over the software specified by the copyleft – the rights to use, modify and distribute the software. What Stallman and Moglen are demanding is that the rights should extend to the hardware and services – that one should be able to use the hardware and services with modified software. They are trying to extend the rights over the software to open up the hardware and the services.

I think this is a mistake. Not because I don’t think that open hardware and open service interfaces are a good thing, but because there is a tradeoff, in terms of what copyleft can achieve, between getting as much as you can and restricting what purposes the software can be used for.

Various programmers have released software with restrictions – that it can’t be used by dictatorships, or arms manufacturers, or whatever. If many people do that, and you try to build systems from a collection of such software, you will pretty soon hit a point where someone disagrees with what you’re doing.

There are many things wrong in the world, and only some of them can be improved using software licenses.

The GPL is a way of using your copyright in software to restrain others from using their copyright in software. There’s an elegant symmetry in that, an automatic kind of agreement. If you want to use GPL’d Free Software, you have to support Free Software. That symmetry isn’t there in saying if you want to use my Free Software, you have to support Free Trade, or renewable energy, or independence for Tibet.

Stallman has always recognised that:

The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user’s purpose that matters, not the developer’s purpose; you as a user are free to run a program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

Admittedly, the link between Free Software and open hardware is closer than between Free Software and, say, legalisation of marijuana. But I still think it’s far enough away that it’s a distraction from the core value.

I’ve always (and it’s been at least 15 years now) seen the core value of Free Software as the right to share. If it costs nobody anything for me to copy a program for some one else, and they benefit from it, I should do it, and I shouldn’t put myself in a position where I am prevented from doing that by copyright law.

The right to modify is secondary. It is important, because in the long run software you can’t modify is useless. I am not helping someone by sharing software with them if I get updates and they don’t.

Open hardware is good too. But the FSF is going further than saying that; it is saying that Free Software that runs on closed hardware, which prevents you from running modified versions of the software, is not really free.

I disagree. I can build my own PVR, and I can use GPL’d Tivo software in it, even software that was written by Tivo itself, and even with my own modifications. That’s the key freedom, even if I’m not free to run changed software on the Tivo hardware itself. If I use a GPL’d online poker client, I can use modified version on an open server, even if I can’t use it on the vendor’s server.

And these aren’t far-fetched examples. If a system vendor like Tivo is able to use Free Software in their systems, it pretty much follows that their systems employ general-purpose hardware, and that their modifications to the software would potentially be useful on general-purpose hardware.

Linus Torvalds has a slightly different objection to the Tivoisation restriction, which is also correct. He insists that there are valid uses of locked-down hardware which ought not to be prohibited. My poker example is one, I would claim. Services can be exposed by connecting them to uncontrolled clients.

Update: a number of other senior Linux kernel developers have issued a well-argued position statement expressing their reservations with GPLv3 and the Tivoisation clause.

Mark Thomas on Broken Window Fallacy

quoted by Johann Hari

a car accident is good for economic growth. Think about all the people who are employed when you drive past a motorway pile-up: the police to investigate, the fire brigade to cut the people out, the road cleaners to wipe it up, the MOTs, the refits. And if you’re really, really lucky there’s an undertaker getting a job too. But you don’t see a car crash and say, ‘Hooray! Things are looking up!’. Not unless Jeremy Clarkson’s in it.

War on Terror – long and short term goals

The attack on the World Trade Center had mainly long-term goals. It was intended by its planners to win supporters to the long-term project of spreading Islamic theocracy by scoring a major coup, and by dragging the US into a war where it could be beaten.

The bombings in London had mainly short-term goals. It was intended by its planners, who were probably also the bombers, to drive Britain out of Iraq.

The invasion of Afghanistan had mainly short-term goals. It was intended to destroy the organisation which had planned the WTC attack, to punish them and to prevent them repeating it.

The invasion of Iraq had mainly long-term goals. There was a long article out about a month ago spelling out that the intention was not to prevent another WTC-style medium-tech terrorist attack, it was to prevent something much bigger, perhaps ten or twenty-five years down the road, by democratizing the Middle East so as not to contain any states that might feed future terrorists with nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately I can’t now find the article – the nearest thing I’ve got to spelling it out is GWB’s May speech.

Blair and Me

What do I think of the current Blair feeding-frenzy? I admit to being a bit conflicted.

First, chris dillow is right as usual that compared to real questions about policy, all this is relatively insignificant.

Related to that, I think the press just wants him out, because they’re bored and would like to see something happen. I can understand that feeling, indeed I share it, but it can’t be a good reason to change the Prime Minister.

I don’t think we’d get better policies either from Brown or from whoever emerges as anyone-but-Brown.

What is distinctive about Blair is his idealism. This leads him to overambitious social and economic engineering projects, which is bad, but it also causes him to resist (to an extent) the Labour Party’s “core values”, meaning the prioritisation of the interests of public sector workers above everybody else. That is good. Will his successor’s corruption be worse than Blair’s idealism? Hard to say.

Then there is the next election. Will an early change be better or worse for Labour? Will the Tories be any better? Is Cameron lying when he says he is really just like Labour? What pressures will be on Cameron from the rest of his party? What would happen to the Tories if they lost the next election? Would they become better or worse, and in each case would that make them more or less likely to win the election after next, and what effect would that have on a Labour government in the meantime?

When it comes the the question of how to influence such an enormously complex and unpredictable system for the better by throwing a single vote at it, the only possible rational response is to give up and do something useful instead.

Current levels of voter turnout and engagement with politics are inexplicably and frighteningly high.

Fairy Dust

From my comment on Tim Lee’s question about Blair:

Blair’s “third way” is the traditional socialist belief that the economy, the country and the world can be managed and moulded to greater effectiveness, but with the old socialist economics modified by a magic sprinkling of private-sector fairy dust that would prevent repetition of the failures of the old state-run industries.

There is a perfect consistency between the belief that every public service and every industry can be improved by expert target-setting and regulation, and the belief that the Middle East can be made better by expert regime change.

The fairy dust is worth elaborating on. What I am talking about, of course, is PFI – the Private Finance Initiative, the idea that private-sector efficiency can be achieved in public functions by means of contracting with private suppliers to fulfil the functions.

The idea is not totally false. If there genuinely is an already-existing market for a particular service – say rubbish collection – then there is a good chance that the government can do better by entering that market than by organising and employing its own collectors. But it is usually the case that if there is a working market for something, the government should not be doing it at all in the first place, either directly or indirectly. PFI has most often been employed in areas which are in practice pretty much government monopolies. There is no competitive market in running prisons, and not much of one in building hospitals.

The reason I refer to PFI as “fairy dust” is because it is employed without any understanding of what makes the private sector different. The point is not the manner of organisation, but the pattern of incentives. The sales manager of a business unit which sells services to the government under PFI is as much a part of the public sector as any civil servant. His personal success depends on satisfying his government superiors/clients, accounting to them for the services he delivers and the resources he expends. If he satisfies them, he will win more contracts. He is in competition only with his peers – those who are selling the same class of services to government.

Von Mises produced an incredibly precise critique of PFI decades before its introduction to the UK, in his 1944 book Bureaucracy

It is a widespread illusion that the efficiency of government bureaus could be improved by management engineers and their methods of scientific management. However, such plans stem from a radical misconstruction of the objectives of civil government.

Like any kind of engineering, management engineering too is conditioned by the availability of a method of calculation. Such a method exists in profit-seeking business. Here the profit-and-loss statement is supreme. The problem of bureaucratic management is precisely the absence of such a method of calculation.

Education

It is a frustration of mine that whenever I start to talk to anyone about education, the conversation always seems to turn to schools. Schools are pretty much irrelevant to education. Schools are for babysitting, social conditioning and political indoctrination – valuable functions in many cases, of course, but not much to do with education.

Recognition of this fact seems to be beginning to build. See this piece in the Washington Post arguing that Americans, who learn exceptionally little at school, learn well after school. See also The Overselling of Higher Education

I happened to read a novel the other day set in 190x Spain. I didn’t know anything about the period – Spain was a complete blank to me from Napoleon to the Civil War. I happened to spend an hour or two poking about on Wikipedia, and I chatted about it with my wife in the evening. I now know as much about the period as if I had spent half a term on it at age 14. (True, what I “know” is not 100% reliable – but in my experience that is as much the case for secondary school lessons as it is for Wikipedia).

Those immigration estimates

John Kay looks at the spectacular underestimates of immigration from Poland and the other new EU members. The basis of the estimates was research commissioned by the European Commission.

My view is that, while planning and estimating things like this is important for the government to be able to manage the country, they don’t matter because the government shouldn’t be managing the country in the first place. If 15,000 East European immigrants are OK for Britain, why aren’t 600,000? The question isn’t how many we’re going to get, it’s how many we want. The idea that we know just what is going to happen as a result of any policy is a dangerous illusion, and leads to overconfident intervention in things that are not government competencies.

And I really don’t see the problem. There are three reasons for opposing immigration:

1) It’s bad for the economy
2) There isn’t room
3) Our culture will be swamped by foreigners

1) is tosh. The only possible harm would be if they all came and started claiming benefit. This is unlikely – Britain isn’t an attractive place to come because of its benefits, it is attractive because of its jobs. And if it happens it is only necessary to restrict benefits.

2) is also tosh. Our population isn’t growing organically, there’s easily room for twice the current population, and a lot more young working people is just what we need.

3) is not a respectable argument, but I find it hard to honestly assert that it couldn’t conceivably happen. The danger tends to be exaggerated, but it’s not impossible that life in this country could be made much more unpleasant by the presence of a large immigrant community with an incompatible culture. But Poles? If there’s a clash of cultures going on in Britain today or tomorrow (which I don’t think is the case to any serious extent, but am prepared to consider for the sake of argument), then, to put it bluntly, the Poles are on our side.

Terrorism and Piracy

Via Schneier, excellent article in Legal Affairs comparing modern terrorists with pirates. Parallels are strong, complete with states backing pirates for deniable attacks on other states, and pirates seizing land and forming mini-states in wild lands. The emphasis is on the law of the sea as precedent for an international legal framework for dealing with terrorism.

One difference, which is significant to the argument that the threat of terrorism is exaggerated: piracy was essentially for-profit, and therefore sustainable. Terrorism creates occasional opportunities for plunder, but is generally a loss-making activity requiring external funding. Therefore it is less likely to be as widespread and as near-permanent a problem as piracy was (and is).

Where terrorism is profitable, it is in “danger” of decaying into pure gansterism, losing its political side where that is not good for business. I believe that happened to a certain extent in Northern Ireland.