Para Bellum

Found an old post on the now-very-much-missed USS Clueless that explains pithily something we should all understand, especially as some are clamoring that the Geneva Conventions for captured soldiers are a blanket edict of international law that must apply een to illegal combatants.

The Conventions however are better honored by applying them only to those who also accept them; otherwise there's no real-world incentie for anyone to follow them.

Using game theory, den Beste rigorously shows:

You want to buy kilos of grass; he wants to sell them. He wants your money. You can "cooperate" by bringing money and paying, you can "cheat" by bringing a gun and taking the drugs without paying. He can "cooperate" by bringing drugs, or "cheat" by bringing something that looks like drugs but isn't. Each of you remembers the next time what happened this time. (The point being that if either guy cheats, the other guy can't complain to the cops, which is necessary for this analysis.)

Both sides benefit most in a long series if they cooperate; money is exchanged for drugs. Of course, if the relationship is about to end and both sides know it, there's a strong incentive to cheat on the last buy. Right?

There's been a lot of analysis of this, and it turns out that honesty isn't the best policy. One guy decided to run a computer tournament; people were permitted to create algorithms in a synthetic language which would have the ability to keep track of previous exchanges and make a decision on each new exchange whether to be honest or to cheat. He challenged them to see who could come up with the one which did the best in a long series of matches against various opponents. It turned out that the best anyone could find, and the best anyone has ever found, was known as "Tit-for-tat".

On the first round, it plays fair. On each successive round, it does to the other guy what he did the last time.

When Tit-for-tat plays against itself, it plays fair for the entire game and maximizes output. When it plays against anyone who tosses in some cheating, it punishes it by cheating back and reduces the other guys unfair winnings.

No-one has ever found a way of defeating it.

Now let's analyze two different and even more simplistic approaches; we'll call them "saint" and "sinner". The saint plays fair every single round, irrespective of what the other guy does. The sinner always cheats.

When a saint plays against another saint, or against tit-for-tat, the result is optimum but more important is that everyone gets the same result. When a sinner plays against another sinner, or against tit-for-tat, everyone cheats and the result is still even, though less than optimal.

But when a sinner plays against a saint, the sinner wins and the saint loses.

Which brings me back to the point of all this: Is there anything I would rule out in war? Nothing I'd care to admit to my enemies, because ruling out anything is a "saint" tactic. The Tit-for-tat tactic is to be prepared to do anything, but not to do so spontaneously. In other words, if the other guy threatens to use poison gas, you make sure you have some of your own and let him know that you'll retaliate with it. That means that he has nothing to win by using it, and he won't. (A war is a sequence game and not a single transaction because each day is a new exchange. If you gassed my guys yesterday, I can gas yours today.)
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I believe that my nation must adopt tit-for-tat instead of using saint tactics, because it is much better. But for that to work, I have to be willing to be as dirty as he is, if he forces me to be.

This is the theoretical basis for such aphorisms as "To get peace, you must prepare for war." That means that your nation is prepared to use tit-for-tat. The pacifist idea of publicly pledging to never go to war, or to never use a particular tactic in that war, is instead a saint strategy, and it results in disaster.

The Geneva Convention is deliberately constructed to be tit-for-tat. It says explicitly that a nation is obligated to follow the convention only if the other nation is also a signatory and is also following it. If the Geneva Convention was binding on signatory nations even against non-signatory nations, it would be a "saint" tactic. But since you follow the convention with others who also do, and don't against those who don't, that makes it "tit for tat".

Tit-for-tat says that you're civilized to those who are civilized to you, and you're a vile son-of-a-bitch to those who want to be that way.

This also speaks to why we should have an announced policy of massive nuclear retaliation against, as Belmont Club puts it "anyone who would gain", should a terrorist nuclear attack happen here:

To the question 'who might America retaliate against if a shadowy group detonated nukes in Manhattan' the probable answer is 'against everyone who might have stood to gain'. The real strategic effect of the GWOT was been to convince many states that this would indeed happen to them. That the decline in Al Qaeda is possibly due to the implicit threat of collective punishment on the Islamic world is a sad commentary on human nature. But there it is.

It is the only rational way.

I was always so irritated by the nuclear freeze and unilateral disarmement people in the 80s. I could never decide if they were just naively retarded, or deviously evil.

Probably the latter.

As a commenter named fred writes at that Belmont Club post, again putting my thoughts into words better than I could:

My money, for future reference, would be on the jihadis who will go the route of using viruses. How in God's name do you defend against that?

If one has doubts, as I do, that some of those Muslim countries we think are coming around to our viewpoint on terrorism, then we can never be sure that, for example, the Saudi Arabian government is doing all it can to snuff out terrorist organizations and discourage its citizens from considering the lives of infidels expendable. Something has to be done to focus these countries very ardently on the consequences of looking the other way or, worse, helping the jihadis out on the sly. There is one solution that is not pleasant and I can hear the bleating about it now. Yet, it was fairly well-understood during the Cold War that MAD made sure that the Kremlin thought long and hard about beginning to sequence the launch codes. It sort of focuses the mind more on survival rather than conquest. Keeps the fingers away from the keys. They should have it firmly in their minds that Mecca and the Hijjaz could be contemplated as the world's most extensive pile of glass....

The word of what we will do should go forth far and wide, so that the devout will know that their holy city and its Kabaa will no longer exist. Now, the ante's been upped and even those who hate us will have to deal with the ruthlessness we can measure out.

And there you have it. If they want their people and their lands to be inviolable, then ours must be considered inviolable as well. Only the deranged will think that Allah can save them from the retribution that will surely follow from their suicidal acts. Our people have got to get it out of their heads that we can somehow do or say something that will make them love and respect us. This is never going to happen, so we might as well get used to the fact that our security, in part, is going to depend upon them fearing us and knowing that, if we have to be, we can outdo them in sheer ruthlessness.

Why isn't such a policy made public? As pointed out in Dr. Strangelove, the Doomsday Deterrent only works if people know about it.

Those opposed are thinking in the wrong time frame; they have imagined we've already been nuked, and they can't stomach the idea of retaliating, especially against third-worlders. This misses the point entirely; the idea is to prevent us getting hit in the first place, so we never HAVE to make such a decision! The policy costs us nothing as they already hate us, and figuring out who, if anyone, to actually retaliate against will be the least of our worries should the situation arise.

It's not about being deliberately provocative either, but simply about aligning the interests of unfriendly governments and peoples with our own.

Does this make us as bad as they are?

In a word: NO!