Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

America is about to fight the wrong war, for the wrong reasons, and with the wrong weapons. America is preparing to fight a military war of bombs and bullets, when it's engaged in a war of cultures where the most effective weapons are principles and ideals. Worst of all, America is contemplating abandoning its most powerful principles in favor of exactly the kinds of weapons that will be useless against the enemy we will have to fight.

An unconventional war requires unconventional tactics that exploit the weakness of the enemy. While body counts and property damage traditionally dominate the popular history of war, nearly all wars are ultimately determined by a struggle for the hearts and minds of the masses. A people that is determined to fight to the last man, woman and child can't be conquered regardless of the amount of force used against them - they can only be exterminated or left alone. Even the most militarily powerful nation can be defeated on the battlefield if support for the war on the home-front can be defeated using unconventional weapons like propaganda, manipulative corruption, covert sabotage, subversion of fringe elements of the native population, and terrorism.

If we lose the struggle for the hearts and minds of the masses, we will still be fighting the terrorists long after our all conquering military has run out of targets to destroy. If we wage the struggle for the hearts and minds of the masses effectively, we can win the war without laying waste to a major portion of the world, and greatly limit the number of our own who come home in a body bags.

Terrorists don't have massed armies or economic assets that provide high value targets for conventional warfare. Their primary asset is their control over their followers. Without fanatical followers to turn their psychotic delusions into bloody reality, terrorist "leaders" become no more dangerous than any other delusional street beggar who believes he has a special connection with an imaginary god.

While the ability to use their control over the hearts and minds of their followers to turn them into self-guided weapons may be the terrorists' greatest strength, their hold over the hearts and minds of their followers represents their primary strategic resource, and point of greatest vulnerability. Creating a self-guided human weapon requires an extraordinary degree of control over the information available to the individual. Suicide is contrary to basic human nature, and will only appear "reasonable" to a functional human when that human is convinced suicide is the only viable/effective alternative. The effectiveness of the terrorists is directly dependent on the continued unquestioning acceptance of their religious doctrines by the human weapons they are creating. Much of their success in training impressionable minds to commit acts that violate their basic instincts is due to the success of the terrorists at keeping competing and/or contradicting information from reaching their followers.

The logical house of cards that justifies the homicidal insanity of a suicide bomber is vulnerable to any information or experience that undermines the bomber's absolute belief that the fantastical story he's been told continues to be worth the sacrifice of his own life. Perhaps even more critical to the motivation of self-guided human weapons is preserving their expectations of "earning" a comically opulent and privileged after-life in "payment" for the crimes against humanity they commit in the real world.

Anything that gives a potential bomber a reason to think his one and only real life might be worth living destroys his usefulness as a self-guided human weapon. He must also continue to believe that his crimes will earn him the rewards of a hero in his after-life, not condemn his soul to eternal damnation for taking his own life while cold -bloodedly murdering innocent children, as is predicted by most other religions.

Our most powerful weapon may well be the Western Cultural Imperialism that has been so relentlessly demonized by the liberal press. The reason so much effort has been expended trying to redefine the attractiveness of western culture as evil is because its power strikes the greatest fears in the hearts of our enemies. Those trying to attract followers with promises of short and brutal wasted lives of self-induced suffering find it exceedingly difficult to compete with the West's hedonistic focus on living well.

It will take creativity to fashion an information weapon that can penetrate the defenses of radical Islam, and deliver a lethal dose of Western Cultural Imperialism to the religionist cancers festering in the hearts and minds of their followers and supporters. But surely the American advertising and entertainment industries that figured out how to convince an educated western population to buy pet rocks and platform shoes, can also figure out how to convince the victims of Islamic religionism that there is more to life than dying.

Every victim of Islamic religionism who choses western good times sex, drugs, and rock and roll over wasting his life in the service of hate filled delusional old men hiding from the real world in desert wastelands as barren of value as those who hide in them, preaching hate and death because they've never learned how to live and love, is another tragically damaged feral animal we won't have to put down in self-defense.