Precedent
In the role of public policy precedents are almost everything. A precedent is a convention that one can look to in order to decide a course of action. This is precisely why history is important: where else must one look for a typical course of action? It also makes history dangerous; identifying a false precedent is easy to do and those types of errors in the soft science of historical analysis often result in the loss of life.
Precedents are so complicated: there are the ones which are local to an administration, the burdens of decisions that have already been made, and the myopia of arrogance. Let’s also not forget the x-factor: the unknowns that singularly annihilate a precedent of millennia.
Hitler either forgot or didn’t know that sending troops into Russia was a bad idea – perhaps he should have looked at the precedent uncovered by Napoleon’s fateful mistake on the matter. Many believe this was the point at which he lost his war. No administration creates policy out of nothing; often they inherit and react according to their predecessors. Ethnic and geopolitical conflict demonstrate this: the Taiwanese and Chinese, the Israelis and the Palestinians, Serbs and Albanians, Eritrean and Ethiopians all as vivid examples. Finally the ‘x-factor’; what one can’t anticipate. A Russian winter, betrayal, defectors, cryptography and other technologies serve to remind us of the things one cannot quantify when making policy.
It is important to view everything in precedents, especially terrorism because, as a force in conflict, so much has yet to be defined.
A friend told me earlier of conversation in which it was mentioned as a “silver lining” that Spain withdraw forces from Iraq as a result of the massive bombings that took place on the commuter trains. The deaths of the Spanish commuters served a greater good in prompting a change of government.
My mind immediately begins to look at the precedent that appears imminent from such a perspective. Would anti-Iraq protestors revel in an act of bioterrorism that frightened Americans out of the war and occupation? Perhaps it need not be so drastic – how about an act of terrorism in which only a few hundred had to perish?
It isn’t surprising that terrorists are also aware of precedent; the recent desecration of the bodies of American citizens in Fallujah was designed to invoke memories of Mogadishu and it did. This afternoon an opinion piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Gwynne Dyer: http://www.gwynne-dyer.com/) appealed to the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq because of such carnage, the precedent being this: kill and mutilate a few Americans and the American public will lose its resolve. It could happen in the future, the thought.
No matter what your opinion is of current events or politics, my appeal is that of a large picture, one of precedents. Rather than cheering or sobbing at an event in isolation let us be sedate and ask for context, history and precedent. My opinion is closely aligned with Hitchens, much more eloquently stated here.
ps. Let me anticipate a clever rebuttle. One could argue that a clear precedent has been set against the sort of colonialism and imperialism exhibited by Americans in Iraq. My response is a look at countries like India or Tunisia. Imperfect and yet much better than the course of Saddam's Iraq.
5:02:06 PM 
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