24 July 2007

Innocents Abroad



Mark Twain once observed that: “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

He is my favorite of the native writers, a genuine original who keenly observed what was going on around him. He was as comfortable in his American skin as it is possible to be, and he used his acerbic pen to skewer the pompous and self-important people of his time. One of his first big sellers was entitled “Innocents Abroad, or, A New Pilgrims Progress.” It was an account of his adventures on a trip to Europe and the Holy Land just after the Civil War, a time when you could still go to the Palestine without looking over your shoulder all the time.

His jibes about Americans in places they did not understand are as good today as they were then. He was particularly right about statistics. Washington is a town were we use our numbers as weapons. Sometimes they are blunt instruments and some times they prick the skin like the tip of an epee. I'm in the business myself, using numbers to extrapolate trends. Now they are about revenue forecasts, mostly, but they used to be about the numbers of submarines and missile tubes pointed at the homeland.

After 9/11, I found myself in a place where numbers were crunched to reflect opinion, which is a thing very much like the rectum, since everyone has one. My particular opinion was that we had to understand what was making people so angry that they were willing to die in order to kill others - innocent others- in acts of monstrous cruelty. It seemed quite bizarre, and more than a little frightening.

There was a special unit attached to the place I was working at the time that specialized in taking surveys. That was the sort of mundane compiling of statistics, but this unit did its work in a manner that precluded the sample audience from knowing who was doing it, and who wanted to know. It was a sort of Roper Poll organization for denied areas.

They immersed themselves in their target, and accumulated their statistics from all sources. They were reporting some curious things. Most people in Cairo, for example, were of the opinion that the Israelis were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center, and that a secret network had whisked all Jews out of the buildings before the airplanes crashed into them.

It was hard to take seriously, since Osama had claimed credit for the attack, but the statistics, though weird, were quite real. There was quite a list of astonishing things that most people seemed to believe in Cairo and other places that did not coincide with the apparent reality I was observing in Washington, where the wreckage of the Pentagon still smoldered.

It seemed to me that some very basic work needed to be done to understand the lens through which our actions would be viewed, and tailor our plans accordingly. That effort was lost in the haste to take decisive action, based on the way the world appeared to good Christians from Texas and Wyoming.

I was deeply troubled then, and remain so. Ultimately, the failure of the government to understand the basic intellectual landscape on which it laid the foundation of strategic policy convinced me we were embarked on a course of folly, and it was time to pull the plug and retire, where I could fume on my porch like Mr. Twain.

Of course, there was none of that. I still see some of the work that my old colleagues have done surface in the press, and others have conducted their own examinations. I peddle my trade on the commercial side, most recently helping a sovereign government devise a plan to ensure that the people it admitted to its territory were not crooks, cheats or international terrorists.

That country has a long tradition of respect for individual liberty, tempered with pragmatism and forged in the white heat of the oven of multi-cultural respect. We are in the midst of one of the greatest mass migrations in human history, after all, south to north in most cases, though vice versa on the other side of the equator. Europe appears to be going out of business, with the current occupants apparently deciding to cease reproducing in numbers sufficient to replace themselves.

We determined that Identity was the key to a successful immigration policy. If we could determine with some certainly precisely who was applying for admission, it would enable rational decisions on whether that individual would be a welcome guest, or potential citizen. The discussions to get to that point were exhaustive, and in the end we were satisfied that technology could produce enough context to make high-confidence decisions on who a person was.

From there, went our reasoning, Intent and the possibility of threat could be divined. Everyone seemed satisfied with the answer, and I got back on an airplane content that I had contributed the best I could in a complex problem.

I had my doubts, of course, but I kept them to myself. Arriving at LA International, the televisions were all ablaze with the burning car at the Glasgow Airport. The story was quite dramatic, and more than a little ominous. The attack on the airport was linked to attempted car-bombings in London, apparently with the intent to inflict mass casualties on nightclub-goers. The perpetrators were physicians, all from South Asia or Arabia.

More statistics about the group arrived in the next few days, once I was back in my little home in Big Pink. All of the group were known to be precisely who they were. Their identities were well known and incontrovertible. Their professional credentials were in good order, and had among the most desirable skills an immigrant can possibly have.

At least two of the group had conducted surgery to save a child's life in the week before driving a car bomb designed to inflict the greatest possible carnage.

Identity had no relation to intent, or to threat. I finished the paper I was working on, with some added caveats that there might be a problem with the methodology. I sent it off with some misgivings. I did not add that the developments at Glasgow suggested solutions both simple and complex. The most obvious observation was that the violence had its nexus in the most virulent form of the Islamic concept of struggle, or jihad.   

As a sometime user of statistics and associational computer software, I considered that there was the possibility that additional data could provide context. Information far beyond that of identity would be required to attempt to establish the worldview of the individual. That might include the doctrinal composition of professional schools, or attendance at particular Madrasses or mosques. Regional attitudes might be part of it, and family associations and travel patterns could contribute to a complete picture of the individual in the context of their identity.

Fitting all these factors into a worldview that made sense to my western sensibilities was a challenge. I had to reject the most obvious out of hand, since it is unacceptable. We continue to utter the public line that this is not a struggle of civilizations, and that somehow the carnage is some strange anomaly in foreign affairs.

Statistics only lie when we actually give them voice. Most Muslims are not bombers. Most do not want to slaughter others in the name of their faith. Most people, regardless of faith, are nice people when given the chance.

The statistics bear that out, but they are damned lies, of course.

I'll give you some of the latest and most optimistic ones, compiled in May of this year by the Pew Research Center, a respected and non-partisan institution. The results are much less alarming than others I have seen, which must contain more lies.

The Census Department is precluded from asking questions about religion, so this basic survey is a voyage into an unknown land. Their conclusions are up-front and up-beat, and are incorporated into the report: “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream.” It is good news, considering the attitudes overseas.

They based their survey on interviews with 60,000 people in multiple languages to find a representative sample population, which is one of the pivot points in the statistical survey business.

The Pew Research team concluded that there are around 2.35 million followers of Islam in the US, or slightly less than one percent of the general population. Thirty percent of them are under thirty years of age (700,000+), and slightly over half of these are male (54%).

Overall, Muslim Americans have a generally positive view of the larger society, and most say their communities are good to excellent places to live. Two thirds were born overseas. Of the native-born, half are African Americans (400,000). Nearly three quarters (1.9 million) believe in the American Dream of getting ahead through hard work, and more than sixty percent think that life is better in the States than it is in Muslim-majority nations.

That is the good news, and something we can all feel good about. There is another side, though. A third (800,000) see a conflict between the observation of their faith and living in a secular society.

Most think of themselves as Muslim first, rather than as Americans. I suppose that is not surprising, since many are first-generation North Americas.

Sixty percent (1.5 million) do not believe that Muslims carried out the 9/11 attacks, or that it was a product of a conspiracy. Most believe that the government singles out Muslims for increased surveillance and monitoring. Younger believers are more inclined to believe that suicide bombings in defense of the faith is justified than their parents. While absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low compared with Muslims around the world, it is still significant.

Of those under the age of thirty, or that portion of the population of military age, fifteen percent believe that suicide attacks in defense of the faith are always or sometimes justified. I did the numbers on the back on an envelope, and that amounts to around 100,000 young men, give or take a few.

But of course, that is just an exercise in Statistics, and Mark Twain told us about those things.

What it suggests to me is something much more basic that we ought to understand, and which requires no numbers at all. We have only a vague notion as to the effects of what we are doing, and what we are confronting.

Innocents abroad, indeed. Mark Twain could tell us a thing or two about that.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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