War of Attrition Mark Two, A.D. 2006-?

Today’s papers bring another serving of mind-boggling, blood-curdling and nerve-shuttering news. Two unnamed Yemeni women mailed two brand-new varieties of “highly sophisticated” weapons, this time so skilfully hidden in a computer printer and a printing cartridge that no sophisticated X-ray devices installed on all big and small airports of the planet could have spotted them (how on earth they have been nonetheless discovered and defused, the sources of the press release did not say; it is left to us, on the receiving end of the communication channel, to assume that the foiling of the shrewd plot can be only explained to the superhuman perceptiveness and unsleeping vigilance of the security agents, just as was the discovery of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as well as of the “dirty bombs”, “liquid bombs” and other most exquisitely murderous contraptions added to the terrorists’ arsenal).

First commentaries concentrate on the possible impact of this dramatic announcement on the coming mid-term American elections. How Obama will react to the news? Will he play them down or up? I don’t know the answers, and frankly am not particularly interested in finding them or guessing. Of one thing, though, I am sure. As today’s NYT chose to express it, “The foiling of the package plot was a sobering reminder to officials around the world that quick response to timely intelligence rules the day” (as if the officials needed be reminded, or for that matter wished to be sobered…)

There will be a spate of brand new security measures designed and promptly put in place, new spying techniques developed and supported by newly produced technical devices, and “new and improved” regime of airport checks and searches introduced. To pay for all and each of those measures, new commissions will fill the order books of security companies, while new holes will be burrowed in state budgets as well as in the funds earmarked to meet urgent social, cultural and educational needs of the nations. Two “highly sophisticated” bombs have been intercepted. To seize the uncounted and uncountable numbers of their not-yet-produced replicas, millions of new “yet more highly sophisticated” contraptions and thousands of their operators will be needed. As always since the discovery of the self-beefing up escalation of security expenditures that is now proving to be the most seminal and lasting heritage of the cold war, the stables will be overhauled at a cost dwarfing the price of the horse(s) that bolted.

Not only the generals are prone to always fight the last victorious war, and the current “war against terrorism” (I am sorry for adopting that oxymoron, for the lack of another accepted, publicly recognizable name) is in some crucial and most seminal respects a repetition of the cold one. The combatants, the weapons and modes of military actions have changed – but not the strategic doxa, logic and above all the in-built mechanism of exponential self-escalation (I guess that precisely such an expectation was the hub of Bin Laden’s war plan).

It was the permanent feature of cold-war battles not to be fought in the field. New weapons were produced on a steadily rising pace not in order to be used in action, but to render the weapons stocked by the enemy useless and force the enemy to replace them with new ones, forcing thereby one’s own warehouses to be emptied and the suppliers to refill them. The story repeats itself now. With every step probability grows that the ending will be also repeated. The cold war, remember, ended with one of the players in the rearmament game going impoverished and bankrupt. Imploding, not having been exploded…

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