The Napster Illusion
In Iraq, Without Options
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 7, 2004; Page A31…I'm not predicting that Sadr will succeed in evading U.S. forces and in time set up an Islamic republic as extreme as Lenin and Stalin's Soviet republic -- much as he may wish to. But, like Lenin, he has tapped into a popular sentiment that is far broader than the size of his own narrow legion might suggest. It's also clear that the civil authority that is supposed to take power June 30 will have few reliable domestic forces to defend it -- a situation reminiscent of the one confronting Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Russian provisional government who had no loyal forces at his disposal when the Bolsheviks seized power.
What the Iraqi provisional government will have is the Americans. It would be far better off if it had a force under the U.N. banner, with troops from nations that had opposed as well as supported the war, troops from Arab nations in particular.
But the time to have built such a force, I fear, has come and gone. The administration's utter failure to envision the problems that a U.S.-controlled occupation would encounter kept it from going to the United Nations until the situation on the ground was barely tenable. It's still worth trying to get a U.N. high commissioner to supplant Paul Bremer, but it grows harder to imagine why the U.N. would sign on at this late date.
Mr. Meyerson is half right. The opportunity has gone, but it was never really here to begin with.
Remember Napster? Not that poseur that's running around under that name but the original one. The anarchistic, libertarian, cyberspace-is-the-true-reality philosophy that made Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker feel they could discuss design decisions to help folks get away with trading copyrighted works:
Boies has argued that Napster bears no responsibility for its customers' downloads, and that, as far as the company is concerned, the service should be used only to swap songs that its customers already own or that are in the public domain. Some jurists seem sympathetic to that point of view. During the oral argument before the Ninth Circuit on Oct. 2, Judge Robert Beezer asked, "How in the world are [Napster's executives] expected to have knowledge of what's coming off some kid's computer in Hackensack, N.J., for transmission to Guam?"ran into a real-world snag: "cyber-space" may be a virtual place where meatspace laws don't apply, but it exists in servers which are quite subject to real world influences.Well, Judge, Boies's client is more than clever enough to know what's going down between Hackensack and Guam. An internal company memo quotes Napster co-founder Sean Parker as saying that he'd designed Napster's software to avoid links to users' "name or address or other sensitive data that might endanger them, especially since they are exchanging pirated music." That's the sort of smoking gun that Boies might have salivated over in the Microsoft case; unfortunately for him, he's now sitting at the defendant's table.
The Bush administration is trapped in a similar illusion. They acted with full belief in the real physical dominance of American military power. They acted to consolidate that power. They've been caught up by two meatspace realities, though:
- You can not project sufficient force to control that many people from literally half way around the world indefinitely
- It is in the interest of every nation seeking to deal with the USofA as a peer that the USofA be humbled in the effort
The Iraq II, from the American people's viewpoint, was the Kick-The-Dog war. A lashing out as SOMEbody in response to 9/11. Most of the antiwar people were antiwar because the outcome was so damn predictable. Now that every foul prediction made about the war has come about, everyone will be forced to realize the obvious—there are physical constraints on even the mightiest of nations.
