But he didn't know beans about Iranians, did he?

I am not expert on idea markets, but some of my friends are. I listened in while they discussed Poindexter's idea, and they were unanimous in saying it was bogus.

We got the living hostages back.

Yeah, swapped 'em for a cake.

But the idea was bogus? Getting American hostages for a cake seems pretty smart to me. Even without funding the Contra victory in Nicaragua.

Bogus or not, if the idea had been implemented during the past administration we wouldn't have heard a peep from the press.

There were many in the blogosphere who thought this was a good idea (Reynolds, etc.). It seemed to me that all it really involved was thinking like the terrorists think - sort of plotting ahead of them, as it were. And what is wrong with that?

It may have seemed ghoulish to the left, but they don't care about terrorism and won't distinguish innocence from evil. Howard Dean's recent comments on bin Laden and Bush's "foreknowledge" of 9/11 speak volumes. Is Dean going to make anyone safer from anything? No.

One suspects that the 'terror' market would place quite a low value on about 75% of what passes for conventional wisdom on the subject; and people aren't going to like their nonsensical positions being exposed to the harsh light of the commodity pit.

I'm not well enough informed about the market aspects of this, but the goal is nothing more arcane than what military officers are expected to do in assessing an enemy.

The rule there is, you don't prepare your defenses (or offenses, either) based on what you expect your opponent to do, but upon what he is capable of doing.

With armies, capabilities are limited by logistics etc. Terrorism is way less limited in that respect, and betting you know (or can guess) what is coming next flies in the face of everything we know about strategy.

That is exactly why this is outside the stratgic box. It is not like planning for war against Spain or Japan or Indonesia; it is more like preparing qualitative actuarial tables or medical diagnoses/prognoses.

Tom Clancy wrote about a 747 flying into the Capitol years before 9/11. While it is impossible to "blame" anyone for the events on that day, a market pool approach would have at least identified this method as getting quite a bit of bang for the buck.

One thing I expected to see right after 9/11, but have not, is a panel discussion on some talking head show about other methods (or strike points) of terrorism against us here at home. Maybe the FBI would get nervous if too many specifics were brought up, but that is the whole point of the idea. Sift through the chaff and find the stress points and then steps can be taken (quietly) to relieve them.

It doesn't cost much to ask: "what if?" And it doesn't cost much to figure out what the bad guys want to do - kill, kill, and kill again. I don't even think fear matters anymore, just death.

That sounds like a plea for better war gaming. Not a bad idea, but not new, either.

Practically every startling event in recent history (sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, sinking of liner Titanic etc.) can be found to have been presaged in fiction somewhere or other. But by several orders of magnitude, things can be found in fiction that presaged nothing.

I cannot remember who did it, but about 35 years ago, an English professor read through about 400 futuristic books written between about 1600 and 1950. He found exactly one (written by a Polish banker about what turned out to be World War I) that was really close to what happened.

Harry:

What about Jules Verne?

Or Clarke. It's easy to imagine a wonderful machine, or a new political system.

Even beginning to sketch out how to do it is the hard part. Verne didn't do that, and, though I am not a Clarke reader, I don't believe he did either.