Response of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when
asked on September 11, 2001 what the attacks meant for U.S.-Israeli
relations. His quick reply was:
“It’s very good. Well, it’s not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy (for Israel).”
Game theory war-planners rely on mathematical models to anticipate and shape outcomes with staged provocations. For the agent provocateur, the reactions to a provocation-as well as the reactions to those reactions-thereby become predictable within an acceptable range of probabilities.
With
ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan poised to expand to Iran and
Pakistan, it is time to take a closer look at how conflicts are
catalyzed-by way of deception.
When Israeli game theorist Robert J. Aumann
received the 2005 Nobel Prize in economic science, he conceded from
Jerusalem, “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in
Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.” A
professor at the Center for the Study of Rationality at Hebrew
University, Aumann’s Nobel lecture, titled “War and Peace,” expounded on
the rationality of war.
With a well-modeled provocation, a
target’s anticipated reaction can even become a weapon in the
aggressor’s arsenal. In resp… >>>
