Thanks to the so-dubbed “underpants” bomber, the T.V. airwaves and blogosphere are all about terrorism, terrorism, terrorism, as if it’s something that just appeared out of nowhere this week. Where the hell has everyone been? I think part of the dynamic at work here is the simple fact that television news people spend a lot of their time on airplanes, and the tightened security that results from these attempted bombings is a real inconvenience to the jet set. (Me? I wouldn’t get on a plane these days unless somebody had a gun to my head.) Not sure if anyone else remembers, but a short time after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, it seemed like a lot of television commentators – the McLaughlin Group springs to mind – were complaining piteously about the demise of curbside check-in. Such an inconvenience. However will our civilization survive? (It has, somehow.) That helps to drive the news cycle a bit. I think my cousin had the perfect response at the time: That’s it, no more planes. If I don’t have to fly, you don’t have to fly. End of story.
Most of the talk, of course, has been about how this could happen and what we can do to keep it from happening again. There has also been a lot of tough pundit talk about Yemen, as if somehow we have the capacity to mount yet another failed invasion. I think, though, that the central point of this whole episode is barely being discussed at all – the simple fact that, after eight years of war, we are still right where we were when it all started. In essence, people can still walk onto a plane and blow it up, make it crash, etc. – maybe not in precisely the same way as on 9-11, but just as devastatingly, it seems likely. So… what have we accomplished by invading two countries halfway around the world? As it turns out, less than nothing – we have, in fact, made ourselves more vulnerable to attack. It’s a classic supply-side argument, so all you Regan-lovers out there should be able to work this out. We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims, displaced millions more. There are a vastly greater number of people out there who want to see us suffer than there was in 2001. By increasing that pool, we’ve increased the likelihood of attack far beyond what our meager efforts at airline security are able to mitigate. Mission accomplished, Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and, yes, now Obama. Good going.
There is also a strong presumption on the part of the Cheneys, the Buchanans, the Lindsey Grahams, etc., against treating terrorism cases as criminal matters rather than through military means. These people seem to have no faith in our justice system whatsoever. Do they really think it’s going to be hard to convict this Nigerian guy? The system is designed to put black people in jail under pretty much any circumstances, thanks in large measure to “conservatives”. For chrissake, it took just the mere mention of terrorism for them to give Jeff Leurs 22 years in a maximum security hell hole when he set fire to 3 pickup trucks at a car dealership with no intention to cause bodily harm to anyone. This case can easily be handled in the context of our courts. The Cheneys and Buchanans of the world are eager to apply the thumbscrew as well, in the full knowledge that to do so is illegal, immoral, unethical… and ineffective. But the desire to resort to torture is such an integral part of their worldview now – it is their way of appealing to the worst in all of us.
When we made this fight against terrorism a “war”, all we did was elevate the status of a bunch of criminals to that of a world power. That obviously hasn’t worked. Let’s try another way.
