The War on Reason

This started out as a reply to Max Barry's blog, quipping about the charming ability of Brits to snap back after the tube/bus bombings of yesterday:

For anyone who thinks the IRA was ever justified in blowing up shopping malls or school busses, this is good food for thought. When the IRA was active this way, a lot of Americans thought it was a good prompt to dust off nationalist Irish songs and sing. After 9/11, Americans seem to understand domestic terrorism a little better.

Now, if we could only apply what we know to 1) not aggravating a major portion of the world with blind, bipartisan support of Zionism; 2) not arming and aggravating Muhajadeen against Commies and then turning our backs when they bring down a reign of terror created in their own image.

All the Americans reading this have concluded I'm either anti-Jewish or pro-Al Queda, so they've stopped listening. They've got their fingers in their ears chanting to keep the sound out, though my point is picking sides and arming them to the teeth is a big part of what starts this nonsense.

If you take race and religion out of it (for Americans), the question is not whether it's okay to blow up a federal building, it's whether Timothy McVey was a random act or if he was committing a horrible crime in reaction to an otherwise legitimate grievance.

That's where I ended my response on Max's blog, which will probably get me flamed by people who wanted another person to rail against the war in Iraq.

I'm against the war in Iraq, but I wasn't when we started to shock and awe that country. At the beginning of this most recent Iraqi adventure, I was all for giving war a chance. Why? Because Saddam Hussein appeared to have weapons of mass destruction, and a program to develop more. Apparently he wanted his neighbors to think that and was counting on payola to France, Germany, Russia and maybe China to keep his bacon out of the fire. It didn't work, though he had every reason to believe it would, since the United States had talked tough and left him to rule through 30 years of his various outrages. Even acted friendly when we felt like it.

The war in Iraq led me to read 'Blaming the Victims,' a collection of essays by both Jewish and assorted gentile writers, from the hard left to the radical right, edited by Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said. This book was one of the most thought-provoking I've ever read, not less because it was recommended to me by a Republican with libertarian tendencies who is, as far as I can tell (he keeps close about what exactly he does) is an arms dealer. Any time I hear from him, he's back from some hell hole. You can Google places he's been and it's always the site of a civil war or border conflict. Oh, and he has to get State Department clearance for these trips even though he lives in a Caribbean country outside U.S. jurisdiction.

I digress, but that's what Lobsters do.

The essays in this book are not all persuasive by themselves. It's more the concert of them, of finding people from different ends of the spectrum who can articulate the crimes of the state of Israel (note: a distinction between the state and the people) and the political legitimacy of the PLO. This is bitter medicine for Americans, who are told by their press and their leaders that the PLO is the bad guys and the state of Israel is a great democracy and beacon of hope.

Israel is about as much a beacon of hope as the Apartheid regime of South Africa. That's not an anti-Semitic statement, by the way. The Palestinians are Semitic people, and some Jews are too. Not most of the Zionist movement, that was mainly white European Jews and their American counterparts.

So while we've continually pissed off the entire Muslim world for sixty years, what else have we done? We became utterly dependent on the tit of Arab oil at the same time we stood by and let royalist thugs and their goons nationalize the oil reserves of every major exporter, then watched them form an anti-competitive cartel.

Then we do everything in our power to ensure the formation of Al Queda, ignore them while they blow up our embassies, our naval vessels and (possibly) TWA Flight 800. And when the Trade Center comes down, we hold a pity party and ask what we've ever done.

The governments of France and Russia are hideously corrupt, as is the U.N., but that doesn't make ours clean and odor free. Just as we 'liberated' the Jews of Germany and then turned our backs on the Jews of the Soviet Union, only taking a hard stand against Stalin after he got the bomb. I think when Ike warned fo the 'military industrial complex,' I think he had seen that there were interests too tickled to have a big, bad, indefinite adversary. And while the Soviet machine flew apart, we continued to ramp up defense spending. And called reduction in the rate of growth 'cuts' in defense and talked of a peace dividend.

So now we have the 'war on terror,' another indefinite bad guy, one that can't go broke and give up like the U.S.S.R. The downside if you’re a defense contractor, is that terrorism isn't likely to be thwarted by big, nasty military machinery. Terrorists almost always resort to terrorism because they lack the military might to play at conventional warfare.

But the war on terror is a lot like the drug war. All sorts of adventures in places like Columbia, not at 'war' but on a 'drug interdiction mission. For people who make a profit on our defense budget, before the Iraq war, $385 Billion annually. If the margin on that won't corrupt you, you can't be bought.

Afghanistan made some sense, both because the Taliban was thumbing its nose at us, and because we didn't just roll in and take over. We worked with existing political forces. We could have gotten rid of Saddam sooner and for less, except every time Kurds or Shiites threw up a fight, we turned our back and watched them get gassed.

Iraq made sense to me when we started to roll, but when they didn't even manufacture evidence of a WMD program with any scope to it, or of real WMDs (he got rid of them by using them on the aforementioned Kurds and Shiites), the picture got fuzzy. Not that there's any way to cleanly extract ourselves from the place. Nor is it the fault of foot soldiers, many of whom thought they were out of the service already or who figured they could use the extra money to play soldier on weekends.

But while we wait for the paint to dry on the corner we've painted ourselves into, I do wish we'd take some steps that would actually fight terrorism. This would include looking harder at people we're giving military aid to, including Israel. It would also mean not turning our backs on the next Muhajadeen. See also, not deporting, en masse, thousands of young men from the Middle East who thought they were here legally, even if it means splitting up their family. And so on.

Which means acknowledging that blowing yourself up on a bus is wrong but that the PLO has a legitimate beef. And that it's also terrorism if you do it from a helicopter gunship or with 'smart' bombs.

Maybe it even means accepting that governments we don't like are going to join the Nuclear Club. It's not like Pakistan tested their second and third bombs on industrial centers in India...