One more great article I am posting here which asks the fundamental question that needs to be asked first, which is:
"How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?" That is the question to ask -- of ourselves as well as of our attackers.
siliconinvestor.com
Later,see you after hundreds of posts
Terrorists are made, not born
Indiscriminate bombing? Dirty tricks? They're part of the problem, not the solution.
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By Bruce Shapiro
Sept. 12, 2001 | "How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?" asked my
friend David Handschuh, a New York Daily News photographer, after firefighters pulled him,
legs shattered, from the rubble at the World Trade Center.
With President Bush talking of war and "a monumental struggle between good and evil,"
motivation may seem beside the point. But David's anguished query is the right one, and one
we ignore at our peril: What do we make of a rage so deep that it could prompt a few
individuals to convert box-cutters, pilots' licenses and airline schedules into weapons of mass
destruction?
For now, with the attackers still officially unidentified, the only thing that can be responsibly
said is that terrorist killers are made, not born. Call it blowback, call it payback -- but
whichever part of the world these sadistic attacks emanated from, it is someplace where
people have long acquaintance with body counts and death raining down from the sky.
Handschuch's question is even more relevant because, as the bodies and survivors are finally
recovered, the mute bewilderment and confusion will turn into anger of our own. That is
natural. But what contours will that rage take as it emerges in Washington and around the
country?
President Bush read the words "a quiet, unyielding anger" from
his teleprompter Tuesday night. But hours earlier, even as Air
Force One scrambled the unseen president's entourage from
airbase to airbase to bunker, something different was already
evident.
Already, certain Washington hands and select media
mouthpieces were playing an alarming blame game, seeking to
channel public anger into their long-favored favored projects.
On ABC, former Secretary of State James Baker blamed the
whole thing on the Church Committee -- the U.S. Senate
inquiry that 20 years ago exposed the long history of CIA
manipulation of foreign governments and subsidizing of torture.
"In terms of intelligence, we unilaterally disarmed," Baker
insisted, declaring it time return for a return to the days of
unaccountable "dirty business."
He seems to have forgotten just how deeply American
embroilment in dirty business -- coups, assassinations, military
regimes -- contributed to hatred of the U.S. (Today's CIA, let it be noted, profoundly
objects to this yearning by nostalgic old Cold War hands: Earlier this year I attended a
conference on terrorism at which Bill Harlow, the CIA's director of public affairs, bluntly
said that the intelligence community manages to recruit any sources it desires under current
rules.) A few hours later, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger called on the
U.S. to flatten Kabul: "We've got to be somewhat irrational in our response. Blow their
capital from under them."
Just how effective would the Baker-Eagleburger strike-hard policy be in quelling the
terrorist threat? Look at the West Bank, where the cycle of vengeance and victimization
gets further cemented into the foundation of daily life with each new home demolition and
cafe bombing.
This is no time for lectures; in these first hours and days all of us are thinking about the
people who escaped, or who didn't. But with the clamor for aggressive and massive military
action already beginning, it's essential to point out just how many of the world's more baleful
terrorists and mass murderers were born precisely from the kind of operations now
advocated by the bomb-and-assassinate crowd.
Pol Pot? Rode to power after formerly neutral and stable Cambodia was flattened by
American bombs. The Taliban? Detritus of the anti-Soviet Afghan guerrilla movement
financed and trained by the U.S. Chechnya guerrillas? Russia's own private blowback.
None of this diminishes the responsibility of the perpetrators of this week's attack, or
diminishes the need to bring the full force of domestic and international law to bear. But it
should serve as a warning to our leaders that assuaging the public's grief with B-52 strikes
will reap its own unforeseeable whirlwind. "Blow Kabul from under them?" You might as
well hand out box-cutters and directions to Kennedy Airport to every kid in Afghanistan
unto the third generation.
And on the domestic front, while comparisons to Pearl Harbor are inevitable, the comments
of some politicians Tuesday were a chilly reminder of the worst panic-driven excess of the
Second World War: the internment of Japanese-Americans in prison camps. No one was
going quite that far. But Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., called for closing the nation's borders.
Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., propose greatly expanding
the FBI's surveillance powers -- powers that already are the broadest in American history.
Not that there is a shred of evidence that the cold, disciplined commandos who so carefully
perpetrated these ghastly attacks chatted about their plans over cellphones, or that dozens
of terrorist teams are creeping in from Vancouver.
What is striking, in fact, is the raging irrelevance of the extreme measures both military and
legal authorities proposed in the last 24 hours. "The responses for which support is being
mobilized are not going to address the true character of this challenge," says professor
Richard Falk of Princeton, a foreign policy scholar who has thought long and hard about the
reconfigured world order. "This is the first war for which there is no military solution. And
without a military solution our leaders lack the imagination to understand what is happening
and what to do."
One former high-ranking federal emergency official and terrorism response expert described
to me a recent simulated terrorism exercise that featured role-playing by such Washington
luminaries as Sam Nunn and David Gergen. The participants were given an imaginary
scenario involving the deliberate release of smallpox. This observer was struck how in the
"outbreak's" early phases, when small measures could have made the simulated events more
manageable, the players could not settle on a course of action. Later -- when in a real
epidemic it would have been far too late -- they resorted to draconian measures. In the
all-too-real scenario now playing out in Washington, draconian measures -- political, legal
and military -- seem to have similar appeal.
The war has indeed come home. But I don't mean the war on terrorism, a phrase repeated
endlessly and meaninglessly on television Tuesday night. Nor do I mean, in any narrow
sense, the fanatic war of whoever it was who attacked lower Manhattan. What has come
home, on an unimaginable scale and with inconceivable speed, is a vicious cycle of
victimhood and revenge -- a bitter, confusing jumble of shock, grief, fear.
"How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?" That is the question to ask --
of ourselves as well as of our attackers. |
