Steam of consciousness, dudes. Kinda long, but it's my blog, man. Deal with it.
First of all, I have never understood the hysteria that accompanies the threat of terrorism. Yes, 9-11 was a horrible crime of mass murder, but compared to disasters elsewhere in time and space, it is no more than a modern expression of time-honored tactics in service to strategic aims, which are in reality hollow fantasies. Does al Qaeda really pose a threat to our existence as a nation? Even if some fanatics were able to detonate a small nuclear weapon in a major city, as horrible as that idea is, would that not be the absolute maximum limit of their feeble power of terrorism? And aside from considering the extreme difficulty in putting together such an act, how does this compare to the past and newly relevant power possessed by Russia in the form of real nuclear weapons sitting atop working ICBMs? Given Bush’s idiotic destruction of the ABM treaty and his insane insistence in further enriching the defense companies with huge contracts for a fantasy “Star Wars” system in eastern Europe, I find the potential threat of terrorism to be severely limited and quite possibly thwarted altogether through both international policing and diplomatic efforts combined with some self-control in the use of petroleum.
What I’m getting at is that Bush and his minions are the primary benefactors to our national hysteria, as it has proven to cement their power and even fool the nation into entering into a war against the weakest nation in the Middle East, which did not possess any threatening means of attack on our country AT ALL. Hans Blix, head of the UN Disarmament team had said so, as had Scott Ritter, as well as Mohammed al Baradei (head of the International Atomic Energy Agency), and these men were closer to the action in Iraq than anyone else. I won’t presume to guess the motives behind the Bush/Cheney obsession with war in Iraq (Oedipal and financial, I’m sure), but since we now all are witness to the absolute disaster spewing up in the wake of its execution, I can at least call them incompetent liars, and if not Hitlerian in any other respect, similar to the Fuhrer in at least the complete inability to accept a reality so pressing upon them as to squash them flat.
When we look at how terror plots have been foiled throughout recent history, it seems that it really is a police function that works the best. In Spain, Britain, Italy, Germany, and in this country, it was not military action that thwarted plots or caught the perpetrators after the fact, but rather the careful investigatory and intelligence techniques that brought terrorists to justice. Even our foray into Afghanistan, which I supported, has done little to quash al Qaeda, as it seems even stronger now and much more diverse and need only retreat into “friendly” Pakistan to continue operations. What good is our military if we fear to tread across the border of an ally so shaky as Pakistan’s yet manage to kill 3500+ of our own and permanently maim tens of thousands of others in a pointless war in Iraq? Frankly, it astounds me that we failed to pursue al Qaeda into the one place we know they went, particularly after Musharraf’s government started making deals with the very tribes who were sheltering bin Laden and his gang.
We are all old enough to remember a time (not necessarily over yet, thanks to Bush’s provocations of Russia) when a power existed that had the means, the method, and the motivation to annihilate the United States, and, of course, in turn be annihilated. The Cold War was a truly terrifying period in our history where we really were facing the end of our way of life, and perhaps that of the planet. To their credit, the Soviets were not religious fanatics nor crazy for some other reason, and so our stalemate held for decades. Against that potential, the means and methods available to terrorist units are so utterly paltry that it seems almost absurd to have tied up our entire military establishment to stop them. Our vulnerabilities seem to have increased as a result of following the Bush-Cheney doctrine. And our solutions to such vulnerabilities are clearly more educational, cultural, and economic than martial—something completely beyond the grasp of the phony macho cult in the White House.
If we really think we need the Middle East (and so long as we are addicted to their oil, that’s the sad fact), then we should be doing blitzkrieg attacks to modernize, secularize, and thoroughly democratize them through the means we handle best—the overpowering juggernaut of American material culture. But perhaps that is not realistic—after all, the most severely Islamic countries are highly resistant to Western ways, and the reason al Qaeda exists seems partly to be in reaction to the presence of corrupting values coming from our shores.
So perhaps a different tack is needed. I’d propose that if we could wean ourselves from Middle East oil—and I think it is doable if we could only commit at the Manhattan Project or Moon Landing level—then we could simply wash our hands of the entire region. If, ultimately, the Middle East does become a caliphate shaped around a 13th century orthodoxy, what bother to us is that? As it stands, even the most modern Islamic nations are so hobbled by their religious leaders, ridiculous world views, and pathological hatred and fear of Jews (a billion Muslims terrified of 15 million chosen people!) that not one of them can function as a truly modern industrial nation, nor field a military that could defeat Slovenia’s. If the US had no more need of their oil, and the mullahs and madrassas did come to control the future of the region, it would only regress into virtual irrelevance. With half their populations relegated to illiteracy and servitude (women) and their male citizens primarily educated in the broad teachings of an alleged prophet, and with the continuation of the Shiite/Sunni schism and the resultant squabbles over ever-shrinking resources, their version of civilization would be a threat only to itself. Without anything that anyone else needs, rather than entangling ourselves in the Islamic world’s insoluble problems, we could solve our own while eliminating a variable from our economy that has caused nothing but trouble for five decades.
As for “them” coming over here after us if we leave Iraq, I find the notion laughable. If we were no longer on their turf trying to make them all into good little Americans (and given our support of tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia, that hypocrisy is long overdue for retirement), they will have their hands full killing and converting each other, without the economic or technical means to even keep the water and electricity delivered. I expect that some of the more secular nations in the region may escape the collapse that will follow a return to talabanic orthodoxy, but they will be under constant threat of terror more than we shall be. After all, being an infidel is not nearly so sinful as having forsaken the one true faith. We may continue to be the great Satan, but to what purpose will blowing us up be if Arabs and Persians are defecting from Islam in pursuit of some semblance of 21st century living?
