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BS ‘n’ About…
The US, Al Qaeda, & Israel
It has been two and a half years since the World Trade Center came crashing down. We’ve built a Maginot Line around our airports. We’ve spent billions in the skies over Afghanistan. We’ve spent billions on the ground in Iraq. We’ve chipped away at the Constitution and built a Gulag at Guantanamo Bay. We’re at war with Al Queda, our allies, and ourselves. But the conclusion seems inescapable: They’re not at war with us.
September 11th appears to be a stand-alone suicidal gesture by a band of fanatical Muslim ‘frat boys’, not the opening gambit in a declaration of war on the US. Think about it. It makes no sense. Why wake this sleeping giant when we were fat, happy, and halfway around the world? We’re al Queda’s worst nightmare. Why commit a televised atrocity so heinous that only American diplomatic arrogance would prevent the whole world from uniting against them?
International terrorism has never shown any cohesion, co-ordination, or long term planning. Sure, Osama probably signed the checks for flight school, trainfare to Madrid, and cover charges in Bali. But the caves in Afghanistan were training individual criminals, not building an army. Until we understand this fundamental difference, we will continue throwing money and lives at shadows and facades.
Like an army of pickpockets let loose on a city, you can’t eradicate the problem by blowing up their school. You can’t protect yourself against the individual initiative and comfort zone of each individual pickpocket. So you put an armed presence on every street corner and the criminals blend in, bide their time, and wait for the treasury to run dry. A stamp and a little bit of anthrax every once in a while accelerates the process. They spend thirty-seven cents. We spend a billion. We can’t win that one.
And try as we might, we can’t bomb them into the Stone Age. They already live in the Stone Age. But we don’t. Ours is a way of life that can be taken from us forever for a few thousand bucks worth of black market explosives. Ask yourself what would happen if, tomorrow at rush hour, spread across America, they blew up a subway, a bus, a freeway, a school, a cafe, a movie, and a ballgame. What would happen? We’d get mad. But we’d be scared and we’d stay home. America would grind to a halt. Wall Street would tremble. The fragility of modern infrastructure and the isolated innocence of the American people doom us. We have everything to lose. They have nothing. It is a war we can’t win.
It has been two and a half years since the World Trade Center came crashing down. We’re poorer and more fractious, but it is pretty much back to business as usual. Life goes on. But the threat hasn’t gone away.
It’s just that America is a sideshow in this conflict, not the focus we like to think we are. This is a land grab garbed in a Holy War being fought between the Israeli people and the Muslim nations that surround them. It is a war that has come to our soil, but it is a war that can’t be won by us.
Unfortunately, the war on terrorism is a war that can only be won by the Israeli people. Their government seems to think it is keeping them safer by shooting rockets at old men in wheelchairs. The Muslims arrayed against them are so volatile and divided that they’ll never come together in the cause of peace. For all our bluster and strutting about, the rest of us are just spectators.
Until the Israeli people find a way to address the grievances of the Palestinian people they displaced and put in place a government with the vision to carry it out, things are going to keep on blowing up. Until the Israeli people strike a deal to live side-by-side with the Palestinian people, they will go on dying side-by-side. Until the Israeli people elect a government willing to treat the Palestinians like human beings, they will go on acting like animals.
Until current administration America, Israel was the only civilized country on Earth to openly kill civilians in opposition to it as an instrument of government policy. An Israeli bus blows up so they shoot a rocket into the West Bank. Both attacks kill kids. The bus was blown up by a criminal fringe element of the Palestinian people. The rocket was launched by a UN-represented government. Both killed kids. But governments need to be held to a higher standard.
Including ours. It has been two and a half years since the World Trade Center came crashing down. Are we any safer? Is the world any safer? Has any attempt been made to understand the source of all this hatred? Has even one proposal been made to address the issues which gave birth to the terrorist threat in the first place? Have we done anything except try to hunt down and kill all the ‘evildoers’? No. Not really.
I don’t know about you but I don’t want to live like the Israeli people: Afraid to get on a bus, afraid to enjoy a cappuccino, afraid to send my kids to school. I’ll bet the Israeli people are tired of living this way too. It is time for the US to use its considerable power and influence, working in conjunction with the United Nations and other Western Powers, to bring peace to the Middle East. This eye-for-an-eye stuff isn’t working.
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