Friday, August 11, 2006
n Terrorism, Lamont, the New Yorker and Life
Sometimes I don’t post for a while because nothing has light my fire. Then there are times like now. Sorry, this is another long post.
The event at Heathrow yesterday hit very close to home. I have been through Heathrow several times (though the best point of entry to the U.K. is Manchester International Airport). The sight of those travelers disembarking once they got to the U.S. with all of their on board parcels reduced to a single plastic baggie was saddening. I have made that flight more times than I care to remember, and each time I sleep a little, read a little, listen to a book on my IPOD, work on my laptop, and brush my teeth (usually twice). Somehow I think little of that happened on yesterday’s flights (the few that took off).
Once again the terrorists of the world attacked the transportation system, and this time the one that connects us with each other across the globe, To say I was sad is an understatement. I was mad and disappointed. People who want to kill for the sake of killing. Clearly such attacks, had they been successful would not have changed any political situation (except to make people hate Muslims more), and even the damage to the airlines would only be temporary (new ways of travel would rise up in response if those plan were brought down, maybe even a system of travel where people would have to be pre-screened by the government before they can fly from Colorado Springs to Denver). Terrorism by itself cannot win anything. One must be part of a larger movement – political or military – to justify the bloodletting by the terrorists.
Oh, and lets not pretend that this is because of the Lebanon-Israel situation. This plot was started over a year ago, which means it is not tied to that war in the least. It could be a response to the Iraq War, which is deeply unpopular in both the U.S. and the U.K, but such a terrorist act is unhelpful because a) in both nations there are legitimate measures to take to bring an end to the governments involvement in Iraq and b) killing innocent civilians indiscriminately never wins people to your point of view.
The Muslim community in the U.K has already cowed the government and the people there so that there concerns are treated with a much greater carefulness than any other interest group. You had people last week marching in London, British citizens not of Lebanese ethnicity holding signs saying, “We are all Hezbollah Now” signs. At that point, Muslim interest groups really don’t need to resort to violence. The nation is in the midst of handing over the country to Muslim groups.
And then comes yesterday’s plot and last year’s 7/7 attacks, when for the first time I heard people, good liberal minded folk, whispering about Muslims and Islam in negative words. Radical Islamicists seemingly want to provoke their Western European hosts, who have largely bent over backwards for them (usually because of guilt dating back to their colonization), into hating Muslims and attacking (verbally) Islam. Terrorism simply doesn’t make any sense in this situation.
Which brings me to Ned Lamont. His victory on Tuesday night appears to have been centred on his opposition to the Iraq War. Again, this war is unpopular because a) it is run by G.W. Bush, b) it has been fought poorly (a complaint of conservatives) c) it is expensive, though more in dollars than lives (a libertarian and fiscally oriented complaint) and d) it has made America even less popular in the world than we were before.
No war is ever fought perfectly (though the first Gulf War was close to it until the decision to not remove Sadaam from power). There are many errors that have been made, but that is neither here nor there. Mistakes are part of war, and many of the conservative complaints of this war is that it has not been fought aggressively enough and that it may well cost the Republican Party its majority. These are technical complaints. Complaints A and D are what motivated the Lamont voters. Michael Barone, America’s foremost commentator on all things electoral, has already pointed out that Lamont won on the back of high income, high education voters, from areas of the state that used to be Republican, that are populated by secular trans-nationalist, who have more in common with elites from across the globe than with Democratic voters of the industrial areas of Connecticut.
It is these individuals I simply don’t understand. Look nobody likes war (well, okay, there are always nut cases), but the nation has fought wars because it understands that sometimes they are necessary. Generally, the only thing worse than fighting a war is losing a war. But these folks, and I know many like them, don’t really worry about that. They think it is high time America had another defeat like Vietnam to knock us down a few pegs. They point out that our lose in Vietnam didn’t really hurt America (of course, we did lose allies in Vietnam, Laos and allowed the genocidal regime in Cambodia to come to power, but really, what does that matter). Of course part of the reason that Vietnam did not cost America much was that within a decade of the fall of Saigon Reagan was already well on his way to bankrupting the Soviet Union and proving Communism to be a broken and failed system.
Perhaps those who want a pullout of Iraq are correct here, that our pullout will have no longer lasting effect than to bring our nation some much needed humility (as the Dixie Chicks said recently, there really is too much patriotism these days). There are four basic outcomes from a U.S. exit in Iraq if done in the next few months:
1) Iraq’s military and police, with the U.S. gone, is able to focus the nation on forming a coherent union, not as a U.S. puppet but as an independent regime. With the U.S. gone, there is no more need for violence and the nation is able to recover and become a healthy and democratic society. This is clearly the belief of those who see the violence as a response to the U.S. “occupation.”
2) We pull out and the nation splits into three nations. Iraq never existed in its current form until post-WWI and is a creation of Western politicians, not of realistic coherence. The country would be divided into Kurdistan (which will likely want the Kurdish areas of Iran and Turkey added to it), a Shiite south (with the access to the Gulf oil exporting areas) and a mixed mostly Sunni middle, with no natural resources but with the major population centre – Baghdad. One could see larger scale population movements, in the vein of the Pakistan-India partition, with some sort of trail of tears and blood, and it would be highly surprising given the realities of the region is the Shiite south did not align itself with Iran (out of a need for survival in a the largely Sunni region, though most do not realize Saudi Arabia has large Shia populations), and within a decade some sort of war between some collection of the three new nations to try and dominate the whole.
3) A full scale civil war, with the especially the Sunni and Shia going at it, and the Kurd declaring independence and risking either an invasion from Turkey or having to repel a Sunni invasion of the north. The outcome of this mess would be lots of blood and an unknown victor.
4) The loss of any coherent whole, as different Sunni factions warring with each other to try and represent the Sunnis, the different Shia factions (there are strongly pro and anti-Iran groups in the South) warring for dominance, and a possible return to internal strife amongst the Kurds (as existed for much of the decade from 1991 to the 2003 invasion). The outcome might well be a government-less stretch, similar to Somalia, which would the safe haven for terrorists to regroup and attack each other and the West (who would legitimately be responsible for that mess).
Only option #1 is a good one, and I don’t know many who think it is the most likely scenario. If I thought it would happen, I would personally pay to get every one of our troops home tomorrow. But I am hard pressed to see that happening. When I read leftist blogs, magazines and newspaper editorials (I used to read DailyKos, but I found insult and swearing to be simply a replacement for ideas) there are two words that come up in my mind – conspiratorial and Pollyanna. Yesterday you even had people saying this latest “plot” was a Bush-scheme to detract from Lamont’s victory (this isn’t just nutty, its delusional). Delusion and conspiracy tend to go away once your side regains power (which one day, maybe this year but at some point in the future, the Democrats will be in power again), but being Pollyanna is about worldview, and it doesn’t change.
When I read these people’s works I see people who seem to think they wont suffer if the Islamic-Fascists win. Do they think because they read The New Yorker and The Nation, hate Israel (the nation, I don’t mean to accuse them of being anti-Semitic), and are not “pro-American” that the terrorists and those who want to see a worldwide new umma of the Islamic peoples will like them? Lets be clear…they hate their pro-homosexual, open sexuality, secular chardonnay sipping ideas as much as they hate anyone. I have had interesting talks with moderate (even near secular) Muslims in the U.K. They are great people, people you would love to have as neighbors (again, lets say it in bold type THIS IS NOT A WAR AGAINST ISLAM). But more than once I have heard things along the lines of “you know, I saw an episode of your show Sex and the City (or Desperate Housewives), and while I find the fundamentalists sickeningly wrong, I understand their anger after watching that show.”
Look, a New Yorker subscription card will not win those like we saw in action on 9/11 and 7/7 over to you…it will only make them hate you all the more. Life is not lived that way. You love your life that way, and as one who understands that both there is no compulsion in religion and that freedom means sometimes people make choices you don’t like, I respect and honour your choices. These folks don’t…and for them the distribution of culture, with its sex and alcohol (which I must admit I enjoy in moderation along with a good pipe), is for them as offensive as the bombs we drop on Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not an accident that they hit New York, that the millennium bomber was heading for LAX, that they hit the London Tube. The voices of moderate Muslims who find it difficult to stick up for what they see as the hedonist West says something (it also explains, along with fear, why they have been slow or absent from critiquing and shouting down the voices of extremism).
In the end, this does mean that our lives are not going to be the free and easy lives we lived during the 1990s, when the Cold War was over and the forces of radicalism were still building up for the next war. The days of easy air travel are over (does anyone remember meeting your loved ones at the gate?). The days of only worrying about accidents on the subway are over. As a nation we are not going back to the 1950s culturally (and here I agree with the New Yorker crowd). But neither are we going to end up in a world where “live and let live.” To Mr. Lamont and his entourage, I ask, what will you do after Iraq? What will do you do after the next 9/11? I think these are very important questions, just as they are for the people (and I will be among them soon) waiting in long lines at DIA, dumping out their water bottles, and possibly riding all the way to England with nothing to do in the cabin but read airline magazines and watch bad movies, who say “I hate this, we should be stuck like this.”
What is next? I am a theologian, and a believer in the coming Kingdom of God. But I am no Pollyanna and I understand that even after the Israeli-Palestinian question is answered, there will always be the next complaint, and the next, and the next for the forces of radicalism to rally those who seek death and destruction for the perpetrators of perceived wrongs. What is next?
