Terrorism
In comments to my Pinochet post, Traveller asks If only you could get that angry about the Muslim terrorists….
As I’ve said before, comments are great, and this is a good one. I’d like to build on my response.
My anger toward Pinochet is an anger should be shared by everyone from right to left: the Pinochet government was installed by a CIA coup that toppled the duly elected Allende government. Pinochet tortured and murdered thousands of people, waging a dirty war against his own citizens. Pregnant women politically opposed to the regime were disappeared, but not before giving birth in government hospitals, their children distributed to party loyalists. Pinochet’s government would fly their victims out over the Paacific Ocean and throw the bodies out like so much trash. That my government bought and paid for Mr. Pinochet is unacceptable to me: it is a stain on our nation’s history. It is as unacceptable as our funding the Contras, who killed nuns and children in Nicaragua and El Salvador. All of this was done on my dime (or rather, my parents’ dime). Terrorism, in other words.
So I have to question the assumption that I’m not angry about terrorists, Islamist or otherwise, because it’s a false assumption. I hold all fundamentalists in contempt: I believe they are a threat to everyone’s freedom, whether those fundamentalists are Islamists or Christians. And the same goes for Communists too, those suckers who claim that everything would have worked out fine except for that damned Joe Stalin.
But it’s not all black and white in my mind: after all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter (what to make of the Minutemen, who fought off the British by hiding in ambush; or the scuttling of the Gaspee?).
I do not believe that all of fighters in Iraq, for example, can be described as “terrorists”. Many of them are probably better called “resistance fighters.” The fact that they are Muslim is actually secondary to the fact that they are Iraqis fighting to end occupation. This is not to deny that many are Islamists as well, such as al Qaeda in Iraq, who are fighting for an Islamic state. But what of the puppet Shi’a government of Maliki? Not only is Maliki’s government forging ever closer ties to Iran, Maliki himself is a member of the Dawa Party, known for blowing up the American Embassy in Kuwait. Terrorist? Ally? It’s not so clear…
I recently saw a bumper sticker that read “Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease”. While I try not to base my political philosophy on catchphrases, this one strikes me as broadly correct. Happy, healthy, well-fed people with a stake in society and a voice in their government don’t simply wake up and randomly say “Today I will blow up myself and a building.” You really have to get the people’s back against the wall before they go to that extreme. So in the case of the Islamic terrorists, why do they want to do that? It’s not simply a case of “they’re jealous of our freedoms”: paraphrasing from Doug Stanhope, global geopolitics isn’t an episode of Jerry Springer, with two lowest common denominators arguing back and forth about who stole whose baby daddy. If anything, they WANT our freedoms for themselves.
I’m not going to launch into a “Blame America first” diatribe, but I certainly harbor no feelings of American Exceptionalism. People forget that “my country, right or wrong” is only the first half of the quote, ending with “if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”
Then there’s the fact that I’m simply not scared of the Islamic terrorists: no one can make me be scared of some guys who are so behind the times they release videotapes of their messages to the Great Satan. We defeated the Nazis AND the Japanese at the same time. We managed to bring down the Soviet Union, through the power of ideas and material wealth. I’m just not scared of guys in caves.
[By the way, it's worth noting that Saddam Hussein hated the Islamists as much as we do: that's why we backed him in the 1980s. he was a brutal dictator, but a strong bulwark against SCIRI and Khomeini's revolution in Iran. That's why it was so funny to hear Bush employ "liberating the Shi'ites" as rationale number 5,000 for the Iraq War: we backed Saddam specifically to keept he Shi'ites down! For that matter, who was it that funded and armed the mujahedin that are now fighting us in Afghanistan? But I digress...]
One thing that does concern me is how we’re dealing with the terrorists, and those we suspect of terrorism. If reports are to be believed, and bush has confirmed them himself, we are operating a series of secret prisons scattered around the world. It’s estimated that as many as 35,000 may be imprisoned indefinitely on suspicions of terrorist activities, with thousands of innocent people imprisoned with substantially fewer truly bad actors.
If these people are undergoing the interrogation procedures Okayed by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (aka “torture”), is there any doubt that upon release to their countries of origin (should that ever occur), in which the culture of revenge is a powerful motiviating force, these people are going to take up arms to get revenge on their tormenters?
And these policies, which are without doubt not only creating more people who wanted to kill us but inspiring those who bore us no ill will to take up arms, are happening on our dime.
I happen to know a few Muslims (it’s hard not to when you live in a place like Philadelphia), and none of them bears any ill will to me or their neighbors. Most of the immigrant Muslims I know are happy to live here, not only because they can worship as they please, but because they can make a decent living here for themselves and their families. None of the Muslims I know care that I am an atheist (that’s more than I can say for a number of Christians).
So yes, I despise terrorists and others that kill innocent people. However, I do not believe that the way we are addressing the problem is constructive, by suspending habeas corpus, illegally wiretapping people’s phones without a warrant, invading and occupying countries that never attacked us. Not only are these policies not constructive, in the case of the war, they are actually weakening us politically AND militarily (and by the way, Steve Gilliard’s recent posts on the possibility of a fighting retreat are well worth reading).
In the end, we will have to talk. That’s how it always ends up.
5 Responses to “Terrorism”
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December 6th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Awesome Brendan. It’s like Bill O’Reilly asking David Letterman:
O’Reilly: But they don’t want to hear about the bad world that we live in. It’s an evil world that we live in. Let me ask you something. And this is a serious question. Do you want the United Sates to win in Iraq?
Letterman: Well, you know in the beginning, here is my position in the beginning and I, I think I - I sort of felt the way everybody did, we felt like we wanted to do something, because something terrible had been done to us. We did not understand exactly why, all we knew was something terrible, something heinous, something obscene had been done to us. So while it didn’t necessarily make sense to go into Iraq as it did perhaps to go into Afghanistan, I like most everybody else felt like yes, we needed to do something. And as the weeks turned into months, years and one death became a dozen deaths and hundred deaths and a thousand deaths - then we began to realize you know what? Maybe we’re causing more trouble over there than the whole effort has been worth.
O’Reilly: Possible, but do you right now? Do you want the Untied States to win in Iraq?
Letterman: First of all, I don’t -
O’Reilly: It’s an easy question, If you don’t want the United States to win -
Letterman: It’s not easy for me because I’m thoughtful.
These people think all questions are simple yes /no black and white style questions that have clearly defined answers and that thinking about the question is wrong, as you’re clearly trying to evade the question by describing exactly how you feel about it, what you agree on and what you don’t.
For that matter, what is winning in Iraq at this stage of the game? What ever was winning in Iraq?
December 6th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
And again, I’d like to add that it’s not that I don’t think terrorism is a problem: it certainly is a problem. Just ask the British.
In fact, DEFINITELY ask the British how they dealt with the IRA, and their refusal to be cowed in the face of bombings and attacks (not that I support the British role in Ireland, emphatically not).
Notice that when the IRA was finally brought into the political process, the level of violence decreased substantially. And look at the Israel palestine conflict: when it looked like Rabin and Arafat had a deal, and when the US could act as an honest broker, violence decreased. Unfortunately, Bush’s actions have precluded that role for a long time.
I’d also like to say that while traveler and I disagree on a lot, I’m glad he asked the question.
And I STILL don’t know why we’re in Iraq anyway.
December 6th, 2006 at 9:46 pm
Weapons of mass deception….
December 7th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
First things first:
The constitution protects us all against you and others who would tell us which religions are acceptable and which are not. Your hatred of fundamentalists is not constitutionally acceptable.
When a group promotes bombings and mass murder in the name of religion, then you have a point. When fundamentalist Christian groups start strapping bombs onto their children for suicide missions and hijacking airplanes to use as missles against innocent civilians, then, I too will hate them and call for their destruction.
December 7th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
My hatred of fundamentalists is totally constitutionally acceptable. Using the government to stop fundalmentalists from worshipping as they pleaseis not. I don’t propose that. Nor do I call for their destruction: I just reread my post and I don’t say that ANYWHERE. I’m an American: I don’t care how people worship or what they believe, and I expect the saem in return.
“When a group promotes bombings and mass murder in the name of religion, then you have a point.” Eric Rudolph, for example? Or is he OK, because he didn’t use an airplane as a missile?
Or this guy?
I’ll have a bit more to say on terrorism later today: the news this AM was fascinating.