Can't Happen Here?

Can't Happen Here?

I've heard Bush II say several times in the last couple of weeks that we suffered the terrorist attack because we're the land of freedom. As a professional Bush doubter, I had my doubts about that.

Let me say right from the start that the attacks were wrong, there is never any good reason to murder innocents. Only the lowest of the low could even contemplate dealing with any grievance in this kind of way, and they deserve whatever punishment they are given.

But I can't shake the feeling that Bush's cheerleading and saber rattling is coming from the wrong place. I just don't believe the reasons why he's saying the attacks happened, for one. I think that's just a little too simplistic, and is really pretty much only good for selling flags and looking tough. I don't think we're going to really deal with the problem until we actually identify the problem.

One of the problems is that this problem is more complicated than most things we usually have to deal with. To me, one of the most obvious things we need to work out is why someone else would want to do something like what was done on September 11. I know I'm not the first one to say that, but I'm not hearing it asked enough for my satisfaction. When I heard the first reports, I tried to think of who might have a big enough ax to grind to do something like what was done. The list of candidates off the top of my head was fairly long. And that was trying to keep in mind the Oklahoma City bombing which was pulled off by Americans.

Since then, all the indications (the ones which we're told of; some reports I've read since have said there is credible evidence it was Osama bin Laden, but officials don't seem to want to say much about the specific evidence) are that we were the victim of foreign based terrorism. If it's not Laden, that still leaves a pretty long list of suspects. But why would someone want to target the U.S.? We need to be able to see ourselves the way the rest of the world does.

We are not seen by everybody the way we like to believe we are. We are not the "knights in white armor", the world's policeman, the shining beacon of freedom and democracy that some people want us to think we are. Not to much of the rest of the world, anyway. Our mainstream media has let us down tremendously in this regard, keeping us in the dark about developments in other countries. The networks have systematically closed foreign bureaus, and if we hear foreign news, it's in short, short sound bites that don't shed any light on what's really going on. We just don't know much about the rest of the world, and it looks like we still don't really care much. We weren't given much reason to until September 11th.

But what if these items and others had been covered more completely in our media? These are mentioned not as a justification for someone else wanting to commit terroristic attacks on the U.S., but to talk about some of the mentality out there in the rest of the world:

Earlier this year, it was reported that the United States had been voted off a United Nations Commission on human rights. Other countries were allowed to remain who were notorious human rights offenders, but the U.S. was voted off. With the number of votes against us, some of our allies had to have voted against us. We didn't bother to look at what we're doing or what we've done, we pouted instead and blew it off.

This administration has had a serious "my way or the highway" attitude to the rest of the world since day one. Granted, the bad feeling toward us existed before this administration, but refusing to honor or sign onto treaties, insisting on building a missile defense shield, in general telling the rest of the world to go to hell didn't make us lots of friends. That attitude may keep coming back to haunt us, because now we need the help of many of those countries to carry out the revenge we've pledged. Some reports say that some countries haven't pledged support as strongly as they might have, because they are concerned about the way the U.S, may go about seeking its retribution.

Our support for Israel is a sticking point for other Middle Eastern countries. When the attack happened, I was in the middle of writing an essay about the possible ways other countries would see the U.S. and Israel withdrawing from the World Conference Against Racism. There had been a proposed declaration with strong language denouncing Israel for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I won't get into whether any of the criticism is founded, but our support of Israel is a mighty sore point to Arab countries.

Our actions in Iraq during and since the Gulf War has created an incredible amount of tension in that country, and much hatred for the U.S. Our media has mostly ignored that our bombing and sanctions has cost more than a million and a half deaths, at least 500,000 of them children. Click here and here.

In 1986, the United States bombed two Libyan cities. We didn't get who we were after, especially Khadafi, but we did kill lots of innocent civilians, including Khadafi's little girl.

In 1998, the United States had bad "intelligence" information, and we used it to bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. We thought we were bombing a chemical weapons plant of Osama bin Laden's, but it was a factory that produced much of Sudan's antibiotics and vaccines.

When the Russians were forced out of Afghanistan, we left that country basically almost just a smoking hole in the ground. We didn't help them get back on their feet, and we thereby helped create the Taliban. A quote from The Village Voice: "...All of which is highly ironic since bin Laden is the progeny of a U.S. policy that sought to unite Muslims in a jihad against the Soviet Union, but over a decade eroded the moderate political wing and launched a wave of young radical fundamentalists. The Taliban, says the author Ahmed Rashid is the hip-hop generation of Islamic militants. They know nothing about nothing. Their aim is the destruction of the status quo, but they offer nothing to replace it with."

What about the ones I don't know about or don't have space to include here?

When you think of all that and include the people still being killed by land mines we've left in many countries, and the indictment by the War Crimes Tribunal for how we fought the Gulf War, it's almost a miracle anybody likes us. Then when you add religious fundamentalism to the mix...

I've heard Bush say something like we'll wipe terrorism off the planet. I just hope he's ready to take care of business at home. We've had terrorism for years, we just have short memories. Everyone remembers that the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, apparently by bin Laden.

But how about the homegrown terrorism?

The Unabomber was on a spree that went from the 70's way into the 90's.

The Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by American "patriots".

If abortion clinics being bombed and doctors being killed isn't terrorism, I don't know what is. It just hasn't been on as big a scale, and seems to have toned down lately. But fundamentalism never sleeps.

Our inner cities have been in a constant state of terror for years. Gun violence has caused residents of urban areas to be afraid to be outdoors after dark. The number of gun deaths in this country is shameful and unexcuseable, and the NRA is bound and determined to get more guns into more hands. Combat medics train in inner city emergency rooms.

There are hundreds of militia groups, and if we follow through on restricting freedoms to crack down on terrorism, these anti-government military "patriot" groups could be just as bad as any foreign terrorist if the government goes far enough.

So, whether or not terrorists have any good reason to target the United States, we mostly don't have any idea of why they think they do. That includes the domestic as well as the foreign ones. If we go about this the wrong way, if more innocent people are killed in the process of our getting even, we could be creating the next round of terrorist attacks. We haven't learned this yet. It's happened before-after the Libya bombing in 1986, Libyan terrorists blew up a U.S. airliner to retaliate. And when we hear Bush saying that we will go after any who've helped terrorists, body bag manufacturers must be licking their lips. There's the potential for lots more innocents to be killed before this is over.

We need to get over being surprised that the U.S. would be a target of terrorists. As Gary Hart and Warren Rudman stated about their commission's anti-terrorism report, it wasn't a matter of if, but when it would happen. There is never a good reason to kill innocent people, but apparently some people in this world believe they have good reason. Whatever the reason, it's not justified, and no doubt someone will always be out there trying to justify the wrong they do in the name of having been wronged. We need to stop giving crazies excuses.

Innocent people died for no good reason, but it's hard to believe the reason Bush gave for it.

isaac peterson