4. May 2011 by admin.

Last Sunday, so the news reports tell us, a team of Navy Seals visited Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed him.  He was then buried at sea.

Yeah, right.

That, indeed, was my reaction.  My trust in government has eroded to the point where I’m reluctant to take such news seriously.  Osama bin Laden was the bogeyman of the last decade: Obama must be pretty desperate in the polls to tell us that he was gone.

But as more detailed reports came out yesterday, I’m willing to believe… just barely.  And I’m encouraged that our President has learned that being nice doesn’t always work: sometimes you have to use force.

Now, can we repeal the Patriot Act, disband the TSA, and peel those stupid flag decals off our subway trains?

Yeah, right….

Posted in Terrorism, Barack Obama | No Comments »

29. December 2009 by admin.

Last Friday, a young man from Nigeria attempted to set off a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam shortly before it was due to arrive in Detroit.  The effort failed because the explosive didn’t go off as intended: it just lit on fire, and the man was tackled at that point by another passenger.

It wasn’t as if this guy was a total surprise: he was on a terrorist watch list, and his father, a wealthy banker in Nigeria, contacted the American embassy to warn us about him.  But somehow we didn’t recognize the problem in time, didn’t yank his visa, and didn’t stop him from boarding the flight.

The bomb itself was 50 grams of explosive powder packed into a condom and sewn into his underwear (this last resulting in a slew of really silly headlines: ‘Fruit of the Loon;’ ‘Pants on Fire’).  There was nothing to show on a metal detector, and one would have to do a very thorough pat-down to find the package (insert appropriate off-color remark here).

The response from our leadership has been singularly inept: Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, first asserted that ‘the system worked’ until confronted by overwhelming evidence that it hadn’t.  And Our Fearless Leader took a few minutes out of his Hawaii vacation on Monday to tell us what we already knew, because, after all, the President should say something about such an event.

There is talk about using full-body scanners to detect packages that one might carry on one’s person.  They’re effective, but they enable the viewer to look at the scanned person… naked.   I guess that’s OK, just as long as I can’t hear them snicker.

I’ll take someone in a remote location looking at me naked and snickering over some of the rules that came out after the incident.  For the last hour of a flight, passengers are to sit in their seats and do nothing.  No laptops, or blankets, or pillows, or even a paperback novel.  And no hints as to where the plane might be: the video with the map is out, as well as announcements from the pilot.  (Meanwhile, the terrorist can still look out the window!)

I understand that some of these rules may have been rescinded, so perhaps things are a little saner now.  And I’ll admit that I don’t know what the proper response to this event should be.  But adding yet another layer of aviation-security theater does not reassure me.

At least I don’t have any business trips for the next few months….

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Terrorism, Barack Obama | No Comments »

12. September 2009 by admin.

Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center.  The site is still basically a hole in the ground, with construction proceeding at a glacial pace.

So how do we commemorate a day in which we got our ass whipped because we were unprepared?

It would seem appropriate to spend a few moments in quiet contemplation about the events of that day, those who died, the nature of our enemy, and the challenge that they represent.  But that’s not what what’s happening.

For two hours yesterday morning, they recited the names of those who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers, as they have done every 11 September since 2001.  That’s entirely appropriate.

But what is getting lost is how they died, and what we should do besides stopping the city for two hours to remember them.  The danger is still out there, biding its time, contemplating the next opportunity to strike.

It’s been contemplated to include an exhibit on the terrorist hijackers at the World Trade Center memorial.  Of course, we should: not to honor them, but to remind ourselves of the nature of our enemy, and to rededicate ourselves to the battles we face.  When we ultimately win the war against the terrorists, the exhibit can reasonably be turned into something else, as it will have served its purpose.

But I’m in the minority here: most have reacted with horror to the thought of memorializing the hijackers alongside their victims.   So how did the victims die?  Lightning strikes?  An earthquake?  Catastrophic elevator implosions?  Do we want to forget the people who brought about the destruction of 11 September–and are gathering their forces to do it again–even as we spend billions sending our young people off to war?

Or is it that in our politically correct culture, we can’t bring ourselves to identify a group of people as ‘the enemy’?

This brings us to the alternate, post-Bush, commemoration of 11 September: the ‘national day of service’ proposed by President Obama.  It’s a charming thought, and good things can get done, but it doesn’t address what happened that day and the danger that it still represents.

We don’t remember 7 December, ‘a date that will live in infamy,’ very much anymore.  But its time had passed: we fought the Japanese, we won, and now, two generations or so later, they are important allies.  Hopefully, the same will one day happen to 11 September.

But not yet.

Posted in World Trade Center, Things Falling Apart, Terrorism | No Comments »

15. September 2008 by admin.

Seven years ago last Thursday, Islamic terrorists in hijacked jetliners destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and brought the War on Terror upon us.  And so we remember the dead, pray for the living, and moan about the crappy replacements the politicians are serving up to replace the majestic Twin Towers and the glacial pace of their progress.

And then what?

We’re supposed to be intelligent: when some problem befalls us, we’re supposed to study it, learn from it, and do better in the future.

An article of faith among conservatives seems to be that we were the innocent victims of the 11 September attacks.  Obama, and the Democrats in general, are full of self-hatred when they declare that we brought it on ourselves.

As a gross approximation, it’s probably accurate to say that we were innocent victims that fateful day.  But the fact is that we, the United States, built Osama bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and we built Saddam Hussein to fight the Iranians.   While we were indeed victims, we were not quite as innocent as we’d like to imagine.

And since we’re not that innocent, we should have been more careful.  The signs were there that something was afoot: the President was briefed a month earlier that bin Laden was potentially preparing to attack us.  Now the report didn’t say that he would have his henchmen hijack airplanes on 11 September and fly them into things, but a word to the wise is sufficient.

But then again, one could plausibly believe that our leadership wanted the attacks of 11 September to take place, for their own political ends.  But in that case, in the long run, the responsibility for addressing this abuse of power lies not with our leadership, but with ourselves: we still have a representative government, and we still have the right to vote.

And it certainly seems possible that our leadership wanted the terrorist attacks to happen as a pretext not only for war, but also for curtailing our civil rights and for torture.  Yes, it’s a new kind of war and a new kind of enemy.  But I’d like to believe that we’re better than such things.

But maybe we’re not.

And maybe that’s what I have to learn.

Posted in World Trade Center, Life Goes On, Terrorism | No Comments »

17. May 2008 by admin.

On Thursday, President Bush addressed the Knesset in Jerusalem, and made the following remarks…

****

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

****

Well, maybe.

The remarks were taken in the US as an ‘outrage,’ and a slap in the face to Barack Obama, who has indicated that he would be willing to talk with our adversaries.  But to talk to our enemies–to at least initiate a conversation–is not appeasement.  That’s when you give your enemy something that he wants so that, hopefully, he’ll go away and not bother you again.

Years ago, we considered communism as radical, if not necessarily terrorist.  Yet we talked with the Russians and the Chinese, and despite their far greater power to destroy us than the current threat, we were able to keep the world in one piece.

It doesn’t hurt, other than from the standpoint of national pride, of which we have more than enough, to try to talk to our enemies, recognizing, however, that they may not want to talk to us.  One of the essential reasons that our enemies are our enemies is that they believe that their cause is right, and Bush is correct in noting that it’s really unlikely that “some ingenious argument will persuade them that they have been wrong all along.”

On the other hand, if Bush is looking to lecture someone about the futility of negotiating with terrorists, he needed only to look around him in the Knesset, or in a mirror.

For decades, Israel has been engaged in one ‘peace process’ or another in which it concedes something of value  to its enemies (who are sworn to Israel’s destruction) in exchange for peace, but the peace never materializes.  (Can someone explain to me how this differs from appeasement?)

The Palestinians, with at least the tacit consent of their government, launch rockets into Israel, and Israel, for its part, keeps a stiff upper lip about the destruction they cause.  On the other hand, if Israel exercises its right of retaliation, they are quickly brought to heel by world opinion for having created a ‘humanitarian crisis.’

For his part, after his trip to Israel, Our Fearless Leader went to Riyadh, where he tried to persuade the Saudis  to open the spigots and produce more oil.  The Saudis said no.  Bush made a similar trip earlier this year, complaining about how the high price of oil was affecting the American economy, with the same result.

On the one hand, the Saudis probably see themselves as businessmen, facing one of the basic problems of any business: establishing the most satisfactory price for their product.  But then why are we trying to bend over backwards to be their friends?  (Oh, that’s right: we do that anyway: at all levels of government, we’re more than happy to help big businesses because they will purportedly help the economy.)

On the other hand, the Saudi government does things to its people that would result in armed revolution if anyone tried them here.  And Saudi Arabia is the homeland of most of the 11 September hijackers.

So are they really our friends?

I don’t know, but I guess we have to keep up the illusion that they are, because otherwise they won’t sell us oil, and then we’ll all starve.

Posted in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Terrorism, George Bush (43), Barack Obama | No Comments »