In Russia, as we all now know, Chechen terrorists attacked not a plane this time, not a subway, not an office building, but a school full of children. And now they have killed hundreds of them, as well as their parents and teachers.
For almost five years, Chechyna has been brutalized by the Russians, who have been accused of numerous war crimes and atrocities. (For some details, see here and here and here.) The Chechen response has been repeated terror assaults on the Russian homeland. This latest, however, is far and away the most appalling. For now they have chosen to target not just the innocent, but the most innocent, the most trusting, the most defenseless of all.
It is so frightful as to take one's breath away.
But will this be what's in store for the United States next? Will this inspire copycats? That is surely the question that has crossed many minds in America in the last 72 hours.
Right-wing morons, who are never in short supply, quip, "This is what we're dealing with, for those who have forgotten," as though what happened in Russia has anything to do with America's need to defend against fundamentalist zealots--would that the latter had only concrete grievances with the United States! (Of course, thanks to Bush, they now have more concrete ones.) As another blogger usefully puts it: "Whatever links al Qaeda and Chechnya may have, they're certainly secondary; bin Laden isn't directing these assaults from his cave. Chechens do not seek to bring about a world Islamic state, and don't care about the Middle East; all they're trying to do is leave the Soviet Union, which they haven't been allowed to do for 13 years. Their tactics are reprehensible -- and Russia's response has often been just as brutal -- but that is what they want."
(As a curious sidenote: do see the ordinarily mild Mr. Yglesias's reply to Instaignorance's usual sliminess on this topic.)
But the Bush Administration, like the moron blogger noted above, has already assimilated this incident to its current re-election campaign, as further proof of why we need four more years of the fake tough guy, Bush. Which does suggest another question: has George W. Bush made us "safer" from this kind of brutality?
I am not surprised that legions of the ignorant, the stupid, and the subliterate believe that he has; I am more puzzled that a handful of people with some education, some capacity to read and think, believe that.
George W. Bush has inflamed the world, and especially the Islamic world, through his criminal invasion of Iraq. It is the primary reason al-Qaeda has endorsed his bid for re-election. And it led the experts at that bastion of radical dissent, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to speak "unanimous[ly] in giving warning that the War on Terror was doing more to recruit terrorists than to defeat them."
George W. Bush has squandered some two hundred billion dollars on the criminal invasion of Iraq, money that might have been spent on securing ports and borders, training and staffing airport and airline security, producing vaccines, controlling nuclear materials, and on and on.
George W. Bush has inspired a global rush to acquire nuclear weapons--from the North Koreans to the Iranians to the countries we have yet to hear about--as the only defense against the American juggernaut. The North Korean weapons purportedly can reach California.
George W. Bush has done nothing to stop the Israeli brutalization of Palestinian men, women, and children, the single most powerful provocation to the Islamic world and an injustice in its own right.
George W. Bush has shattered alliances with nations, like France, that have real armies, real intelligence services, and real experience battling terrorists, all assets in a serious war against religious fanatics with bloodlust for Westerners, and Americans in particular. (Imagine how the mindless American derision of the "wimpy" French must look to those who remember the war in Algeria?)
George W. Bush has appointed stupid, foolish, ill-prepared or strange men--sometimes all four at once--to critical posts charged with protecting Americans, from the Attorney General to the Director of Homeland Security to the Acting Director of the C.I.A. The President himself, who has no real experience, and who has made a mess of every professional opportunity he had in his life, inspires no confidence, and his choices are of a piece with his lack of experience and judgment. (George W. Bush, remember, is the man whom the leader of the Smear Boat Veterans, Houston attorney John O'Neill, called an "empty suit"!) Is there anyone with a brain in his head who, given a choice, would pick a prankish, spoiled frat boy, who has never had a real job, to protect his family?
On every count, except restraining Israel, there is reason to think John Kerry would do better; it is hard to imagine anyone could do worse, of course.
So I ask myself: why do some educated individuals, friends of mine even, think that they will be "safer" with Bush? What is the evidence? What has George W. Bush done to lessen the odds that barbaric horrors like those in Russia will not be visited upon the United States? Has he done anything to counterbalance the catastrophically stupid and incompetent actions of his Presidency?
I can think of only two bits of evidence that someone rational might adduce on Bush's behalf.
First, by invading Afghanistan and toppling the Taliban, he disrupted al-Qaeda's primary sponsor. Put aside both the morality of that war (I'll assume, controversially around here, that innocent Afghanis have the same moral claims on life and well-being as do innocent workers in the World Trade Center) and the fact that a Democratic Administration would have done the same thing. Has that invasion made us safer? Certainly reports from those actually living in Afghanistan bear little relation to the fantasy talk in the United States about the "liberation" of the Afghan people (perhaps the people of Kabul were liberated--perhaps). And that fact certainly bears on the question of how the invasion of Aghanistan affects the security of America; herewith someone who actually knows something (and who supported the assault on Afghanistan):
"Instead of rebuilding and stabilizing Afghanistan, as he promised, he put almost nothing into reconstruction for that country. Then he let the poppy growing industry come back with a vengeance. Afghanistan's GNP is $5 billion a year. At least $2 billion of that is poppies, and Afghanistan has become the top source for heroin in Europe. With al-Qaeda and the Taliban still powerful in the country or its borderlands, Afghanistan is on the way to becoming a terrorist's dream-- a place worse than Colombia from which narco-terrorism can be funded and launched. This looming disaster will certainly blow back on the American homeland. Yet Bush is doing nothing to avert it."
This analysis is not, to my knowledge, contradicted by any expert analysis in this country or elsewhere; only in the popular media is the "big lie" that Afghanistan was liberated and we are now safer repeated ad nauseam.
So a rational person could not adduce Afghanistan as evidence that we'll be safer thanks to Bush; indeed, it appears to belong in the catalogue of stupidities that make us less safe.
Second, Bush and his Administration have shown themselves quite willing to violate civil liberties and rule-of-law values in the interest of "security." Perhaps these violations will make us safer, there is no evidence available that permits an assessment. And perhaps a Bush Administration is more likely to take such steps than a Kerry Administration (though anyone who can recall Democratic Attorney General Robert Kennedy's assaults on civil liberties, political dissent, and the rule of law might have their "confidence" restored in the capacity of Democratic Administrations to carry out police-state tactics). Civil liberties and the rule of law are too important (too central to what makes a democratic society a worthwhile place to live), and the "benefits" in terms of safety too speculative, for me to take this as a reason to prefer Bush on security issues--especially in light of the very tangible failures noted above.
But if this is at the root of why some who are not ignorant favor Bush on security issues, it would be nice if they would say so clearly and publically. At least this way we would know what the debate is about, namely, our willingness to become more like a police state on the off-chance that this will reduce the odds that we'll be intentionally killed by foreigners. (It might be noted in this context, of course, that Russia today is much closer to a police state than the United States, and it has done them no good at all in terms of safety.)
UPDATE: Geoff Pynn, a philosophy graduate student at Yale, writes:
"It's worth noting a third reason often offered to support the claim that Bush has made America safer: he has 'taken the fight to the enemy'. This was the message Tommy Franks ('I choose to fight them over there!') delivered at the RNC; it's a favorite trope of right-wing bloggers. I think the reasoning is supposed to be something like this.
"First, al Qaeda and its ilk are concentrated on fighting the American occupation of Iraq, thereby diverting resources away from direct attacks on the US mainland. Second, it's more effective to try actively to destroy terrorist networks where they are based rather than to attempt to safeguard US territory from their agents by other means.
"Putting aside the morally repugnant consequences of this strategy for the otherwise innocent inhabitants of the places where the enemy happens to be located (if an al Qaeda cell were located in Oswego, would the state be morally justified in destroying Oswego in the process of 'engaging' the enemy there?), neither reason is sufficient to justify the Bush wars (or the claim that they have 'made us safer') if those wars do more to strengthen fundamentalist terror networks than to weaken them. There is ample reason to believe that the result of the Bush wars is just that, as you point out."
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