Let Loose the Dogs of War
And what ugly dogs they be. In my daily commute up to San Francisco, I've had the opportunity to start listening to NPR in the daytime again, a ritual that used to be a large part of my workday back in the Electro-Pub days. It was something we started doing during the what will probably now be called the first Gulf War, listening to KQED from 9am to around 3 when the news had pretty much been reported for the day. Talk of the Nation was born during that time, and is still one of the best call-in discussion shows around—if you've ever despaired of balance in talk radio, it will restore your faith somewhat.
In any case, I'm having an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu these days, what with a Bush in the White House about to launch an attack on Iraq and Colin Powell giving briefings. I want to believe that that the intelligence we have is grave enough to justify the belligerence of the Bush Administration, but just like 11 years ago, I have my doubts. And while war is an immediate concern, my greater worry is with the erosion of civil liberty here at home. The events of 9/11 have given Attorney General Ashcroft and the FBI the perfect opportunity to gather the kind of information they've always wanted about any group they consider dissident (read: opposed to any part of the Bush agenda). In a country that's already lived through the FBI of Hoover, Cointelpro, and the bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, that should be cause for much greater alarm than is currently present.
The discussion has already been framed in such off-center terms that I wonder if we will ever get back to a sense of our true rights under the Constitution. The world is a frightening place, it's true, and while that certainly requires vigilance, the concept of Total Information Awareness about the American citizenry (and managed by a convicted felon, no less) is more alarming to me. The truth is that America has never been as safe as we believed from the kind of terrorist violence that has plagued many other parts of the world.
To say that the possibility of something like 9/11 was inconceivable requires a high level of naiveté about how we are viewed in many parts of the world, and that in no way implies that we deserved the attack. Regardless of how you may view American foreign policy, the fact of the matter is that we are seen as an enemy by many people, and that some of those people might be sufficiently angry to take drastic action can hardly be surprising. We assume safety based on our economic and military strength, but all of the traditional measures of strength and deterrence are useless in the face of a committed group of people who are willing to destroy themselves in service of a cause. And as our own homegrown terrorists of the McVeigh ilk have proven, the group and the means can be very small and still effect large-scale destruction. No amount of data mining, intelligence, and spying on the American populace can save us from something as simple as a Ryder truck full of explosives, and we are fools to give away the rights that are at the heart of the American ideal in search of a false sense of protection.
