Remora

The response to 9/11 -- that Magna Carta for a heady dose imperialism with the riding whip, according to the Bushies -- is most interesting in the refusal to, well, see 9/11. How many articles begin just like this one, from John Lloyd, in March 7's Financial Times:

"Violence," says Joseph Nye, former US assistant secretary of defence, now dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, "is democratised. War has been privatised. The price of entering a communications network is very low. Terrorists can operate much more easily, do much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began." That technological advances have put mass destruction in the hands of small groups or individuals has become a familiar concern. The mobilisation of tanks and army units around London's main international airport at Heathrow recently was assumed to be against such a threat: several newspapers sketched a lone rocketeer peeking out, SAM missile-launcher on shoulder, from behind bushes on the flight path."

In fact, the technology for what the 19 hijackers did has been available for the last fifty years. The main difference, perhaps, between a 9/11 in 1955 and a 9/11 in 2001 was the size of the plane, and the size of the buildings it brought down. But Nye's comment about terrorists operating "much more easily, do [ing] much more damage, than at any time since terrorism began..." is driven more by a theory that requires this to be the case than what the case is. What we know about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is -- the leadership escaped on horseback. What we also know is that Afghanistan and Sudan were the headquarters -- not Silicon Valley. We know that that this terrorism wasn't state sponsored -- rather, states' paid off Al Qaeda, the way the Byzantine empire paid off wandering Bulgars. And, in the two years since the Al Qaeda operation, not once have I seen, in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine, the merest hint about what, exactly, the charity networks traversing the Middle East are all about. The assumption that Middle Eastern states and Islamic charities exist in the same kind of relation as the Red Cross and Switzerland has never been penetrated -- but from the little LI can gather about the subject, Islamic charity has a much richer history than that, is much more connected to the way people get by in, say, Somalia or Yemen or Egypt, and have gotten by since the Ottomans. Decimating those networks, as we are intent on doing, means replacing them with more state sponsored networks at a time when the revenue of the states is going more into paying past debts than into creating safety nets.

So why do we get people like Nye spouting obvious nonsense, and newspapers like the Financial Times publishing it? Because the idea that it ISN'T necessary to acquire a lot of technology to attack the U.S. -- that you can do as much damage with a passenger airliner as you can do with the most advanced bomb --hurts the self-image of the U.S. We have a vested interest -- we vest 300 billion dollars in it per annum -- that the more James Bondian our weaponry, the more overwhelming our successes. The idea, so far, that you have merely to strap a gasoline tank to you and set fire to it in a crowded bus is one that hasn't sunk into the official U.S. mindset -- so much so that no one draws the connection between the suicide bombings in Israel/Palestine and the potential for same in a U.S. occupied Iraq. Discussion is always getting detoured about how the natives, after we greet them lovingly with our 3 000 smart bombs, will be rushing to the Baghdad florists and candyshops to buy our GIs flowers and candies. It is almost enough to make the smart investor want to invest in some Iraqi Lady Godiva Chocolatier before the fete is over. But hey -- what if the natives are less than appreciative of our smart bombs? What if they grow restless being bossed about, for two years, by Donald Rumsfeld's old senile friend, Jay Garner, the apparent heir to the Iraq satrapy?

We are headed into a situation that is perfect for the kind of fighting that the Spanish did with Napoleon's troops, two hundred years ago -- stringing out 60 to 100 thousand U.S. soldiers over a territory bigger than Yugoslavia, and expecting them to stay there for two years.

Amazing. There's a very nicely turned phrase about a man who overshoots his mark in P.G. Wodehouse's Heavy Weather, where Wodehouse comments that he had the look that Samson must have had when he heard the pillars crack. LI definitely thinks we are heading for a Samson moment.