the csa and terror

The rituals begin. The comments sections are flooded with “our prayers and thoughts are with you.” The leaders condemn the attack. They are against terrorist attacks. The Pope, too, is against terrorist attacks. Not a single leader thinks that London commuters should be blown to bits by a network winding back to a very alive and not very dead and certain not captured Osama Bin Laden.

These are the grooves we are stuck in. LI has an idea that the model for the half-security state – the state that leaves obvious gaps in its defenses while it goes about putting people’s library book checkout records under the magnifying glass – is Russia. Yeltsin, with Western encouragement, made himself briefly popular by playing the terrorist card and invading Chechnya. Putin has infinitely refined on the Yeltsin prototype. That the Bush culture is at once as tough as testosterone and as supine as a newly born lamb when it comes to demanding the taking down of the paramilitary networks from their supposedly tough leaders is a peculiar psychological complex that often accompanies junta politics. I especially love the rightwing meme that you can’t use “police” methods against terrorists. In point of fact, that is all you can use – the method of hunting down and destroying dispersed cellular groups that are armed and exist on a black money dole is the only method for destroying them. Because the perpetual war economy is about an elaborate welfare system for defense department engineers, it is understandable that this element thinks that terrorism is an excuse to get more of the gravy. If Boeing and Halliburtan don't make a profit on it, it can't be security. Cold war days are happy days. In the meantime, of course, there is also the solution of throwing bureaucracies and money at the security problem and making immigrants go through purposeless knots as though this was really sorting out the good, the bad and the ugly, instead of bottlenecking the good. However, one has to admire the emergence of a rich Homeland security welfare system that puts money into bungholes in Wyoming and Mississippi and takes money out of NYC, in the time honored, free riding fashion of Red State politics. Sweet.

In the week after Bush was re-elected, LI rethought a lot of what we used to assume about politics. The ascendancy of the Confederacy means, we think, that progressives must create enclaves and networks outside of D.C. – hence, they must invert their reflex support of centralizing power in the national government and work for the serious devolution of that power. But there is a fly even in this ointment: there is no alternative to endowing the central government with military power. This is a real problem: the D.C. Pentagon crowd, and their international clientele, are simply clueless. The evolution has been to the dumbest, which is why this is the Rumsfeld era in the ministries of war, technosmart and logistics dumb, full of strategic visions and tactical collapse. They cannot protect us, but they can certainly lie to us -- as the Bush and Blair governments did systematically in the run up to the war. They were the Code Orange Bobsey twins of misleading statements.

Meanwhile, the basic, security-making feature of government, which is equivalent to a membrane for a cell, is in hands that have proven themselves utterly unable to cope from day one.

It is childish to think men with bombs can be absolutely stopped. In fact, the benefit of an open society overwhelms the risk of terror. But a international order led by men who unwittingly open up new venues for terror, who brag about fighting wars that train terrorists, who intentionally create situations in which constituencies for terrorism are born, is rather like a hospital managed by doctors and nurses who refuse to obey the simple rules of hygiene. They become deadly to the rest of us. Our leaders have become very good at condemning the barbarity of killing commuters, which is a good thing. Because every policy they have pursued and every opportunity they have punted increases the possibility that we will see much more of it.