Saturday, January 27, 2007

The Peaceful 1990s

I remember when I was a kid and my mother was trying to discourage me from getting into fights with bullies at school. She used to tell me that it took two to fight. Wise as my mother was, I recognized this as a well-meaning untruth when I was a kid, and I’ve seen it played out and proven to be false, countless times since. If you believe my mother’s advice, try this little experiment. Tell someone who hates you to start beating the crap out of you, and don’t fight back. If I’m wrong, you won’t get hurt and you certainly won’t get killed. Let me know how this works out for you. I’ll wait.

OK, I’ve waited long enough. If you can still read this, you have declined the challenge and have accepted the premise that a fight can take place even when only one person is determined to fight. The only questions are “Do you recognize when a fight is upon you?” and “Are you going to fight back?”

I’m a little sick of hearing about the peace we had during the Clinton years. I don’t mind the repetition, but I do mind the lie. Let me make it clear that my intention is not to bash President Clinton. That’s just too easy, lots of people do it, many of his predecessors, advisors, and contemporaries share whatever blame there is to share, and it doesn’t get anywhere near the heart of the problem. The problem is that we, the American people, drove the behavior in many ways.

This is how peaceful the Clinton years were:

  • 1993 – New York, World Trade Center bombing by Al Qaeda kills 6 and injures over 1,000 – I could be wrong, but this sounds like an act of war to me.
  • 1995 – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Car bomb kills 5 U.S. military - I could be wrong, but this sounds like an act of war to me.
  • 1996 – Dhahran, Saudi Arabia – Truck bomb exploded by Hezbollah near the Khobar Towers military complex kills 19 U.S. military and injures hundreds - I could be wrong, but this sounds like an act of war to me.
  • 1998 – Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania – Truck bombs exploded by Al Qaeda near 2 U.S. embassies, kill over 200 and injure about 4,500 - I could be wrong, but this sounds like an act of war to me.
  • 2000 – US Cole bombing by Al Qaeda, kills 17 U.S. sailors - I could be wrong, but this sounds like an act of war to me.
  • The Time In-Between attacks – planning and preparation for the bombings by Al Qaeda and Hezbollah - I could be wrong, but this sounds like an act of war to me.

So much for the “peaceful” Clinton years.

Make no mistake. Al Qaeda and Hezbollah were at war with the Unites States through the 1990s – the “peaceful” Clinton years. Delude yourself at your own peril. I challenge you to dispute these standards of war. Unless you successfully met the challenge in the first paragraph of this article five times (the number of terror attacks during the “peaceful” Clinton years), you can’t. Now using these standards, I challenge you to find a time in human history that was provably peaceful, because if I am wrong, I want to know. I don’t believe you can.

We should explore some of the institutional causes of missing these signals – causes like term limits, polls, denial, and our false sense of our own goodness – but not today. Incidentally, I believe my mother would have been bombing Al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the 1995 time frame. Just because she tried to keep ME out of trouble didn’t mean SHE would take that crap.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

This is dedicated to...

This space will be dedicated, for the most part, to the proposition that those at the top are either clueless or indifferent to those at the bottom. I know this isn't a particularly new concept, but the proof, documentation, and application of it may be, in the sense that some of the underlying assumptions by which we live are flawed. If this proof fails, so be it; the state of knowledge will still have been advanced. If it succeeds, maybe we will be one small step closer to saving ourselves, our children, their children, and so on. For example, consider the following:
  • We are at war. Get used to it.
  • We are going to be at war for the remainder of our lives. Prepare for it.
  • We have been at war since the beginning of human history. Accept it.
There have been periods that most people recognize as periods of peace - the 1990s, for example. There have not. There have been relatively quiet periods when preparations for war were taking place beneath the radar. More to come on the many aspects of this as time goes on.