The Attempted Airline Bombing – America’s Nutcake Reaction
Guess how many people have flown since the 9/11 attacks:
More than 5 billion!
So one person claiming connections to Al-Qaida gets on a plane with some sort of “device”, and the US government goes beserk:
- Obama calls it totally “unacceptable” and “demands answers” from his counterterrorism security team;
- Congressional committees are scheduling hearings; and
- Dick Cheney criticizes Obama for projecting weakness.
I ask you: how safe to planes have to be? For me, one terrorist in every 5 billion people that gets on planes is about as safe as we will ever be able to make planes. I fly a lot by plane. I sense what people from other countries think of all the security inspections they have to go through because terrorists want to kill Americans?
I know, there was some mishandling of security information on the terrorist. But one terrorist per 5 billion passengers is about as good as it can ever get.
The reaction is interesting for other reasons. It took the headlines away from several another events:
- last Thursday, 14 people died in a suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan;
- on Wednesday, 25 people dies and 100 were wounded in a suicide bombing attack in Iraq.
The US government’s frenetic efforts to tighten security on planes even further draws attention away from the primary issue: a significant portion of the Middle East population hates Americans. And until the US government tries to do something to reduce this hatred, bombings will continue.
Why does the Middle East hate the US?
- How about the fact that we are engaged in two hopeless ground wars in Middle East countries? Why are they hopeless? Does anyone really believe that committing troops and equipment for two more years in Afghanistan and Iraq will make things “better”? Does anyone think that propping up a corrupt Afghanistan government that controls less than half the country will weaken Al-Qaida?
- The Middle East also hates the US because of its unbalanced support for Israel. The hatred could be subdued if the US focused all of its influence and power on getting a two state Israeli – Palestinian solution.
We now learn that Al-Qaida is in Yemen. Does that mean that once the US gets through the fruitless effort to tighten up airplane security, it will launch a third ground war in the Middle East to wipe out Al-Qaida in Yemen?
America should really bring back the military draft. At least then, the parents of the solders would take a hard look at the justifications for where the government was sending their children to fight.
3 Comments
Charles V 1 Jan, 2010
For better or worse human nature’s response to just about everything is emotional, not rational. Thus when met with anger, rather than attempt resolution, we respond with anger and fault others. Always has been, probably always will be. Sad.
As you suggest, the rational solution to our troubles with those who hate us would be to discover why and resolve the discord. Instead, we blame them for being angry and we fight back, try to put up walls, increase airport “security”, etc., etc.. Hasn’t ever worked. But we keep trying. Despite our exponentially increasing knowledge, we remain pretty dumb.
Do our leaders cynically exploit our responses? Perhaps. But that would require rational thought; more likely they are reacting just like their followers.
And so: Happy new year!
Elliott 1 Jan, 2010
The absurdly low chances of being on a plane with a terrorist reminds me of a Russian joke. During WWII, Moscow was regularly hit by German bombers. Radar would pick up the incoming bombers and alarms would ring for people to enter the underground bomb shelters. A professor of statistics never went into the shelters. When asked why, he always said “2,100,076 people and one elephant live in Moscow. Consequently, the chances of any Moscow resident being injured by a bomb are extremely low.” But all of a sudden, the professor started showing up in the bombing shelters. When asked why, he said: “They got the elephant.”
Richard Rust 2 Jan, 2010
Elliott:
I agree with your dispassionate and logical point of view, however that and two subway tokens will get us from Harvard Square to Park Street station. Being dispassionate and logical hasn’t done much for President Obama in his first year in office.
Sadly, the dispassionate and logical need not apply for attention in the “lamestream” media. The reality of past policy and current actions by the U.S. is not up for discussion among either the general public or the commentariat’s bloviating pundits.
Today, the U.S. political arena is populated by a disloyal opposition Republican Party whose only hope of avoiding being relegated to the scrap heap of history is to bring down Obama and Democrats who cower like a deer in the headlights whenever the issue of terror comes up.
Only a small sliver of the press still makes any effort to inform the public. While the major media outlets, fed by the blogosphere, prefers to inflame public opinion.
According to many of the Obama’s critics, he is a linguistic appeaser – the Neville Chamberlin of presidential rhetoric. They argue that he puts the world at increased risk, whenever he dispassionately discusses the threat from extremists and logically explains the official rationale for the U.S. military and security plans and details the manpower and trillion dollar investments aimed at the terror thereat.
The pundits – both right and left – when they say Obama is way too cerebral, although they don’t see the connection, imply that the U.S requires a Commander-In-Chief, who can channel the passions of Chavez or Castro or maybe Ahmadinejad when they address national security. Maybe, if he could rant a little more, al Qaeda might back off. Maybe if he took off his shoe and banged the podium when he discusses the Islamic threat to life as we know it or tells our enemies we will get them “dead or alive” – that would end the matter. Of course, they ignore that such an approach didn’t work for the Bush, but that is beside the point.
Amnesia and absurdity seem to rule the day in public discourse.
I am less critical of Obama than you, as I think his options – strategic, militarily and political – are fatally circumscribed. I wish it were otherwise and that our nation would wake up from it’s fifty year hallucinatory dream state. But it won”t.
That being the case, I guess the option most likely to satisfy the anti-raghead crowd, their Republican fellow riders and the USA-all-the-way press gaggle would be to round up the 1.4 billion muslims from around the globe including the majority populations from 50 countries, rent Siberia from the Russians, and send the actual handful of jihadists and their billion-plus potential sympathizers to a new mega-Guantanamo/Gulag, surrounded with wall like in old Berlin. It could be called the Back To The Future Initiative.
The world has become pretty absurd and absurdity may be the last refuge for those of us who used to make a living and maintain our sanity being logical and dispassionate.
In any case welcome to 2010!