The fear-mongers go to work

First published 5/14/10 at http://socialistworker.org/2010/05/14/fear-mongers-go-to-work

THE FAILED car bombing in Times Square has New Yorkers, some of whom still have nightmares from 9/11, on edge once again.

While most of us can't afford therapy, at least we have universal access to the soothing counsel of politicians and pundits. For the past two weeks, we've received dozens of cheery reminders that none of us are safe from terrorism--ever.

At times like this, it's nice to know that we have the kind of straight-shooting elected officials who aren't afraid to jump in front of the nearest camera and tell us their foolproof plan to prevent anybody from ever packing a car with common, yet explosive, materials and parking it on a street somewhere in the United States of America.

Of all their helpful suggestions--stripping suspects of citizenship, eliminating Miranda rights, and adding the phrase "for whites only" to each of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution--none of them have proposed to stop doing the thing that seems to have actually caused the Times Square attempt: our own bombing of Pakistan.

That, at least, is what the suspected Times Square bomber said his motives were. In the past year, pilotless U.S. planes have dropped bombs that have killed more then 300 Pakistanis. Most of them were non-combatants, many of them were children, all of them lived in a country with whom we are not at war.

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" we do not. Of course, the guy who coined that phrase was one of those radical Middle Eastern clerics flagged as a terrorist and taken out by the authorities--2,000 years ago.

IT'S NOT exactly a secret that the suspected Times Square bomber was motivated to murder by our own murders. A New York Post headline in early May screamed, "Why He Did It: Revenge for U.S. Drone Attacks on Taliban Terrorists."

The Post ran this cover not to make a point about imperial blowback, but as just another sinister detail of the "Taliban lackey's twisted mission." Which only demonstrates that those in charge of molding public opinion have a moral code that owes less to Jesus Christ than it does to that other Jewish philosopher, Mel Brooks. "Tragedy," Mel once said, "is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."

Terrorism, according to our conventional wisdom, is when we suffer anxiety from a barbequed Pathfinder. Foreign policy is when you and your family die a fiery death while lying in your beds at night.

Of course, in case some readers got the wrong idea from its headline, the Post ran another article that day declaring that the "drone attacks have been incredibly successful in the war on terrorists in Pakistan." Seems that the only downside to this incredibly successful weapon against terrorism is that it produces terrorism.

According to some in the media, the Times Square incident actually proves the wisdom of the drone bombings because it shows that the Pakistani Taliban are growing desperate [1].

So we've come full circle. George Bush justified his disastrous war in Iraq by saying that we were fighting "the terrorists" over there so that wouldn't have to fight them here. Now Barack Obama can claim that his escalation of the Afghanistan war is so successful that the terrorists we were fighting over there are now fighting us over here.

By this logic, we'll know that we're really close to winning the war on terror when there's another attack in the U.S. on the scale of 9/11.

It would be nice to laugh at this lunacy, but it's obviously not a joke. I'll have to settle for watching the next tough-on-terror press conference at Times Square and rooting for the politician of the day to step into one of my fine city's many open sewers.