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A Little Less Chaotic before/after
I watched the Discovery Channel special on Terror in America last night.
Actually only watched the first hour, but damn, was it enlightening.
I highly recommend that if you have any questions or confusions to watch it. Normally I cross reference my sources feverishly, but in this case, it was objectively presented and meticulously explained, and given basic knowledge of the past 20 years of current historical events, it all bears up under cross.
Gotta' love the Discovery Channel.
There is no reasoning that can rationalize the horror that has afflicted us, but after veiwing it, some of my confusion has alleviated. To me, these strikes were much like a lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky. There was no lead up, there was no logic, it was random, and horrible and perpetrated by a people who's culture the propoganda machine told me hated mine, and hated me. This is incorrect.
What I took away from it was that this tragedy is a culmination of the intersection of several events.
And before I launch into anything else, let me say that I am a firm believer in personal responsibility.
All the societal forces in the world can push a person upto a certain point, and put a gun in their hand, but the horror that follows after they pull the trigger is that person's fault, and that person alone. There is no excuse.
Having said that, the forces in play some fifteen years ago had a large bearing on what happened last week. It is a cross of a fanatic, a conflict inside of an otherwise peaceful religion, meddlesome (and inept, at the time) foreign policy, and pure economics.
At the start of the eighties, the Soviets moved into Afghanistan. The policy of the Regan/Bush era was to provide billions and billions of dollars of training and equipment to the Afghan's resisting Soviert incursion.
A Jihad was declared, and we took part.
In the past, traditionally so, Jihad was a defensive battle. Purely defense. And it was more of an ethical ideological abstract, more of a declaration of religious fervor to resist. To get completly technical, one could have an inner Jihad to resist temptation.
This changed as Jihad was declared on the Soviet incursion, and changed furthur when the US got involved, and gave it a great deal more teeth. It was perceived by this faction of the Muslim world, which is the minority, as an aggressive movement.
After years of fighting, the Afghans improbably won, and pushed the Soviets out, at the cost of a million Afghan lives. Two thirds of the country was homeless. There was no central government or rule of law.
In essence, a vacuum was left, and nature abhors a vacuum.
Also, there was a large force of well trained, well equipped, homicidal twenty two year old men, who had never had another job or other skills besides those related to killing people.
Communism crumbled after the defeat, and the world celebrated.
And Afghanistan was left to fend for itself, a pawn in the battle between Warsaw pact countries and NATO, a battle that no longer existed. And afghanistan still had no rule of law, no central government, and a large force of well trained, well equipped homicidal religously fervent young men.
Some of these men were deported, returned to their homelands, and were dispersed throughout the world.
Some stayed, and formed a society to their liking, based on their fundamentalist minority muslim beliefs. After more fighting ensued, this became the Taliban.
In the war against the Soviets, a Saudi millionare named Osama Bin Laden came to Afghanistan, and supported a cause he had no real reason to support, other than they were of the same religion. He funneled money and other support to the region. He built roads and hospitals in the land. He became their hero.
The war ended, and he went back to Saudi Arabia, where the Gulf War began to heat up, and the Americans came beating their drums of war.
Regardless of the fact that they had been asked there, in Osama's fundamentalist and backward mind, the very presence of these Western troops in his holy land was an outrage. He criticized his government in the extreme, and was summarily stripped of his citizenship, disowned by his family and forced to leave the country.
The Taliban government was beginning to form in Afghanistan.
Osama went to Sudan. He bought a house next to a mosque, and also bought land where he could train others in the arts of war and terror, brining back some of the former Afghan warriors that had dispersed throughout the world to be some of his teachers, and part of his network of corrupted ideology. That they were already in far flung places must have been quite a bonus for the corrupt Jihad he had now declared on the US soldiers and citizens alike.
Remember, he is a hero to these people. They will do what he likes at his pleasure.
In the Bush years, Bush sent troops to Somalia on a humanitarian mission. Osama sent some of his teachers to supply and teach the Somalis, another largely muslim nation, how to commit acts of terror. They destroyed a helicopter, and dragged some of our soldiers through the streets.
No one yet knew that it was he, Osama, who had facilitated this atrocity.
The US put pressure on Sudan, and Sudan kicked Osama out. He went to Afghanistan, which was then under the rule of the Taliban, and they welcomed him with open arms.
But before he left, Bin Laden organized the simoultaneous bombings of US embassies in Africa. Only a handful of American lives were lost. Many muslims died in these bombs.
There was also the bombing on the World Trade Center, facilitated by some of the same Afghanii fighters we either directly or indirectly helped train.
He set up shop in Afghanistan, where he is a hero, and business was carried on as usual.
Later, in retaliation, we shot cruise missles into Afghanistan at some of the camps he set up.
And Bin Laden's terrorist cells were coordinated into the terror of last week.
What strikes me as a fundamental error on our part, was not moving to help rebuild Afghanistan like we did with Japan, Germany and the rest of Europe. Had we done so, Osama Bin Laden would simply be an extremist voice in the wilderness, with no one to heed his calls, a nuisance to be disposed of at leisure.
And surely he should be removed by all the peoples of the Earth. We are witnessing his angrly last stand, his perversion of a peaceful religion to suit his own desires, his unshakeable belief in his righteousness, no matter how flawed his interpretation of Jihad is.
His call will reverberate with the disenfranchised Muslims, which is to say in Palestine. The uneducated and unenlightened will appreciate his horror spreading ways. It would be much as if a demogouge of a preacher mobilized certain Christian beliefs, spewing a message of hate, fomented by lack of economic opportunity, to go out and kill "rugheads". Yes, there would be those who would appreciate and heed the call, such as it was relative to their own desparation and lack of education.
But in the main, here, much as it is over there, people are people, and hungry for peace.
Mass invasions of multiple countries now seem unwise and unlikely. Specialized and supported teams searching for certain and specific goals now seems the way. Clean up the mess that should have been addressed long ago. Then rebuild here and over there. Forge a future on the goodwill to follow this necessary dusting out of the closet. We all need to learn. Future peace lies in our hands of action today. We need to want to know what the world will look like then, so we can start it now.
It will be messy, as almost all concerns that need to be cleaned up after a decade and a half of neglect will be.
The fervor of all the news channels and their propagana machine now seem something hysteric, no longer entirely rationale. They are whipping the American people into a frenzy of violence, and it is not right.
There is no excuse for what happened last week. Its is the lowest and basest of animal instincts in a backward display for the world to see.
However, having gleaned what I can, the world now seems a trifle less chaotic. A little less mad.
And I feel a little more together.
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