London & US
Two days out the most fascinating thing about the London attacks is the recovery, and that is being led by the people of London. After WWII, a survey was done of the effects of saturation bombing of Germany and Japan. And to the chagrin of war makers the survey showed that not only had the bombing not crippled the industrial ability of those nations to manufacture war materiel, but it had stiffened, not weakened the resolve of the people.
Perhaps we could have known that by simply talking to people in London about the blitz. Forty thousand Londoners were killed by random bombing. Clearly Hitler believed he could bring the nation to its knees, demoralizing the people. And one would have thought he was right, particularly since the bombing was totally unpredictable. A buzz bomb would be heard overhead and everyone would wait until the buzzing ceased as that meant the bomb had spent its fuel and would drop and explode. It made Londoners more defiant.
We Americans have not experienced, at least not yet, enough to have developed such a hard shell. But I suspect we are tougher and more resilient than we were before the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. Why, in the minutes after the Pentagon attack, the passengers on the plane over Pennsylvania changed from passive to active resisters.
All that being said, we still don't seem to understand, or perhaps believe, that our Iraq policy, our whole mid-east policy, our entire foreign policy, is feeding the terrorist recruiting. Over and over President Bush has said the reason for our Iraq occupation is to fight terrorists over there so we will not have to fight them here. London makes clear the futility of such a view.
Though terrorism is a horrible reality of 21st century world politics and we must have a tough strategy for facing into the challenges it poses for every citizen of every nation, and though military and intelligence vigilance is going to require a huge part of our resources, to fail to see how this is linked to seemingly softer issues like poverty means we are dooming ourselves to making no progress in the struggle.
When our president stiffs his closest ally on global warming and addressing African poverty, it may make the plutocrats among us who are getting richer by our hoarding of the world's resources for ourselves happy, but it makes the world more dangerous for everyone.
Perhaps we could have known that by simply talking to people in London about the blitz. Forty thousand Londoners were killed by random bombing. Clearly Hitler believed he could bring the nation to its knees, demoralizing the people. And one would have thought he was right, particularly since the bombing was totally unpredictable. A buzz bomb would be heard overhead and everyone would wait until the buzzing ceased as that meant the bomb had spent its fuel and would drop and explode. It made Londoners more defiant.
We Americans have not experienced, at least not yet, enough to have developed such a hard shell. But I suspect we are tougher and more resilient than we were before the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. Why, in the minutes after the Pentagon attack, the passengers on the plane over Pennsylvania changed from passive to active resisters.
All that being said, we still don't seem to understand, or perhaps believe, that our Iraq policy, our whole mid-east policy, our entire foreign policy, is feeding the terrorist recruiting. Over and over President Bush has said the reason for our Iraq occupation is to fight terrorists over there so we will not have to fight them here. London makes clear the futility of such a view.
Though terrorism is a horrible reality of 21st century world politics and we must have a tough strategy for facing into the challenges it poses for every citizen of every nation, and though military and intelligence vigilance is going to require a huge part of our resources, to fail to see how this is linked to seemingly softer issues like poverty means we are dooming ourselves to making no progress in the struggle.
When our president stiffs his closest ally on global warming and addressing African poverty, it may make the plutocrats among us who are getting richer by our hoarding of the world's resources for ourselves happy, but it makes the world more dangerous for everyone.
posted by Blayney at 8:24 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home