Reading notes

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more powerful and succinct opening paragraph:

America’s intelligence system failed to see terrorist threats coming from Al Qaeda that should have been evident before 9/11, and then, after 9/11, saw terrorist threats coming from Iraq that didn’t exist. A system that doesn’t warn of real threats and does warn of unreal ones is a broken system.

And then Robert lays down some serious wisdom:

Terrorism is a tactic. It is not itself our enemy. There is no finite number of terrorists in the world. At any given time, their number depends on how many people are driven by anger and hate to join their ranks. Hence, “smoking out,” imprisoning or killing terrorists, based on information supplied by our intelligence agencies, cannot be the prime means of preventing future terrorist attacks against us. It is more important to deal with the anger and hate.

A war on terror? Crazy it is. It’s like making war on shock & awe, a similarly deranged tactic. Dealing with terror means dealing with the anger and hate that fuel its use as a tactic; dismantling unjust policies that evoke anger and hate directly targets the root of the problem.

This is another way of saying what Jim Wallis has been preaching for some time now:

Poverty is not the only cause of terrorism, but unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we will never win the battle against terrorism.

Back to Mr. Reich, who provides specific ideas on dealing with anger and hate:

This means, among other things, restarting the Middle East peace process rather than, as President Bush has done, run away from it. It requires shoring up the economies of the Middle East, now suffering from dwindling direct investment from abroad because of the violence and uncertainty in the region. And it means strengthening the legitimacy of moderate Muslim leaders, instead of encouraging extremism — as the current administration’s policies have undoubtedly done. …

The United States cannot control or police the world. Instead, we will have to depend on strong treaties and determined alliances to prevent illegal distribution of thousands of nuclear weapons already in existence in Russia, Pakistan, India and other nuclear powers, and of biological or chemical weapons capable of mass destruction. The administration’s “go-it-alone” diplomacy takes us in precisely the wrong direction. That the United States suffers from a failure of intelligence is indisputable. The calamitous state of our spy agencies is only one part of that failure.

The last paragraph’s reference to “police the world” inevitably reminds me of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 observation —

Don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of the policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You are too arrogant. If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and I’ll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn’t even know my name. Be still and know that I am God.’”

Even Sen. Fritz Hollings — with whom I had such disagreement back in 2002 about government-mandated digital-device copy protection (SSSCA renamed CBDTPA) — gets it. Bravo, Senator.

[also archived at Truthout]