Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Getting Serious About Terror

One of the realities highlighted by last week's terrorism attacks in Spain -- and largely overlooked by the press -- is the fact that domestic terrorism is largely indistinguishable from international terrorism in terms of the damage that it can inflict -- and that focusing on one at the expense of the other leaves a nation truly vulnerable to lethal violence.

This was driven home by the way the Spanish government immediately tried to blame the attacks on the separatist ETA -- a domestic group -- instead of al Qaeda, who now appear to be the real culprits:
Beginning immediately after the blasts, Aznar and other officials telephoned journalists, stressing ETA's responsibility and dismissing speculation that Islamic extremists might be involved. Spanish diplomats pushed a hastily drafted resolution blaming ETA through the U.N. Security Council. At an afternoon news conference, when a reporter suggested the possibility of an al Qaeda connection, the interior minister, Angel Acebes, angrily denounced it as "a miserable attempt to disrupt information and confuse people."

"There is no doubt that ETA is responsible," Acebes said.

Within days, that assertion was in tatters, and with it the reputation and fortunes of the ruling party. Suspicion that the government manipulated information -- blaming ETA in order to divert any possible link between the bombings and Aznar's unpopular support for the war in Iraq -- helped fuel the upset victory of the Socialist Workers' Party in Sunday's elections. By then, Islamic extremists linked to al Qaeda had become the focus of the investigation.

With a seemingly bottomless capacity for callousness, right-wing pundits and warbloggers have been quick to blame the Spanish voters for supposedly capitulating to the terrorists by giving them their desired election result. The iterations of this noxious claim have been too numerous to list here, but are embodied by David Brooks' recent NYT column:
The Spanish government was conducting policies in Afghanistan and Iraq that Al Qaeda found objectionable. A group linked to Al Qaeda murdered 200 Spaniards, claiming that the bombing was punishment for those policies. Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking.

What is the Spanish word for appeasement?

As Retrogrouch points out, this kind of argument is not just outrageously thoughtless, it is simply wrong on the facts. The Times' own reportage gives a much clearer and more honest picture of what was on Spanish voters' minds:
At the bus and train terminal at Plaza de la Castilla in northern Madrid, Alberto Martín, a 31-year-old nuclear physicist who voted Socialist, said, "If the government had said, `We don't know who did it,' nothing would have happened and Zapatero would not be there. Aznar was making decisions without any consideration for people's concerns. Look at the war in Iraq. Aznar thought he was God! There was no dialogue."

The election, Mr. Martín added, "is a victory for the people, not for terrorism. You see, I'm now going to take the train."

Of course, the right-wing smear of Spanish voters serves precisely one purpose only: To set the stage in America for the Bush re-election campaign's talking points attacking John Kerry for his supposed weakness on national security. It's meant to work in tandem with the equally noxious "terrorists want to see Kerry win" meme.

And as it happens, their inability to understand -- or to honestly characterize -- the real reasons for the Spanish election outcome points precisely to Republicans' substantial vulnerability on exactly the issue of national security.

Because, just like the Spanish government, Bush and the GOP have sold the electorate a bill of goods on a "war on terror" that has come up substantially short in making the "homeland" more secure -- and has, in fact, more substantially increased the likelihood of being vulnerable to a terrorist attack.

The Bush approach has been to treat terrorism as though it were a phenomenon mostly related to unrest in the Middle East, the product of brown-skinned fanatics for whom the only adequate response is the full force of American military might. This approach largely treats terrorism as though it exists only in conjunction with a handful of states -- the "Axis of Evil" -- that support it, and containing it means bombing and killing its supporters out of existence.

This was, in essence, the rationale for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, certainly a military response is fully justified, since the state connection to terrorism is clear and unmistakable. In the case of Iraq, however, that connection remains far from clear; though at one time I thought evidence existed to suggest such a connection, it has become painfully clear since that any Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism, particularly al Qaeda, was thin at best.

More to the point, however, is the fact that by making the "War on Terror" primarily a military operation and only secondarily (at best) a matter for law enforcement and intelligence, the Bush administration is focusing on only a rather narrow part of the terrorism spectrum. (Even on those terms, as Matt Yglesias has ably demonstrated, Bush's execution of the "war on terror" has in fact largely consisted of smoke, mirrors, shock and awe.)

The reality: Terrorism is a global phenomenon. It takes the shape not of a singular or even related ideology, but the idiosyncratic form of whatever extremism gives it birth. It is amorphous, and highly corpuscular, sometimes effectively emanating from extremely small groups or even individuals. And it is every bit as alive and well in America as it is in the Middle East.

This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that emphasizing the military component to any effective assault on terrorism -- and there are instances, such as Afghanistan, when a military solution indeed is required -- has an extraordinarily negative effect, particularly if military operations are undertaken through fraudulent circumstances, as in the invasion of Iraq. As Robert Wright observes in Part 3 of his insightful series in Slate, "A Real War on Terrorism":
We have to understand that terrorism is fundamentally a "meme" -- a kind of "virus of the mind," a set of beliefs and attitudes that spreads from person to person. One way to squelch terrorism is to kill or arrest the people whose brains are infected with the meme, and the Bush administration has done some of that effectively. But some forms of killing and arresting -- especially the kinds that get us bad publicity -- do so much to spread the meme that our enterprise suffers a net loss. ... The ultimate target is memes; killing or arresting people is useful only to the extent that it leads to a net reduction in terrorism memes.

Rephrased in these terms, the point I've been trying to drive home is that, for technological reasons, memes are getting faster and slipperier. The information age is doing for these "viruses of the mind" what dense urban living and interurban transport did for biological pathogens during the late Middle Ages. (The result of humankind's failure to reckon with this was the Black Death.) And few things drive terrorism memes farther and faster over their new electronic conduits than doing an ill-thought-out job of neutralizing people already "infected."

Any kind of serious War on Terror needs to have the flexibility to respond proportionately and nimbly to various terrorist threats as they manifest themselves, and in this respect a military emphasis is simply too musclebound to be effective. A comprehensive approach will emphasize intelligence and law enforcement -- especially global law enforcement, the very concept of which is anathema to the Bush administration -- while reserving its military options, fraught as they are with multiple collateral hazards, solely for the rare circumstances that warrant them.

This, as it happens, appears to be the smart approach to terrorism that is being advocated by none other than John Kerry, though of course it is being demagogued by the Bush campaign and its apologists as being solely about law enforcement.

Nearly all the smart folk on the left side of the blogosphere have been urging Kerry to take the debate on national security to Bush, to turn the assault on Kerry as weak on it head, and attack the administration for its very real miscalculations and missteps in this arena: Atrios, Josh Marshall, and Daily Kos are only among the foremost in the blogosphere making this point.

If Kerry is going to do this, one of the most effective ways he can make this point is to talk about domestic terrorism -- because the Bush administration's extraordinarily weak record on that front exposes in a concrete way that everyone can understand just how phony its "war on terror" (and accompanying rationale for the invasion of Iraq) really is.

It would not take much to drive this point home. The Kerry campaign could easily point to Bush's serious lapses in handling domestic terrorism as symptomatic of the real shortcomings of his approach to "homeland security":
-- The fall 2001 anthrax attacks, for which no one has yet been apprehended.

-- The Texas cyanide bomb case.

-- The ricin attack on the Senate.

-- Various cases of right-wing domestic terrorism since Sept. 11, ranging from plots to attack abortion clinics and gay bars to the bombing of local racial-relations offices.

As I've discussed previously, the Bush record is such that it is becoming clear that Americans are more vulnerable than ever to domestic terrorism, particularly since it is likewise evident the extremist right intends to "piggyback" off attacks committed by international terrorists -- and yet federal law enforcement's emphasis remains almost entirely on international terrorism. Even when a disturbingly dangerous case like the Texas cyanide bombers emerges, it is relegated to insignificance -- and so poorly handled that FBI investigators fail to even contact their own offices where leads might appear.

Even conservative news organizations like UPI have noticed. A recent op-ed piece on the wire service titled "Outside View: Who is William Krar?" points up many of the same problems observed here as well:
Even more astounding is the stony silence from the Ashcroft Justice Department, which found at least 2,295 occasions to toot its own horn that are apparently more newsworthy than the Krar arrest.

"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how we announce our activities," a Justice Department spokesman told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Really? This is from a Justice Department that averages two news releases every day and has never been shy to march out every triumph over the arrest or conviction of anyone remotely connected to overseas terror.

No, this Justice Department is obsessed with thinking about how they announce their activities. And that is what is so intriguing about this arrest and the conspicuous lack of comment from Ashcroft.

It is, to quote another famous crime fighter, reminiscent of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time," said Inspector Gregory. "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

What throws the Bush administration's miserable handling of domestic terrorism into stark relief is those few cases in which the government has tooted the "domestic terrorism" horn in making arrests -- all of which have involved so-called "eco-terrorists," such as the recent arrest of "Tre Arrow" up in Victoria. Especially noteworthy in that recent AP story was this point:
The FBI lists the ELF as its No. 1 domestic terrorism priority.

This is a crystalline example of the gross skewing of priorities for both law enforcement and intelligence in dealing with terrorism that has been a hallmark of the Bush regime.

While eco-terrorists are a serious problem, and deserve certainly serious prosecution under the law, the level of threat they represent is proportionally so much less than that from the far-right "Patriot" movement and white supremacists as to raise serious questions about the priorities of both the FBI and the Justice Department. Certainly it is worth observing, as does It's a Crock, that "eco-terrorist" Jeff Luers -- who torched three SUVs and took care to do so when it was unlikely anyone would be harmed -- is serving a 22-year prison sentence, while William Krar -- who built a cyanide bomb designed to kill perhaps a hundred people or more -- is facing a mere 15 years. When left-wing terrorists begin actually killing and maiming people and blowing up federal buildings with day cares inside them, or even plotting to do so, perhaps then they will deserve the kind of focus being accorded them under the Bush and Ashcroft style of governance.

Moreover, lest anyone think that the American far right is incapable of serious damage and not really in al Qaeda's class, it's probably useful to recall that before Sept. 11, the most lethal terrorist attack on American soil was committed by American right-wing extremists, with a toll similar to Spain's recent losses.

And contrary to those who argue that an emphasis on law enforcement is inadequate, the reality is that a one-two punch of intelligence and law enforcement is extraordinarily effective in stopping terrorism, at least domestically. One of the points that emerged from my in-depth work for MSNBC on domestic terrorism was that of the 40-plus cases of serious domestic terrorism we identified as arising in the 1995-2000 period, the vast majority had in fact been nipped in the bud by law enforcement before the would-be terrorists could act, largely through effective intelligence-gathering and aggressive arrests and prosecution. There is no reason this same approach would not be effective on a global scale -- unless, of course, one was allergic to cooperating with the very concept of international law enforcement.

In many ways, the American situation is a kind of reverse mirror image of Spain's: Were domestic terrorists to actually strike on U.S. soil, the government would be eager to blame the attack on international terrorists -- as was, in fact, the case with the anthrax terrorist. Just as with Spain's Aznar, Bush's handling of terrorism has instead revolved around invading Iraq -- a diversion, by nearly any standard, from a serious and comprehensive assault on terrorism.

But unlike in Spain, hardly anyone has bothered to point out the flaws in that approach to the voters. John Kerry would be smart to do so.

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