Science Forums 2

[lemit]

The thing about 9/11 that drives a lot of us crazy is that unlike many domestic problems it was not just reprehensible, it was also preventable and prosecutable. If we knew about homelessness what we knew beforehand about al Qaeda, if we had the kind of purpose about healthcare that both the national and international communities had immediately after 9/11, we could shelter and heal ourselves and export those palliative technologies to the rest of the world. The fact that we flailed around in Afghanistan and then attacked the most stable government in the immediate area is inexcusable--but it is instructive.

If we had stopped the hijackers on the no-fly list--if we had struck the camps after we failed to use the no-fly list, and had then allowed the UN to handle the Taliban--we could have tackled a lot of more complex international problems instead of exacerbating them. Hell, if we had tried studying that region 40 years ago instead of just trying to build on our preconcieved notions and cold war yinyang thinking, which is what the CIA was recuiting people to do at that time, we could have been much better to our people and their people. If we had paid attention to the leaders of Southeast Asia instead of deposing them, we could have helped stabilize that region instead of destabilizing it. From what members of the Sihanouk family told me at the time (off the record), it was our refusal to provide humanitarian aid without military aid that drove those countries to other sources of income. What could we have done with all the blood and treasure lost in that region? (And we must remember that blood is treasure--by far the greatest treasure.)

We are self-centered idiots when it comes to the rest of the world. Always have been, always will be. And this time I'm not being sarcastic, although I'm definitely not being as cautious as I should. I hope I don't need to become as paranoid as the Afghanis and Iranians I've known over the years.

We are the great white whale, powerful, unpredictable, and vastly dangerous. If history is a useful guide, we might possibly do the right thing, but it might well take us a century or two to get around to it. And even then we're likely to change our minds and decide we really wanted to do the wrong thing after all. Remember that just last fall John McCain got 45% of the vote after reminding that ranting woman in the audience that Barack Obama wasn't an Arab; he was a good man.

To borrow language from mental health social work, we pose a danger both to ourselves and to others.

--lemit

(About the CIA thing, a minor State Department official was driving a group of my Middle Eastern friends around while they were handling paperwork to be able to stay in the U.S. on student visas. I was tagging along. While the friends were all out of the car taking care of papers, the official started asking me a lot of personal questions about likes and dislikes, tastes, personal interests, hopes and dreams, as well as my thinking about foreign policy, which was a very popular topic at that time. Of course, knowing I was a reporter, he asked if I wouldn't like to work for USIA. Later, I asked my friends if the guy was coming on to me. They laughed and told me he was a CIA recruiter who had had similar conversations with all of them, eventually turning to what they could do for their countries. Apparently my anger with my own country's foreign policy made me not a favorable candidate, although the recruiter reportedly had better luck with a few of the students. Whether that success included other kinds of contact I couldn't say.)