What is it about radicalized Islam that has become the source of so much strife in the world today? It seems that the pot has been slowly simmering for my entire life in the unresolved conflict in Palestine. But while we watched one suicide bomber after another detonate themselves at Israeli taverns, malls bus stops and check points, while we watched 747 jumbo jets hijacked and lined up in the desert to be blown to smithereens, while we watched Marines incinerated in Beirut and saw the USS Missouri lob Volkswagen sized shells in reprisal…nothing has changed. The violence seems to have only ignited more violence, in a never ending cycle of hatred and reprisal. We’ve seen shootouts and massacres at the Olympics, on cruise liners, in the Church of St. Nazarene and all through the “Islamic Crescent” from Morocco to the Pakistan. Nothing changes.

We’ve seen a revolution in Iran that quickly led to an 8 year war with Iraq, and 2 million dead. We’ve seen two bloody wars in the gulf that killed several hundred thousand Iraqis, Kuwaitis and yes, over 2500 US troops as of the latest tally. We’ve seen helicopters chasing Taliban in the rugged highlands of Afghanistan and suicide bombers in the Indian Parliament setting the stage for a near nuclear disaster as two of the world’s largest land armies squared off in the hot summer of 2005 over the Kashmir. And now, the latest wave of violence has the Sudanese government backing roving gangs of Janjaweed Arab Militia, who have been riding on horses from one black village to another and carrying out a program of burning, looting, systematic rape, and killing. The toll so far: some 50,000 dead and 1.2 million displaced from their homeland in Darfur Province--and it will get much worse. Radical Islam is on a roll.

While the US quibbled over intelligence snafus before 9-11 and the war on Iraq, another little genocide began to bubble up in Sudan, quietly unnoticed. The last time Africans started racially based “ethnic cleansing,” nearly 900,000 died in Rwanda before the bloodshed was stopped. Throughout the 100 day slaughter, as whole families were hacked to death, their bodies rolled up in dirty carpets and stacked up for burial like obscene “cigars” as the killers called them, the U.N. equivocated over what to do as the death toll mounted. French troops went in briefly…to rescue white French Missionaries, then left thousands of blacks to the machetes. One lonesome UN commander on the scene refused the order to withdraw his “peacekeepers” and fought a gallant holding action, backed by a few hundred brave soldiers from Nigeria, to save as many lives as he could. He was, as Hermann Hesse once wrote, “picking the flowers in hell.”

Now it is beginning again—radicalized Arabs on a rampage to cleanse villages of non-Muslim blacks. Their intention is stated openly, as brazen as the calumny of their murderous actions, and thus far they have heard only the barest whisper of protest from the “civilized world.” The Bush administration has threatened to, (heaven forbid) restrict the travel of Sudanese government officials! While the US has been trying to get up steam in the UN for sanctions, China, Russia, our new buddy Pakistan, and Algeria have been shielding Sudan in the security council. What gives here? In the meantime, Sudan has just taken delivery of the last of a 12 plane order of Mig-29 aircraft, and officially warned the West and the UN that it would not tolerate any intervention in the troubled Darfur province by Peacekeepers. Why, I’m literally shaking in my shoes! While I am not always in favor of unilateral military intervention, there are times when a grave humanitarian crisis demands it. I think it is high time that a US carrier task force showed up in the Red Sea and invited the Sudanese government to fly its bright, shiny new Migs.

But suppose Sudan were to pull one of those inexplicably stubborn and Saddam like moves and merely thumb their noses at us after their 12 new planes are gone—then what? With the US army barely able to maintain a footprint of 130,000 troops in Iraq, what have we left in the troop rotation to put any fire behind our words? And even if there were abundant forces in the US for a peacekeeping mission to Sudan, would the American people support it in the middle of a heated election campaign fraught with dissension over the two wars we already have going with Muslim countries?

Correct me if I am wrong, but all this trouble isn’t being stirred up in the world by Hindus, or Buddhists, or even godless Chinese. It’s being fomented by men with Allah on their lips and a rifle in one hand, a machete or RPG-7 in the other. There are now, by some estimates, at least a hundred odd groups going by names like Party of God, Black Banners, Islamic Jihad, Muhammad’s Warriors, Soldiers of God, and so on. All of them seem to have some political axe to grind, on the bodies of innocent locals, wherever they are rooted. All of them seem to have the underlying intent to purge the world of heretical populations, and purify Islam by violence. Like a fire that spreads with the wind, it seems that all efforts to attack them directly have caused little more than a spike in recruitment for their disparate legions. Now, with one Islamic country after another being accused of harboring “Weapons of Mass Destruction” the increasing presence and popularity of these renegade radicals has become a matter of grave concern. A masked, faceless terrorist with a dirty bomb is not good news for the stock markets in the West. And the fact that the Islamic crescent sits right smack dab atop the vital oil and gas the West needs for its economy has made the whole situation “a bit dicey” as the British might say.

To be sure, the situation in Israel has been an irritant in the heart of Islam for five decades. But the Muslim world has endured far worse. Western armies from France, England and Germany launched all of seven crusading invasions to the Middle East and Persia. They set up shop in Palestine, carving out the Kingdom of Jerusalem and building impregnable walls and castles that kept the Muslim tide at bay for 90 years, nearly twice the span of Modern Israel’s existence. Then, on a hot July weekend in 1187, Saladin the great rolled the invaders back and reclaimed nearly all the lands that were lost to the first and second Crusades. Those who were left were given a choice: convert to Islam or be beheaded. In a way, we see the same scenario re -enacted on our TV screens these days, as hostages from the US, England Poland Philippines, and other countries are captured and threatened with similar treatment.  It seems these radical Muslims just wont let things be. They seem continually dissatisfied with how things are going in the Middle East and, since they live there, they just won’t go away. Even the communists had the good manners to settle down once they drove the US out of Indo-China. But these guys just will not be satisfied.

What is it they seem to want?

Well, to take their own words as any guide, they seem to want: 1) Israel and all Jewish Israelis gone, with a return of Palestine to the Arabs and Muslims in a moment that would make Saladin proud. 2) They want Exxon, Mobil, Arco, Unocal, British Petroleum, Halliburton and the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all packed up and out of the region, leaving all that Arab oil to the people who own it. Now, does that sound like too much to ask?

Let’s assume that, by some miracle, those two things could happen. The world gets together and sets up an entirely new country, say, somewhere in the vast hinterland of Canada. Everybody chips in to build housing and cities and all, and then the whole thing is given to the Israelis, pine trees, lakes and all. They get tired of the suicide bombings and bad news coverage and emigrate out, in another Exodus, to live happily ever after in the north, on the safe and happy continent of North America. Problem 1 solved.

Then the oil companies pack up and leave the troubled Persian Gulf to the egrets. A crash Manhattan style program is launched to create all the energy we need from the hydrogen in seawater, and oil becomes a thing of the past. In short, we take our football and go home, leaving the Arabs to all that oil, or what’s left of it after our insatiable consumption for the last 50 years. Problem 2 solved.

What then? Would the radicals be happy? Probably not. No sooner do we leave when they decide that their jihad can now be safely turned on their own people. They want to: 3) throw down all the secular governments in the Islamic crescent and restore one Theocratic Caliphate, where Islam reigns supreme. Beyond the obvious irritants of Western Troops and corporations entrenched on Islamic soil, and the ever-present annoyance of Israel in Palestine, this #3 has deeper implications. It gets at the reality of the conflict between Islam and the West as being rooted in a clash of cultures. But is our culture so superior that it must prevail?

We have seen this time and time again in history. Europe came to the new world and systematically eradicated most of the indigenous peoples there, building colonies, making wholesale claims on the land, spreading disease, warfare and then shipping back gold and other resources to the motherland. Even when the local colonists proved troublesome enough to break away and form a new nation on their own with a glowing moral creed and constitution trumpeting things about “inalienable human rights” that were “self-evident ,” slavery and the oppression of Indian tribes continued for another hundred years. Eventually even women obtained the right to vote, if you can imagine that. But even as late as the 1960s in America, there were whole classes of people who were treated as second class citizens, and prejudice and racial hatred were still rampant.

It took the “Great Melting Pot” nearly a century, therefore, to boil away bigotry, class oppression, racial bias, and begin the enforcement of laws aimed at actually reaching some measure of the Founding Fathers intent when they were first penned. Some would argue that our “Great Experiment” is still underway here, as the focus shifts to equal rights for people with different sexual preferences, and the rights of women to control their reproductive process. Through all our political campaigns, we constantly hear the old values, quietly receding in real terms within our culture, being elevated: family, virtue, and the freedom, equality and opportunity that are supposedly inherent in democracy and capitalism.

Yet if you take a close look at America you will find all of these values under increasing threat. Divorce is at an all time high. Families are temporary arrangements, where the demands of career take precedence and parents are often absent from the household  most of the time. There is no sense of an extended family, as relatives live in different parts of the country and only see one another at Thanksgiving or Christmas, if even that often. Aging parents are shunted away to homes and seen as an encumbrance. Old virtues like respect for one’s elders and the wisdom of age are deemed “old hat” in a culture that prizes youth. Yet, in spite of this , American politicians will invoke “family values” like a sacred mantra—for indeed, the power inherent in the phrase lies in a kind of sentimental yearning we feel for the old values that cannot be lived out in our real lives.

As for democracy, less that 50% of eligible voters actually exercise that right in America these days. Candidates for seats in the executive or legislative branch are all millionaires who, once seated, tend to stay seated for three or four decades, with a hold on power that would shame the average dynasty. They are all funded by massive donations from mega corporations who expect access and policy to follow their dollars. (The Oil and Energy companies, for example, have contributed over $440 million dollars to politicians coffers since 1998. Is it any wonder that we have a foreign policy that appears largely controlled by the need to secure oil and gas reserves?) Indeed, Ralph Nader is not too far off the mark when he claims that the Bush administration is “a corporation posing as a presidency.” Many key members of the Bush cabinet made a seamless transition from the corporate boardrooms of the big oil and energy companies to the executive branch of our current government…after a five week haggling session in the courts and a lot of puckered eyes squinting at the hanging chad.  Democracy? It seems the whole process has become a shouting match between Hannity and Colmes, or the exchange of salvos on “Crossfire” these days.

Again, Nader is right: the two big parties, beholden to their corporate contributors, have locked out other “voices and choices.” We now have red states, blue states, and battleground states, where the election is being focused on a few independent voters, perhaps 10% of the electorate getting 90% of the campaigning effort. And outsiders are not welcome if they threaten to tip the highly polarized balance. They are rigorously kept off the ballots in many key states, and locked out of the debates by the big parties to prevent any dilution of their voter base.

We have this funny “Electoral College” that awards the full weight of a state’s vote to the candidate who gets even the barest majority. In 2000, some states were carried by as few as 536 votes, yet they reaped the entire electoral tally under our “winner take all” system--designed principally to make sure the two large parties remain in total control. It’s the only democracy where this happens! How unlike the parliamentary system in England, for example, where a party receiving 49% of the vote also gets an equivalent representation in parliament seats. 536 people decided who would be president in the year 2000...536 ballots when it has since been proven that up to 100,000 other ballots were disqualified, eliminated, thrown out--largely in black democratic voting precincts. What a strange system we have. We revere the vote, yet trash it with a heedless contempt if the ballot is not marked the way we (the incumbent vote counters)  would wish.  Democracy?

Did you know that 80% of all votes cast in our elections are all counted by just two companies, Diebold and ES&S, which are owned and run by two brothers, Todd and Bob Urosevich. Their business, counting our votes, is entirely unregulated by the federal government, and there are news stories reporting many other alarming facts about our electoral process, which you can read here. http://nightweed.com/usavotefacts.html   Follow the link. Read the facts, follow each supporting link. You’ll be shocked. In the end, the old maxim coined by Stalin seems to apply these days. He said:  “It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.” Democracy?

It’s an odd system, wheezing along in this country, and it barely managed to deliver a result in our 2000 election when the polarity in the voters was so pronounced that the margin of error in vote counting exceeded the margin of victory. Phrases like “vote early, vote often” have long been a part of our system, where political bosses promised to deliver a given city, county or state to their candidate. But the unprecedented delivery of the presidency itself by the supreme court, who decided the election on a 5-4 vote (where several the “yea” votes were cast by justices appointed by the Republican candidate’s father)…well, Imagine how it looked to the rest of the world out there, this land of the free?

It was a decision made on a technicality: that the vote recount authorized by a Florida court could not continue because different counties had different standards for the recount and it would violate the “equal justice under the law” clause. Oh, we’re so concerned about equality. Did the supreme court ever consider the option of simply selecting a uniform recount standard and imposing it state wide for the recount? Equality? Ask the black voters of Miami Dade county how they feel about that some day. But we learned one good lesson from the 2000 election. No more hanging chad to argue over the voters intentions. In the heat of a contested election, it seems politicos will argue over anything. There was recently an election in San Diego where one candidate received massive write in support. Thousands of ballots were “disqualified” because the voter failed to darken the oval next to the candidates name after they wrote in the name. I guess that made it real hard to discern the voter’s intent, eh? But we’re getting beyond all that now. Now we’ll have our vote tampering done digitally. Now we have unsupervised machines, with no paper trail, proprietary software that can be programmed with secret backdoors, and a host of other “irregularities”... Democracy?

Well, at least we don’t poison the opposition candidate, like they do in the Ukraine. Nope. In America we just  shoot ‘em. (Just ask the Kennedy family). Barring that, we just keep ‘em off the darn ballot and don’t invite them to the debates.

OK... So Democracy is in jeopardy here, but what about the moral strength of America? Sadly, it would be hard for America to lay claim to any sense of moral virtue relative to other cultures on earth. We live in a world where anything goes, and one where most issues of morality are deemed to be a matter of personal preference. It is only when they can be put to good political use that some will take to the pulpit, the airwaves or the courts to try and use virtue and morality as a flail—as in the recent vilification and impeachment of President Clinton by the moral right for his improprieties and his effort to keep private a matter that most Americans would see as entirely personal—sex. Still, Americans are all too ready to lay claim to the moral high ground in any comparison of their “way of life” relative to another. They trot out that 200+ year old constitution and read the words—though they are quick to make exceptions for an alarming number of cases depending on the political winds of the day. All men are created equal…unless they want to sleep with other men. And that is a single example plucked from the current political rhetoric of the hour. It’s a situation that would make Orwell smile. Remember: “Four Legs Good…Two legs Bad.”

How the world views us

It is on the world stage, however, where this real clash of cultures plays itself out, and America has had a dismal record. While claiming to desire freedom, democracy and justice for all, America has made questionable alliances with men like Sukharto, Saddam, Noriega, Marcos, Papa Doc, the Shah of Iran, and any number of others. That these men were perfect models of the oppressive dictator never seemed to matter if the US could manipulate the relationship and use it as a political or economic foil. It seemed that any means were justified in the pursuit of US aims: the defeat of one “Evil Empire,” after another to use a phrase coined by a recently sanctified American president and re-animated by President Bush. Never mind that these odd bedfellows with democracy created some very stressful moments in history. When the Russians invaded Afghanistan we armed and trained the mujahadin--Osama Bin Ladin among them--and created the genesis of the insurgency that became the Taliban. The 2 million deaths in the war between Iran and Iraq seemed a small price to pay if the greater good, protecting the gulf from Soviet expansion, could be achieved. So, we armed both sides, and then justified the deception by saying the proceeds from the arms sales went to fund the “Contras” battling communism here in our own hemisphere. Sure, we shipped chemical precursors and Anthrax over to Saddam to keep him in the game during that war…but it was all for some greater good, eh? Everything we are doing now, in both of those countries, amounts to major cleanup of a mess of our own making.

We sat idly by while Pakistan, in contravention of all existing nuclear nonproliferation efforts, obtained the missile technology it needed from North Korea. We sat idly by while the opium trade in Afghanistan bloomed in the poppies, and millions in drug money went into the war chest of a group calling itself “Al Qaeda”, (The Foundation). Then, after 9-11, it was time to go over and straighten Pakistan out, and get Musharef back in line again. (A man who seized control of the democratic government there by armed coup.) We used the Afghan fighters when we needed them, then walked, abandoning the country to all of the above. Now we need to use them again to help us find this nefarious Bin Ladin. Believe me, this self-serving and myopic foreign policy of America has caused great harm to the way everyone in that region views our country. Do we think they are blind?

On that note, we now have a new doctrine: that democracy and respect for the dignity of human life is now the great aim of the war in the heart of Islam, but with one catch, like fine print on a contract that remains all too obvious to the rest of the world, the doctrine is not valid in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, Sudan, Lybia, Lebannon, Palestine, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Khazakstan, or Indonesia. We seem all too ready to tolerate oppression there in the interest of some greater good that we want and need from the region. Can you guess what the greater good is? How about free and easy access to 90% of the world’s petroleum, for starters. Got to keep all those SUVs running over here, and at $2 a gallon or less, though you can forget that price point at the pump forever now.

As for Western economies, the miracles of capitalism churning out products and advancing humanity, one might want to take a second look there as well. Only 12.5% of the world’s population now benefit, in any way, by capitalism and free market economies. We forget that most of the world is simply not inside the buy-sell loop of capitalism at all. 87.5% have no access to credit, capital, and little in the way of an annual income to buy much of anything. Here in America, of course, we are inundated with manufactured goods and the credit and cash to become real gluttons if we so desire….and it seems we do desire exactly that. The average American has so much more than the average Indonesian that a comparison is ludicrous. Each “Personal Computer” in Bangladesh must serve the needs of 10,000 people. How many are installed in your household? Only 5% of the people in India have an Internet connection. Only 2% of the world is presently connected to the net. In the US, of course, the number of connections is approaching 60%, and there are more personal computers in this country than in all other nations of the earth combined. Would you say we have had our fair share of things?

While this vast disparity in the standard of living when it comes to material things is often elevated as evidence to support the efficacy of the American way of life, it is also the source of the great cultural conflict that is now ramping up in terrorism.  It’s the old “haves” vs “have nots” again, a battle that has been fought throughout history. It is not that the teeming masses of Islamic people want DVDs and laptops. That is not the crux of the issue. The radicals, emerging from Islam in an almost antibody like reaction, seem to be intent on preserving and protecting their culture from ours. That’s why they want those secular, increasingly westernized governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other places, thrown down and replaced with a god centered Theocracy. In their eyes, capitalism is godless. It is possessed with the manufacture and distribution of trivial things that end up separating a person from values of life that they have lived out for millennia.

Is this true? Look again at the typical American. They own a house, a car or two, several television sets, computers, stereo sets, a closet full of clothing from the latest one day sale, and a host of appliances.  They spend they 8 hours at work, and then go home to four to six hours of television where they loose themselves in “reality shows” that feature nubile youth competing for big bucks on some deserted island. All the while there is consumption, of food, goods and media events. Blockbuster movies punctuate the summer season, and shopping sprees are the order of the day in the winter. They eat and eat, getting fatter and fatter, while moving from one fad diet book to the next. They are continuously distracted by the latest loony sitcom, and can name the personalities of their TV shows by route memory while remaining ignorant of world events—events outside the gilded bubble where they live within the good ‘ol USA. Where in all of this is there any time for self-introspection, any sense of sacrifice, any connection to other people that is not played out over a computer screen, television or cell phone? How many of your neighbors do you know on a first name basis? Where in all of this is there any sense of God? God is something relegated to the early morning or late hour programming on Sunday. It is a TV evangelist hawking Jesus for donations. It is a reflexive visit to a church for some; a muttered prayer for good luck in the next Lotto drawing for others.

And what about our way of life? Shouldn’t they love that? Most people would be hard pressed to give up the benefits of modernity. We have freedom of expression, access to information, freedom of mobility, all provided, in a very real sense, by things like electricity and gasoline. Turn off the electricity in your home tonight and see what happens to you. Don’t think about it, just do it for an experiment. Turn off the power, that constantly flowing energy that catalyzes and actuates our Brave New World. See what happens. You light candles, or a fire. You either find yourself alone or you find your self with people, sitting by that one source of light and heat at the hearth. You might even find yourself talking to them. You might be forced to play a musical instrument or even read. No TV, no computer games, e-mail, phone calls, DVDs, VCR tape or any other distraction. Why…you might even find yourself looking at the night sky and wondering who the hell you are on this little hunk of rock adrift in all that space.

Do this one night and you will see that there is a vast vacuum that one of my friends once called “a god shaped hole” in your soul. What do you fill it with each day? Sadly, most Americans never get a moment to ponder this hole in their lives, because that’s exactly what the American way of life excels at: distraction. They end up filling it with Hostess Twinkies, Britney Spears, the Wheel of Fortune, sports shows, comedy sitcoms, and you can name your own daily vice. But if you turn off the juice for a night, a few days, a week, then what? You end up looking at your life and needs in a different light altogether. You end up facing some of the internal states of mind that a huge 87.5% of the world face each day and night. For one brief moment, you stand in another man’s shoes and see his fate as akin to your own.

In such a situation, the bonds of family become paramount, as survival depends on them—not only the immediate nuclear family, but also the extended family of the tribe around you. When you live outside the protective shell of modernity, something else creeps in to fill that God shaped hole, and the sense of religious belief and practice is very central to your life. When you live without the power of VISA and Mastercard, or immediate fulfillment of virtually any need, then you live with want, with desire, with powerlessness, with hopelessness, and you reach for something beyond yourself, something that helps you believe that you are more than nothing. These are the mental states of that 87.5% out there, undistracted by Jerry Springer, Donald Trump, Exxon, Chrysler, Sears or Citibank. Is it any wonder that they fear the death of their family structures, their religious values, their cultural traditions, as much as they may welcome deliverance from poverty and disease?

Zogby completed a 6 nation poll in Arab states asking questions about how they viewed American life style, values and policies. While results were largely favorable when questioned about our science and technology, the notion of freedom and democracy, our products and even the American people, when it came to our way of sharing that with the world, our policies, look at the results:

US Policy in Iraq:  (Favorable / Unfavorable)

Morocco: 1/98, Saudi Arabia: 1/97, Jordan: 2/78, Lebanon: 10/84, UAE: 4/91... That’s an average unfavorable view of 89.6%, and the numbers were equally lop-sided when it came to questions on US terrorism policy and our treatment of Palestine. When they see how we act in the world, Islam seems to prefer to keep America at arms length. We are perceived as a great threat, not a saving intervention in their lives. When will we get this?

Looking at radical Islam from this perspective, it can be seen as an almost reflexive effort to protect the Muslim culture from our Brave New World. They dread the commercialization, the loss of morality, the death of honor, the wanton consumption, the godless nature of our society. And they will not abide our preaching at them about freedom and dignity, respect for human values and all the rest. Not after Abu Ghuraib. They don’t want our democracy if it comes part and parcel with the consumer based culture that we have here, and all its meaningless triviality—and particularly when our means of delivering these goods starts with B1 Bombers and cruise missiles.  That’s their number three in a nutshell. They don’t want our way of life. Period. Done. Over.

With that mentality, it can be easy to see why they might eventually plan to unseat pro-Western governments , as happened in Iran when the Shah was supplanted by an Islamic Theocracy. But the radicals have decide to forestall their number three goal for a while, so as not to cause themselves trouble at home. Instead they are moving on to number four…

4) You see, there is still this little mater of the jihad…this business of the infidels out there, scattered all over the globe. It’s one thing to rail against them inside the borders of Islamic countries. But, even if they leave, they have to go somewhere, right? Something tells me, at gut level, that the radicals won’t be happy until there aren’t any more infidels in the world. Now, it’s quite a task to enforce your religious pogrom on the whole of the world, but that seems to be the bill of sale these days if you actually read the political rhetoric coming from the radicals. They want infidels converted, by God…er,  by Allah, that is. And they want it done now.

It’s a tall order, and probably not one they actually hope to achieve. But it makes for a convenient rallying and recruitment call, particularly when they can replay all the ancestral rage and resentment against the West that has been built up since the Crusades first sent armies to secure the “holy land.” Then the West was fighting for control of the one true cross, the relics of Christendom, the one true faith. Now we come to their lands for other reasons: for the oil and gas, for the strategic value of military basing rights, or for the land itself, in some instances. (Read up on the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.)

So, what have they decided to do? Bin Ladin seems to have made a strategic decision to take his Jihad out of Islam and into America and Europe. Terrorism is the perfect vehicle for his war against us. He commands no armies or fleets. He has no Mig-29s—just a cause and a method that seems to be working quite well. Terrorism uses the very strengths we elevate about our way of life against us. It exploits the very openness of our society as a weakness. Our porous borders, unquestioned freedoms, strong civil liberties, are all to be turned against us now, just as our convenient airlines were. 19 men with box cutters changed America forever on 9-11. They put fear into the home of the brave, for one brief moment, but they will not succeed in the long run. It’s really a mosquito against an elephant in the long run. Neither America nor capitalism nor democracy will be destroyed by Bin Ladin and his followers, rest assured. As far as rooting out all the infidels out there—it is a lost cause altogether.

Ghengis Khan came damn close to conquering all of Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. His was the largest empire ever established on earth, but even the Mongols failed to get everyone on the same leash. Bottom line, the radicals can never achieve their number 4. That being said, it’s probably not a good idea to send 500 million women and girls into virtual slavery, so let’s say that they aren’t going to achieve #3 either, at least not in the foreseeable future. A revolution toppling one key nation after another is certainly a possibility, but it will take time, and it will be fiercely resisted.  So, as long as they will never be satisfied by having their way with number 3 and 4—I say they might as well forget about #1 and #2 as well. Face it: The West will not abandon its interest in Middle East oil and gas—at least for another 30 to 50 years or so. And face it: Canada isn’t going to set up New Israel, and the Jews aren’t leaving Palestine any time soon.

Is it just me that thinks the radicals are—well—just plain stupid that they don’t realize this? Do they actually think they can destroy Israel, drive off the West and take full control of the world’s oil, topple all the secular governments and set up their new Islamic Caliphate from Morocco to the Himalayas? Are they serious? Sadly , I think they are. Oh, they can’t accomplish any of this with rifles and RPG-7s, but give them enough dirty bombs, or just a few good live ones, and they could go a long way to ticking number 1 and 2 off their list. It’s those damn, nasty, dirty little nukes—that awful specter of “WMD” that seems to have the West all in a thither these days. We just saw America, “the land of the free,” go off on a military backed shakedown of two whole countries looking for these bad radical Arabs and their WMDs. It was enough to make Commander Queeq blush, yet we acted with the same heedless abandon of that stalwart sea captain in his quest to find those who dared to pilfer his strawberries in the Caine Mutiny.

We sent in waves of Shock & Awe, followed by Abrams tanks and Marines to kick down doors, take names and root out all but a few of the top 52 wanted men with their faces emblazoned on a new deck of playing cards. It was all done Texas style, with posse riding roughshod over anyone who tried to get in the way. (Unfortunately, about 20,000 innocent Iraqi citizens were in the way, and they lost their lives, and that number has since grown). Once we had the “bad guys” all penned up in Abu Ghraib prison, we made them dance around naked, stacked them up for the cameras and snapped off some 1600 photos of the fun and games, of which 12 or so made the press. One only had to look at the harried, sheepish expression on Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s face when the story broke to guess at what was on the other 1582 unreleased photos and videos. Shame, shame, shame. Nothing like losing your moral high ground because of an excess of vigor in the prosecution of the war on terror, eh? The prison scandal set back, by a decade, all that we have been struggling to accomplish against Al Qaeda. It cemented the growing resentment and prejudice in the Muslim world, and served as a huge “we told you so” for the radical recruiters looking for foot soldiers in their jihad. It made a mockery of all our high sounding words about freedom, human dignity, the value of the individual, and democracy.

So we definitely have a problem with our war on terror now, and that is this: it isn’t working. The radicals weren’t scared by the big exploding bombs in Baghdad, and the Iraqi army just went home to rest a while before finding themselves out of a job and deciding to join the radicals. In fact, the radicals decided to take their next vacation in Iraq for the “Occupation” and  used the whole affair to rally to their black banners and stage a mass recruiting party. As much as most Americans delighted to see old Saddam yanked out of that “spider hole,” and his sons Uday and Qusay served up on a morgue platter, there was something  amiss from the very first with the operation. This evil man, this enemy of freedom, Saddam, laden with all these Weapons of Mass Destruction, failed to fire off as much as a pop gun at the US army throughout the whole campaign. If he had ‘em, I mused, he would surely use ‘em before he goes down. As it turns out, the bad guys weren’t so threatening after all. No WMDs, no missiles, no crop dusting planes laden with botulism tanks, no uranium, no VX gas and no nukes. As weeks became months with no discoveries of the dreaded weapons stockpiles, rumors started to be floated that they had been secretly shipped to Iran, Syria or even Sudan.

Now what do we do? Invade Iran? Invade Syria? The limits of American power have been clearly drawn over the last year. We can’t get our allies to go along with us any more, we can’t get NATO or the UN to go along, and it seems that we can’t even fight half a war in Iraq and one intermittent raiding operation in Afghanistan with any hope of success. Believe me, this bungling show of force, misapplied and mishandled once deployed , has not, in any way, frightened our real enemies. Saddam was an enemy of our own making. Our real enemies are still out there, in the caves of Pakistan, in the villages of the Pushtun, out there on the Internet brandishing RPGs in our faces with their badly staged media events, out there riding the horses with the Janjaweed Arab Militias in Sudan.

If you want to find them, you have only to look to places in the world where central governments have failed, and huge, indigent populations are struggling with hunger, disease and violence. In a recent House inquiry into the restructuring of our intelligence systems, the topic shifted to “Terrorist Sanctuaries.” Afghanistan and Pakistan were the two countries that topped the list of the speakers. In Afghanistan, President Karsai is the mayor of Kabul. The Taliban, who simply melted away when we showed up, have returned to the old tribal alliances with the warlords and now control most of the country. The opium trade, which Bin Ladin brokered into dollars to fund his mischief, is again alive and well. US forces, reduced to 10,000 men at one point, (fewer than the security forces assigned to protect Bush on his state visits), have been relegated to border screening operations and a game of hide and seek in the mountains. In these most obvious of sanctuaries, the US seems largely powerless to really control the operations and incubation of more terrorists… Let alone Iraq, which is now a virtual Petri dish breeding one radicalized cell after another. And this is to say nothing of all the other places where terrorism is now rooting itself There was once some edified talk about “drying up the mosquito swamp,” but it has since gone by the wayside.

The mosquito swamp is in that 87.5% out there. Believe it or not, most of the world does not wake up each day worrying about their credit card bills, or the price of gasoline, or the Laci Peterson Murder trial. They don’t get morning delivery of the NY times, or watch FOX news. They are sitting in some rural village, where rumor, the word of a cousin, and an occasional radio broadcast make up their only news of world events. A sizable chunk of the world wakes up and wonders if they’ll be able to find food that day, or if they’ll have the energy to go and look for it, being hobbled by diseases like AIDS, Malaria, Diphtheria, Typhus and a host of others. There are countries out there, in Africa and the Islamic Crescent, where people make annual migrations like animals, driven across borders by hunger, or the rampant chaos and murder of armed men. Can you imagine 1.2 million Californians stampeding across the border into Mexico because of some great disaster or threat to their lives? (As in the recent Hollywood thriller “The Day After.”) That’s what just happened in Sudan.

As long as most of central and southern Africa wallows in poverty, disease and racially based warfare, as long as countless millions go hungry in Bangladesh, India, China, Indonesia and North Korea, the West will never rest easy. Did you know that, even in a country like South Africa, over 40% of all working professionals: doctors, teachers, managers, are infected with AIDS? Imagine that in this country. Just imagine it! Their life spans will be cut short by a third, and when they are gone, what then? Who will take their place?  Did you know that the average annual income in the oil rich kingdom of Saudi Arabia in now half of what it was in the 1970s?  Someone has been collecting and spending all those petro-dollars, but not the rank and file workers and underclass of that society. And this is to say nothing of North Korea, a starving, medieval society with nuclear missiles.

Above: World Hunger regions from starvation (Red) to widespread hunger (Orange) to malnutrition (yellow) to poor nutrition (Green) to wanton excess and gluttony (Gray). Two of the orange starvation areas are now nuclear powers: N. Korea  and Pakistan, along with India (Yellow).

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem, and it isn’t in the current minimum wage here in the US, which would be a windfall to the average person in Africa.  Out of these huge, hungry, and increasingly hopeless, populations we will find our next Bin Ladin. Out of this “arc of instability” will come the radical fighters that will willingly sacrifice themselves to strike what they hope will be the fatal blows against the West. They chatter about it even now on the Internet, in places where computers exist in the Muslim world. The NSA routinely sifts through the stream of e-mail and newsgroup posts with its Eschelon software to identify potential threats. The “bad guys” are snickering to themselves behind their staged beheadings and media boasts. They are speaking of “the death blows” that are imminent.

Of course, they do this precisely because they know we are listening, watching, from Eschelon to CNN to FOX news. While the balloons fall in our rousing political conventions, the stoplight warning for terror threats goes from amber to orange during our elections and holidays. We are watching, listening, trying to discern, with antiquated intelligence methods, what may be going on in the minds of small groups of radicalized men, or even a single individual, who might open fire with a gun in our crowded shopping malls one day and wreak havoc on our holiday shopping season. The problem is, we are looking in the wrong place. By the time we get to our electronic eavesdropping, our special forces rappelling down ropes from silent helicopters, by the time we get to sending our legions off to the parched deserts of the world, the battle is already lost. All these things are corrective measures, like our present treatments to cancer, which must be burned, poisoned or cut out of the body once it becomes rooted. And, like a cancer that began long ago in the hungry, lawless, ignored regions of the earth, it has metastasized to little radicalized cells, spreading all over the world to foster ill will against the West, the US, Capitalism, or whatever they hold to be their enemy these days.

Misapplied Millions

Of the billions that went to US corporate contractors, a sum three times our USAID donation, (some 900 million dollars according to the GAO), has simply disappeared. It is missing, vanished, or rather “unaccounted for.” I wonder where it went? Could it have gone into the coffers of Halliburton, Kellog Brown & Root, Bechtel? Halliburton alone has now racked up over $50 billion in contracts for Iraq. And do you have any idea what it costs for us to deploy a sub to the Arabian Gulf and fire off a salvo of cruise missiles at a suspected terrorist “training” camp? (You’ve seen the footage: twenty guys with checkered scarves on their faces running around a barren gully and jumping over makeshift obstacles as though they were going to catch the very next plane to New York and ply their craft in the Long Island Tunnel.) It costs billions to build, deploy and use that sub…and this is a huge misapplication of our dollars and energy.

What could we do with all that money that goes into defense each year? We could, instead, go into Sudan, into Nigeria, into Chad, and yes, into Palestine, and raise up the struggling, hopeless peoples there. For the cost of just one of our 15 carrier task forces, great for shooting down Mig-29s, we could end world hunger. We could build schools, stock them with good books and hire the teachers. Lord, we could practically buy every person in Palestine an air conditioned condo with the money we will spend on our 2005 Military budget, which is $420.7 Billion dollars.

We have our “Great Society” here, with a supermarket, computer shop, video store, auto dealership and discount warehouse on damn near every block. What do the rest have out there? The average American earns $36,200 per year, and probably feels poor to live on that little. The average Afghan, however, must labor 40 years (all their adult life, if they live so long) to earn the typical amount an American makes each year. Some are lucky to have a small hut, with thatched roof. Some count themselves rich to own a herd of five goats or a cow. They have never heard of a thing called a school, never seen a movie, never ridden in an elevator or even a car. As long as these populations exist, there will be fertile ground for Radical Islam to find new recruits. Out of hopelessness, poverty, neglect and war, come our real enemies. Out of Africa we will find the seed of our real peril, for until these “have nots” get the barest modicum of the things they need to survive, there will be continual strife and increasing terrorism in the world. A blind man could see it.

Did you know that an annual expenditure of just $13 Billion would provide enough to fulfill the nutritional requirements of every hungry person on earth? To date we have spent 23 times that, some $300 billion, on Iraq…(enough to feed the hungry in the world for twenty years.) We have spent an equal amount on “Homeland Security”—enough to treat every AIDS case on earth for five years. (Do you feel safer?) With the $420.7 billion we plan on sinking into defense next year, we could feed the hungry for thirty-two years. Think that would make a difference out there? Believe me, three square meals, a little hope, health care when you are sick, and an educational system that actually allows the discourse of ideas are the only ground in which freedom and democracy can grow. Without them, terrorism grows in its place, like a weed infesting a garden.

If we were to take away all the trinkets, electronic gadgets and appliances that Americans play with each day, and reduce their income to $1000. per year, do you think we would still have a functioning democracy here? Lord! Just look at how we behave after a mass power failure, or in something like the LA riots or New Orleans, where much of the looting was simply opportunistic “get mine now” behavior. We go about preaching democracy, without realizing that it takes a stable economy with well fed people to make that work. In the meantime, because it isn’t working in the hungry places of the world, we will spend more on defense next year than all the other nations on earth combined. All of them! What are we protecting? What armies have dared to set foot on our shores? What navies threaten our coastlines, what planes darken our skies? Do we actually expect legions of Chinese to para-drop from the sky, or waves of Sudanese militia to paddle over here in canoes? Who has died in America at the hand of our radicalized enemies for the last five years? Not a single person. What, then, are we protecting with all this money?

The Wheels Must Turn

Regrettably, it’s a “lifestyle” that we are guarding now, freedom to consume. We are worried as much about the vulnerability of our “infrastructure” as anything else. It is not that we fear a few thousand more Americans will die in a terror attack, for that would be an insignificant blow against our nearly 300 million population. What we really fear is the monetary damage such an attack would cause to our economy, and to the corporations that continually feed on it. We can’t have our stock markets closed, our airlines grounded, our baseball games in limbo, as they were after 9-11. The wheels would stop turning if that happened, and we live in an economy where the wheels must always turn.

The West has been pumping Oil and Gas out of Arabia at a record pace for the last 30 years ... How would we feel if the Chinese were cutting down trees here at that clip... no matter what they paid for them...and if they had fleets off shore to make sure nobody interfered with the annual tree harvest? Do you think there might be some radical American groups forming to go after the Chinese? You betcha...

Americans expect that their lives will always get better. They expect more food, lower prices, better technology, and more convenience at every turn. Just Ask Wal Mart. I went out to my car after writing a first draft of this article and found it did not immediately turn over. After opening the hood and looking inside…and being completely nonplussed as to what I was looking at, I just got in and turned the key again, fingers crossed that it would work this time. Thankfully, it started up just fine. But in that moment of unexpected anxiety, when I first turned the key and heard the engine cough, I was a bit like America on 9-11. The wheels were not going to turn for me! How terribly inconvenient! As I gazed at the morass of gizmos, hoses and soot -covered metal under the hood of my car, I was running scenarios through my head….Now what? Do I call a friend for a ride home? Call AAA for a roadside rescue job? Do I walk home today?  I was reminded of the hundreds of thousands who did just that when the lights went out on the East Coast a few months back.

Like me, most of America takes it for granted that when they turn the key, the engine will always start; the wheels will always turn, and there will always be cheap gas in the tank to make it all go. My own experience made me realize just how inconvenient terrorism is. The walk home would have probably done me some good, but the ride home when my car decided to start just seemed so much nicer. We’ve grown so accustomed to our modern lifestyle that I wonder what would happen to us if our enemies ever managed to really pull off  a paralyzing attack—with a small Nuke or Dirty bomb, or something else in the WMD category.

The sad truth of my experience was brought home when the first Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge took center stage to give an unprecedented Sunday afternoon news conference to warn us all again. They are after us, and they want to knock down more buildings. He ticked off a list of suspected prime targets: The World Bank building, the International Monetary Fund Building, the vast concrete castles of Citicorp. In short, buildings, banks, (or as Clinton once said: “It’s the economy, stupid.”) Radical Islam, thinking they can gain some advantage, is actually trying to take down capitalism with a few truck bombs! They would never succeed , of course, but they would certainly cause a nasty dip in profits, wouldn’t they? And a nasty dip in profits is enough to drain the blood from a rich man’s face. Come to find out—all the data prompting the alert was later found to have pre-9-11 file dates. In short, we were just finding out about it, and scrambling to tighten security around all those buildings, only we were three or four years late! When former Democratic candidate Howard Dean intimated that there might be some press manipulation going on, he was quickly shouted down by the Republicans for his “inappropriate” statements.

Like my car, the security Czar was only playing a little trick on us. A day later the financial centers went blithely about their business, just as my engine started a moment after I closed the hood cover and tried the ignition again. But fear, it seems, is a powerful way to get someone’s attention. Fear raised the alert level, and pulled top billing in all major news media that weekend. And it all came down to the same flutter of anxiety that I felt when my car wouldn’t start.

It’s high time we admitted the fact to ourselves: Our enemies are after us where they think they can hurt us. They want to target our infrastructure and economy, which the government now equates with “the American Way of Life.” They want to stop the wheels. It isn’t American people the government is really worried about losing, it’s buildings. We can’t have any more skyscrapers tumbling down, no more power failures, no disruption in the continually corrupt trading on Wall Street. The wealthy must be free to make their stock deals, legal or illegal, just ask Martha Stewart.

So now we are worried about the banks, those virtuous, upstanding pillars of our free economy and society. I suppose we should be worried about them, because they literally own everything in the country: all the houses, prime acreage, cars, trucks, yachts, and most capital equipment is financed by the banks, and therefore owned by the banks until it is paid off in full. We should be worried for them, because they provide 90 % of the spending power the typical American has, in nifty little plastic cards with holographic logos on them and convenient magnetic stripes. If the banks get hurt, why then, they might have to pass that hurt along to all the rest of us. We might have our already usurious credit card interest rates raised from 19% to 29%...we might find it harder to borrow for that new car, refrigerator, home theater setup, computer, or the outrageously expensive college fund for our kids. So, by all means, guard those banks. Jack up that terror lamp from Amber to Orange, roll out the concrete barricades. Get the dogs out on a long, long leash. Like Martha Steward, who passed off her stock trade shenanigans as a small personal matter, we don’t want to be inconvenienced if a truck bomb blows up Citicorp…or even Yankee Stadium.

Article By: John Schettler

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