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Dangerously Adrift in a Sea of Fantasy
By Ray Pavlak, Winsted
 | | Caitlyn Cook participated with the Love At Work Band at Thomaston Library on June 1. Photo/Robin Gourd. |
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I'm frightened! It is not a fear of personal death from a terrorist bomb or attack, but of the death of our nation as a democratic republic. I believe we are allowing ourselves to be stampeded into supporting a presidential declaration of war because of the tragic loss of so many lives in the attack mounted against us on September 11, 2001.
Let's stop to look rationally at the situation before that day and the response by our leaders in Washington since the attack occurred. Let's look at our history, which has much to tell us about ways that we might now proceed.
More and more, I am becoming convinced that the "War on Terrorism" is an unnecessary war declared and dragged on by the present administration in Washington for reasons that were never mentioned, but that are starting to become evident.
First, we were embarrassed in being caught flatfooted by the terrorists. Yet, it wasn't as if they appeared overnight from out of the blue. They, the Muslim extremist groups, had declared the Western, Christian governments—especially the U.S., the leader of these governments and a staunch supporter of Israel—as their enemy. We know they bombed American embassies, attacked the Cole, a U.S. naval vessel, and exploded a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center in the months and years preceding 9/11. Still the FBI, CIA, military intelligence, etc. said after the attack that they had received no warning that such an operation was in progress. But as time passed, more and more indications came to light that our security groups did indeed have warnings of a coming assault.
 | | Kathy Bloom of the Love at Work Band with participants Jessica Ireland, Cole Ireland and Caitlyn Cook at the Thomaston Library on June 1. Photo/Robin Gourd. |
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The new excuse, after it became public that many clues were known before 9/11, was that there was a failure to communicate: "No one connected the dots." In truth, the dots had been connected before 9/11 by the agents of the FBI's Minneapolis field office, but the officials at the Washington headquarters prevented the information from going any further, did nothing themselves, and would not even give permission to the field agents to break the case. (Read in-depth articles in Time, June 3, 2002.)
After the attacks were traced to Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and after the Taliban in Afghanistan refused to turn him over for trial, I supported President Bush's decision to go after bin Laden. This effort has been a heroic one, and thankfully has resulted in few casualties. There have been puzzling aspects, however, such as our failure to bring bin Laden to trial and justice. Do we really want to bring him back "dead or alive," as Mr. Bush once said?
Why do I ask this? Well, we know the bin Laden family is a very wealthy and powerful group in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. need for oil and an ally in the Muslim world seemingly requires us to move carefully and speak softly to the Arabian king. It was reported that right after the 9/11 attack, when all commercial air traffic was grounded, a private plane flew around the U.S. picking up members of the bin Laden family and taking them out of the country. Now, this might have been for their protection, but the FBI wanted to question members of the bin Laden family and advised against letting them leave.
Another puzzling aspect regarding the apprehension of Osama bin Laden is that he requires dialysis. How is he serviced (and so secretly) while on the run?
I feel that the broadening of U.S. military action to fighting terrorism (even state-aided terrorism) around the world was unnecessary, much too ambitious a goal, and too prone to subjective judgment as to which governments are terrorist. A prime example is the speech by President Bush that described an "Axis of Evil" that included North Korea and Iraq.
There is serious talk about invading Iraq because it is supposed to be a threat. To whom? By what means? Yet, we are willing to make nuclear reactors available to North Korea because we say they say they will use them for peaceful purposes, to generate electricity—even though they have operational long-range rockets, which Iraq doesn't. More weird is that we are not happy that the Russians remain firm about selling nuclear reactors to Iraq, even though they say that these are for peaceful purposes as well.
Evil and terrorism have been with man for a long time. Even state-supported terrorism is far from new. The British government encouraged and equipped Indian tribes to raid and pillage along the American frontier during and after the Revolutionary War to discourage further American settlement in the trans-Appalachian territory they coveted. A more recent example is to look at the terrorist activities in their younger days of Begin and Sadat, who later forged a peace between Israel and Egypt with the help of President Carter in the 1970s.
What needs to be done? We need a bipartisan investigation of the 9/11 attack, just as was done after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. It will not suffice to let the agencies who failed to prevent the attack do an in-house study, nor to accuse those who favor this approach of being unpatriotic. The aim is not to lay blame, but to find and correct the weaknesses which allowed the tragedy to happen.
We, from the administration and congress to the citizens of this nation, need to study and debate the policy alternatives which ought to flow from this look at ourselves. Things like whether there should be a War on Terrorism—and, if so, what the parameters should be.
President Bush unilaterally committed us to a war without limits either as to objectives or duration. Even the U.S. does not have the resources or emotional capacity to go on forever. We should determine how far we are willing to or even need to surrender our individual freedoms or to curtail our rights in exchange for national security and independence.
The longer we stay on a war footing the more likely our rights will slip away, along with our resolve to maintain a democratic republic. Contrary to the warning of President Eisenhower, we may come to believe that we cannot survive economically without being on a perpetual war footing.
Will a modern Nero say to our president one day, as Nero did to Claudius, an emperor who wanted a republic but who ruled by will of the praetorian guard: "Oh, uncle, nobody believes in the Republic any more"?
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