When Threats Are Real, Why Multiply Them?

By Matthew Rothschild

The arrests of 21 terror suspects in England remind us that the threat from Al Qaeda or its offspring remains real.

I’ve never doubted that, even though Bush and Cheney make shameless political hay out of it.

So, yes, we need to be on our guard.

And yes, we need heightened security.

Bush and Blair have been reinforcing the creed of the fanatic.But the Bush folks haven’t done a great job of it.

They’ve failed to ensure that all bags on planes are screened properly.

They’ve left our ports wide open to terrorism.

And they haven’t safeguarded our nuclear or chemical plants.

What’s more, you can tighten security all you want but if you keep manufacturing terrorists, at some point they’re going to succeed.

And that’s what Bush’s policies have been doing, especially the Iraq War and the U.S. support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Less than a week before the bomb plot was cracked, Robert Fisk of the London Independent [1] issued a warning from Lebanon.

After surveying the scene in Qana, he wrote: “A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11.”

Hours before the bomb plot was cracked, I was talking with Jennifer Loewenstein, a research fellow at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Center, who has spent a lot of time in Gaza and Israel and Lebanon. She told me there would be many 9/11s to come, some even worse than 9/11. She said she’s noticed a change in people’s attitudes in the region, an erasing of the distinction between the American people and the U.S. government.

No longer are Americans assumed to be good, and only the government itself responsible for the policies that inflict such harm. Now, more and more, U.S. citizens themselves are being identified and blamed with their government.

This is not to excuse or to justify in any way the hideousness of the terror that was being planned, or the culpability that any conspirators bear for the mass murder they contemplated.

No one should sympathize with or extenuate for anyone who would do harm to a single individual, much less someone who would murder hundreds of innocents.

Nor can every fanatical act of terrorism be traced to Washington or London. Al Qaeda and similar groups have their own twisted ideology that mixes nihilistic violence with anti-Semitism, misogyny, Islamic fundamentalism, and fantasies of a restored Muslim empire.

But Bush and Blair have been playing the part Osama bin Laden assigned to them.

They are brutally occupying one Arab country.

They are supporting the invasion of another by Israel.

And they continue to let Israel inflict collective punishment on the Palestinians in Gaza.

By so doing, Bush and Blair have been reinforcing the creed of the fanatic.

That won’t make us any safer here at home.