Those of us who had the luxury of a late-night DVD viewing or those who chanced on an HBO replay of an early sci-fi thriller, whose hero (Tom Cruise) plays a future cop doing his errands of arresting potential criminals on the basis of a supposedly perfect batting average of ESP-gifted indivduals in predicting who would turn out as criminals, would shudder that this strange Orwellian scenario is playing out in real time, as we find our lives transformed into the security-focused ,racial-profiled paranoia that would readily agree to a war outside of US soil.
In the movie,the ESP-gifted individuals are so perfect in their prediction that the time, place and person carrying out the crime, are seen and documented in holographic images that are supposedly unarguable and worthy of sentencing. It was a very efficient way to get rid of crime and criminals- arrest them before the crime is committed. In our reality, we have the supposedly reliable equivalent of these ESP-gifted individuals - the US Intelligence Community. We, of course, have to factor in, the bad reviews they and their international counterparts have had from the pertinent quality control government agencies, and we lie in constant discomfort that their judgement calls might cause us a loss in our paycheck or the ruin of our economy altogether. Hey, a war economy may not be a bad option.
The movie gives a twist, though ( as all movies do) when Tom Cruise in his routine inspection of future crime images sees himself as the criminal. Did by any chance anybody in the White House see this movie? Com'on,not even a DVD copy? Well, then the US Doctrine of Pre-emptive War must be original.
Well, the point is, there never is a perfect system, you know. We just have to find those WMD until we find them. How about the world-class criminals of the earth? Did we know that Hitler got legally voted into power not because the Germans were evil, but because at a certain point in history, they were weary of their economy, of their national humiliation from the First World War and they needed a leader- a national saviour of sorts to get out of a rut. In other words, they were vulnerable, much like 9/11 has made a lot of us feel. And that's the real danger there. As the images of barbarism from the enemy come across from the TV screen, we'll hear a lot more calls about having a "fearless leader" to lessen this vulnerability. As we surrender more of our security concerns to this leader, we'll eventually be finding ourselves led from one war to another where the only solution is another war or worse an upgrade of the current war to..nuclear (?) proportions. Feel more secure now?
Nobody seems to be interested in finding out why 9/11 occurred. The previous global events from the backlash of the Balfour Declaration creating the state of Israel out of an old piece of land called Palestine seem disconnected. Or is it? What about the UN Resolution that followed pushing for accomodation between Israelis and Palestinians? And the War that followed where we helped our ally, Israel get the upper hand? Did the enemy then just happen to be mostly Muslims - the very Muslims who gave birth to the forerunner of the bin Ladens and Zarqawis terrorizing our backyard? The earlier desperate strategies of the PLO as they debuted in the Munich Olympics and the Intifada that followed afterwards - did they elicit any political response from us in so far as seeing a powder keg in the Middle East defused ? Didn't we just make sure that our ally was satisfied with its gains, told the other party to make peace and sounded off their claims with "tough luck" and our return to evening football TV? Now, the mess we more not less ,had a hand in shaping, is coming back to us in terms of guerilla terrorists who operate without borders. What do we do ? We nuke them,eventually, of course. Let's see where that gets us.
There's a religious element inserted here, of course and it wasn't inserted by us . When you make the enemy desperate for solutions, you tend to make him cling to something more superior, like a God. It's caused a worldwide spillover where we see events affecting our military forces in Africa, our allies in Asia and even Europe, and worse we get confirmations that, yes, Muslims, specially impoverished ones, support their cause, and yes, some wealthy ones even do clandestinely. We have to provide the enemy with an acceptable political option rather than deprive him of all possible political solutions, driving him to desperate terrorist tactics. Didn't you get it yet? We're all connected. An injustice or even perceived injustice can't just go away if we ignore it.
But we have to go about it intelligently. And that has nothing at all to do with nuking.
Let's go back to the movie. (got carried away there). Like I said the twist revealed that despite what we perceive as a perfect system or solution, there simply isn't any, and what we can do at the moment is to see that the system gets to be subjected to checks and balances too , and hope that with enough of these checks around, we can can have a better shot at hoping that our decision will be the right one. That's the beauty with democracy, despite the noise it creates, it's self-correcting and when people really live up to its ideals, it's self-healing too.
So, what if ...Saddam had these WMD and was going to negotiate with terrorists to nuke us? So what if.... France had ties with extraterrestials and our intelligence info gave us some..some evidence that maybe..maybe the French and the extraterrestials would occupy the US in a month. Shouldn't we pre-empt this possibilty with a nuclear strike?
What if..we're wrong? Well, tough luck. Anyway, there's that football game to go back to. Nobody better mention that we made a mistake. It destroys our macho image in the world and every country would pick on us. Anyway, where's your patriotism?
Oh yes, the movie.. It had a happy ending. You know, Tom Cruise gets the girl,gets his life back and everybody's happy. There's a message there somewhere. Something about killing the forest before the forest fires spreads. Remember that ?
