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PUBLIC PRINTS  Do unpopular government policies inspire terrorist acts like the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City or do such attacks stem from hatred of the Western way of life? |
For Pres. Barack Obama
of TheColumnists.com
I sometimes wonder if President Obama is reading some of the same things in the public prints that catch my eye.
A study by a Princeton University scholar stated that broad disapproval toward the policies of the United States and other world powers may provide the fuel for terrorist acts. The research co-authored by Alan Krueger, now on leave as chief economist of the Treasury Department, counters a common view that terrorists simply target the Western way of life.
On the contrary, our policies seem to matter, says the analysis printed in the Journal of Science and quoted in a Sept. 20 Philadelphia Inquirer article by Tom Avril. It says that if the leaders of a given world power make decisions that are unpopular in a particular Middle Eastern or African country, terrorists from that country are more likely to launch an attack on the larger nation.
Paul R. Pillar, a professor of security studies at Georgetown, who was not part of the research, said, “The implication is we need to shape our policy, at least certainly in the Middle East, in ways that do not engender more hatred.”
He added that the findings debunked the view that terrorism arose solely from the extremist views of the terrorists. “The greater the level of disapproval toward another country’s leadership, the greater the likelihood that some small portion of the population feels strongly enough to make the leap to extremism.”
Pillar was deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA from 1997 to 1999 and is director of graduate studies at Georgetown’s Security Studies Program. He raised these questions in a Washington Post op-ed article:
How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland?
“The answer," he wrote: “is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism.”
He said, “Consider: the preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan, but rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain, and flight schools in the United States.”
He acknowledged that a haven in Afghanistan would be of use to a terrorist group. But he questioned whether “preventing such a haven would reduce the terrorist threat to the United Staes enough to offset the required expenditure of blood and treasure. Thwarting the creation of a physical haven also would have to offset any boost to anti-U.S. terrorism stemming from perceptions that the United States had become an occupier rather than a defender in Afghanistan.”
Amidst the moves toward sending more troops into Afghanistan, I am struck anew by an exchange that David Halberstam described in “The Best and the Brightest.” As plans were being developed for the expansion of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, McGeorge Bundy, an assistant to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, showed some of the elaborate plans to one of his aides.
The aide was impressed but concerned. “The thing that bothers me,” he told Bundy.”is that no matter what we do to them, they live there and we don’t, and they know that someday we’ll go away and thus they know they can outlast us.”
President Obama’s seemingly tireless, fruitless attempts to get Republican cooperation in framing health insurance legislation inspired an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Marshall U. professor Jean Edward Smith. It included these paragraphs:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt relished the opposition of vested interests. He fashioned his governing majority by deliberately attacking those who favored the status quo. His opponents hated him-and he profited from their hatred. ‘Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today’ he told a national radio audience on the eve of the 1936 election. ‘They are unanimous in their hatred for me-and I welcome their hatred.’…
“Roosevelt was a divider, not a uniter, and he unabashedly waged class war. At the Democratic Convention in 1936, again speaking to a national radio audience, Roosevelt lambasted the ‘economic royalists’ who had gained control of the nation’s wealth. To Congress he boasted of having ‘earned the hatred of entrenched greed.’ In another he mocked ‘the gentlemen in well-warmed and well-stocked clubs’ who criticized the government’s relief efforts.”
One of the developments in the health care fight that initially sparked the opposition to health insurance reform was a report from the Congressional Budget Office about how expensive the plans considered by the Democrats would be. That got the Republicans and reactionary herds screaming about protecting their grandchildren.
An op-ed piece in The NY Times last month probably should receive more attention. Jon R. Gabel, a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center of the U. of Chicago did a study that argued that the Congressional Budget office inflates the cost of Medicare.
He wrote “The Congressional Budget Office’s consistent forecasting errors arose not from any partisan bias, but from its methods of projection…The budget office’s cautious methods may have unintended consequences in the current health care reform effort. By underestimating the savings that can come from improved Medicare payment procedures and other cost-control initiatives, the budget office leads Congress to think that politically unpopular cost-cutting will have at best, only modest effects. This, in turn, forces Congress to believe it can pay for reform only by raising taxes, which then makes reform legislation more difficult to pass."
Even if these savings don’t overcome the projected costs of health care reform, the goal of providing health care for all is too important to be cut down by the kinds of entrenched interests FDR fought. The Republican reactionaries never worry about costs to their grandchildren when we spend billions on ill-conceived wars that send would-be fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers to their deaths."
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Sept. 28, 2009.
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