NEW YORK — We should all admit that nobody really knows what is going on with this war. How can they? What are its precedents? Who has any relevant experience? How do you defeat an invisible enemy without armies, navies and air forces but who manages to reproduce and expand every time you attack it?

IT’S NOT CLEAR what the right weapons in this struggle are or even if the word "war" is more than a metaphor — and a misplaced one at that. The satirical Web site The Onion made this point better than anyone with its mock story, that claimed "In a televised address to the American people Tuesday, a determined President Bush vowed that the U.S. would defeat ‘whoever exactly it is we’re at war with here.’ "

WAR WITH PARADOXES

This is a "war" in which the paradoxes outnumber the common-sense assumptions. It began with a murderous attack carried out with only box-cutters and civilian airlines. We are bombing a nation that already lives in the stone age, due to previous wars, who will be fighting back against us using anti-aircraft stinger missiles that we gave them. And we are doing the bombing — at least in part — so that we can send them packets of peanut butter and jelly. This is a ‘war’ in which the paradoxes outnumber the common-sense assumptions.

Owing to Osama bin Laden’s amazing television broadcast on Sunday, courtesy of al-Jazeera TV, we now, at least, have a reasonably certain idea of who is attacking us. That solves one problem, but it hardly provides a road map for how to proceed. Bin Laden is just one man with a few hundred million dollars, but the masses for whom he speaks — and who celebrated this tragedy in the Arab "street" can continue his war long after he is gone — even assuming we can find him.

A VIRAL ENEMY

Terror is like a microbe that feeds on the body of an open society. How much can we inoculate ourselves before we allow the vaccine to become a disease of its own? Should the White House Press Secretary be telling all Americans to be careful about what we say? Should editors and reporters be fired for criticizing President Bush? Should media companies be censoring daily comics and rock and roll radio? And what of the plans to "unleash" the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation? How much is enough? How much is too much? Should we be fighting Iraq and Syria as well — or will that merely make the problem worse?

Bin Laden’s Sunday broadcast was amazing on any number of levels. It did, after all, demonstrate an important difference between the kind of society we are protecting and the ones he is seeking. Bin Laden’s Sunday broadcast was amazing on any number of levels. It did, after all, demonstrate an important difference between the kind of society we are protecting and the ones he is seeking.

After all, no state run by an Islamic fundamentalist government would ever dream of broadcasting a speech by George W. Bush to its people, while every U.S. network carried bin Laden here, even without permission to do so. More important, the bin Laden broadcast demonstrates the global reach of our enemy and the potentially endless nature of the problem. If al Jazeera can communicate with the Arab "street" as well or better than CNN, then bin Laden and his cohorts and allies can go over the heads of more conservative governments and foment revolution from below. That makes it much trickier for these governments to offer public support for our efforts — even though the danger to them is far greater than it is to us. How’s that for a paradox?

IN THE NAME OF ‘FREEDOM’

Wait, it gets worse. Apparently, the Bush government has been leaning on the government of Qatar to try to put a muzzle on al Jazeera because it considers some of its broadcasts to be inflammatory against both the United States and Israel. So the nation that is fighting for freedom is asking other nations for press censorship against the people fighting for religious autocracy. Meanwhile, also in the name of freedom, the United States is embracing anti-democratic autocrats left and right. We are suddenly newly understanding of the need to crush dissidents and jail thousands of Muslims in Uzbekistan and of Vladimir Putin’s need to destroy the remnants of civilized life in Chechnya. We are no longer interested in the anti-democratic origins of the current regime in Pakistan, or the human rights implications of Turkey’s war on its Kurdish population. Again, all of these actions could inspire more popular hatred against us and potentially more terrorism, but how else to fight a world war except on the side of people whose actions you don’t approve? (Remember "Uncle" Joe Stalin?)

GETTING ISRAEL RIGHT

If al Jazeera can communicate with the Arab "street" as well or better than CNN, then bin Laden and his cohorts and allies can go over the heads of more conservative governments and foment revolution from below.

And Israel? Nobody really knew what to do about Israel even before the crisis; now, getting it right may be a matter of life and death. Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is worried that the U.S. is planning another Munich-style appeasement by forcing Israel to make a peace agreement with the Palestinians in order to smooth Arab opposition to the U.S.-led war. Commentators on both the pro-Sharon right and the anti-Sharon left agree that Israel is itself the problem. But many on both sides believe the exact opposite: that we would be under attack even if Israel did not exist. The problem, in other words, is modernity itself. And even if we did lean on Israel —which its conservative supporters oppose, regardless of consequences — we end up solving nothing. To top it all, you can find evidence for either view in the final sentences of Osama bin Laden’s chilling broadcast: "I swear by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad."

When the bombing of Afghanistan resumed Monday night [Oct. 8], retired generals showed no fatigue at their posts under hot lights at network studios. On CNN, former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark teamed up with Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd to explain military strategies; they were sharing their insights as employees of AOL Time Warner.

Far away, missiles are flying and bombs are exploding -- but in televisionland, a sense of equilibrium prevails. The tones are calm; the correspondents are self-composed. News bulletins crawl across the bottom of the screen, along with invitations to learn more. "Take a 3-D look at U.S. military aircraft at CNN.com."

At Pentagon briefings, carried live, the secretary of defense bears a chilling resemblance to a predecessor named McNamara. But the language of Donald Rumsfeld is thoroughly modern, foreshadowing a war without end: "In this battle against terrorism, there is no silver bullet." But there will be many bullets, missiles and bombs. We hear the customary assurances that air strikes will be surgical, and Rumsfeld echoes the metaphor: "Terrorism is a cancer on the human condition."

The reports about the bombing are laced with references to airborne food drops. Details have been sketchy. But self-congratulation has been profuse on television, now a free-fire zone for war propaganda.

Sunday night [Oct. 7], on "Larry King Live," a bipartisan panel of senators affirmed their loyalty to the president. The ranking GOP member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a former secretary of the navy, illuminated our goodness. Sen. John Warner said: "This, I think, is the first time in contemporary military history where a military operation is being conducted against the government of a country, and simultaneously, with the troops carrying out their mission, other troops are trying to take care of the innocent victims who all too often are caught in harm's way."

Hours after Warner's explanation of American saintliness, the UN's World Food Program halted its convoys of emergency aid to Afghanistan because of the bombing campaign. Meanwhile, private relief workers voiced escalating alarm. A news release, put out by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org), quoted the president of the humanitarian aid organization Conscience International, Jim Jennings: "Food drops from high altitudes alone absolutely cannot provide sufficient and effective relief that is urgently necessary to prevent mass starvation."

The U.S. government sent two C-17 planes to drop rations. Jennings, who has been involved in humanitarian work around the world for two decades, was not impressed. At a single camp inside Afghanistan, in Herat, "there are 600,000 people on the verge of starvation," he said. "If you provide one pound of food per day, the minimum for bare survival, it would take 500 planeloads a month to supply the one camp in Herat alone, and Afghanistan is the size of Texas. The administration has stated that two aircraft are being used for food relief so far -- for all of Afghanistan."

Avowedly, the main targets of the bombing are the people in the Bin Laden network. But the rhetorical salvoes will be understood, all too appropriately, in wider contexts. "We will root them out and starve them out," Rumsfeld said, just before closing a news conference with a ringing declaration: "We are determined not to be terrorized."

"That last quote says it all," MSNBC anchor Brian Williams interjected a moment later, before going to "NBC military analyst" Bernard Trainor, a former Marine Corps general. Like the other ex-generals on network payrolls, Trainor consistently uses the word "we" to describe U.S. military actions. ("We now have the capability...") High-tech maps and video graphics are profuse during the explications of war-game scenarios.

Former diplomats can play too. On NBC, Richard Holbrooke -- a media favorite who engineered the diplomatic runup to the bombing of Yugoslavia in spring 1999 -- chatted with Tom Brokaw while using a pointer and a bright-lit map to elucidate geopolitical dynamics.

Constantly crawling across TV screens, snippets of quotes blur together... Bin Laden saying that believers will triumph, Bush declaring "may God continue to bless America," the Taliban accusing the U.S. of "terrorist" attacks... As time goes on, the adversaries increasingly seem to be talking each other's language.

The on-screen logos, spangled in red-white-and-blue, exude pride in a nation resurgent. CBS has opted for "America Fights Back." NBC and MSNBC are using "America Strikes Back." At times, MSNBC switches to an alternate buzz phrase: "Homeland Defense."

Supposedly, bombing Afghanistan is going to make us safer back here in the USA. Yet hours after the attacks began on Oct. 7, the FBI called for heightened alerts across the United States -- because the risk of another deadly attack in this country had just increased. If war can be peace, why can't greater danger bring us greater security?

By Monday afternoon, networks were showing bombers taking off from aircraft carriers, en route to Afghanistan. MSNBC's viewers saw footage of warheads with "NYPD" scrawled on them; in the background, an American Flag fluttered on deck.

And so, a bait-and-switch process of patriotic imagery is near completion. For weeks, in the aftermath of the horrendous events of Sept. 11, the public embraced Old Glory as a symbol of grief, human solidarity and love of country. Now the ubiquitous American Flag is being affixed to military means of destruction.

Every day we are told that everything has changed, but some things have remained depressingly consistent. We still see partisans misusing patriotic rhetoric for their own narrow gain, and we still hear demands for conformity in the name of national unity. In some quarters, those unhealthy habits—already widespread during the months since the disputed election last fall—have only intensified over the past three weeks.

Both liberals and conservatives have fallen afoul of the newly self-appointed monitors of moral seriousness. And as predicted in this space, certain commentators have pointed a quivering finger of accusation at officials supposedly responsible for the government’s failure to prevent the terrorist assault of Sept. 11. Such opportunistic attacks are often uttered in the same breath as appeals to stand together against the common foe.

At a time when the Attorney General is calling for sharply increased powers of federal surveillance and detention, the ingrained hostility toward dissent is not only illiberal, but potentially dangerous.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this kind of conduct is emanating mostly from the political right, whose leading spokespeople seem to feel that we are all obliged to line up behind their agenda, to blame their targets, and to refrain from questioning any action by their favorite politicians. (At the same time, curiously enough, these same figures also feel free to launch vicious broadsides against anyone whose views they disdain, including even high officials of the current administration. But that kind of hypo-crisy only underlines the attempt to stifle criticism from the left.)

Under this dispensation, it is fine for corporate lobbyists and their Congressional allies to seek corporate tax cuts and capital-gains bonanzas, supposedly in response to the terrorist emergency. And it is fine for the White House to insist on full funding of its ineffectual missile shield, even as more pressing security needs are underfunded. But it is "unpatriotic" to criticize those warped priorities, and anyone who does so risks being admonished—or worse—by the right-thinking and right-leaning.

What a democratic culture needs to thrive is not conformity, however, but civility—a quality noticeably absent from American political debate over the past decade, when the politics of personal destruction reached a virulent peak.

Civility is what will enable the nation to resolve the exceptionally difficult questions that we now confront in a strange and sometimes hostile world, questions that were evaded or ignored while those who dominated politics and the media pursued petty partisan vendettas. Conformity is what characterized the low, dishonest and hypocritical period that has now passed, a time when exposing the President’s private life took precedence over all the real issues that now unavoidably preoccupy us. How small that obsession now seems, and how perverse. One measure of the warped priorities of the recent past is that the F.B.I. assigned so many agents to investigate pseudo-scandals involving the previous administration, while reportedly failing to fully spend its increased budget for counter-terrorism.

A few honest conservatives, notably Christopher Caldwell, have looked backward with a wry acknowledgment of these realities. More than a few have instead insisted on continuing their political jihad, with obtuse attempts to blame Bill Clinton for what happened on Sept. 11. This is quite a stretch even for the likes of Andrew Sullivan and Dick Morris, whose own unhappy experiences with a prurient press have done little to improve their understanding of the Clinton era. Mr. Sullivan, a person of English origin, presumes to instruct Americans on the finer points of patriotic duty, distinguishing between the stalwarts of the "red" Republican regions and the squishes of the "blue" Democratic states. He lectures about these categories while simultaneously calling upon all good citizens of whatever ideology to give President Bush a fair chance, and doesn’t notice the contradiction.

It is entirely possible, and perfectly patriotic, to disagree strongly with George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and other government leaders on issues of civil liberties, foreign policy and defense—even, and perhaps especially, on the question of how the "war against terrorism" ought to be prosecuted. Whenever we have quashed dissent, we have regretted it later.

One sterling exception to the present rush to conform is being provided by Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee. (His leadership of that body, which he took over from Orrin Hatch of Utah, is yet another reason to be grateful to his colleague Jim Jeffords.) With the polite yet firm commitment to protecting liberty that has always characterized him, Mr. Leahy has resisted the most egregious aspects of the anti-terrorism bill sought by Mr. Ashcroft. With the help of principled members of Congress from both parties, he has insisted on debate and deliberation instead of hysteria.

Even in a time of war, there is also politics. The notion that all differences of opinion should be put aside for the duration is itself a political statement, and not a very clever one. Open debate is essential to defending freedom. Democracies can be disorderly and slow to act, but the most catastrophic military blunders of the last century--Hitler attacking Russia, Japan bringing the U.S. into the war--were made by dictators. Secrecy and lies got the U.S. into Vietnam; an awful lot of messy and divisive democracy eventually got us out.

With few exceptions, Americans have closed ranks behind President Bush in the struggle against terrorism. The terrible reality of the September 11 attacks caused an almost instantaneous re-ordering of priorities. But yes, there will still be congressional elections a year hence and a presidential contest in 2004. If history is any guide, they will be vigorously contested. Millions who support Bush today fully intend to vote against him tomorrow.

It's precisely this aspect of democracy which baffles and infuriates mad zealots like Osama bin Laden. They mistake the provisional assent of a free people for a fatal weakness. Actually, it's our greatest strength. Oddly, a small, but noisy group of Americans also don't seem to get it. A number of professional scolds persist in making nasty attacks upon the character and patriotism of domestic political rivals as if the nation were still involved in a make-believe event like the Clinton impeachment instead of a life and death matter.

Most prominent are the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of televangelism, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Without re-hashing their sickening pronouncement that the terrorist atrocities were God's punishment for the usual list of fundamentalist bogeymen (and women), suffice it to say that if no other good comes of this dreadful event, it's that this preposterous duo can bend over and kiss their own sanctimonious posteriors goodbye. They're through in politics. No sane presidential candidate will ever again solicit or accept their endorsement.

Then there's Rush Limbaugh and his zany pals at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Whose fault was the terrorist attack? Bill Clinton's, of course. According to Rush, Clinton "can be held culpable for not doing enough when he was commander in chief to combat the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon." Yeah, well, coulda, shoulda, woulda as Hillary Clinton once said in a different context.

This bunch sang a different song in 1998, when Clinton made a move against bin Laden. Then the panting voyeurs hollered that it messed up the focus on the electron microscope Kenneth Starr had inserted into the president's undershorts. It'd be instructive to know how many FBI agents wasted the Clinton years investigating Democrats for imaginary crimes instead of pursuing America's real enemies. Michael Kelly, Washington's most dyspeptic political journalist, rants about pacifists, whom he derides as "liars," "frauds," "hypocrites," "profoundly immoral," "pro-terrorist," and "evil." Except, get this: in two columns, Kelly's yet to name even one. So who's he talking about? College kids petitioning for world peace? A few balding ex-hippies with ponytails? A "Voices" writer recently opined that terrorism was God's (long delayed) punishment for Woodstock, the Vietnam era rock festival. Kelly wouldn't be so crude, but he does appear to share the same wavelength.

Then there's British transplant Andrew Sullivan, who also blamed terrorism on Clinton. "The narcissistic, feckless, escapist culture of an America absent without leave in the world," he wrote "was fomented from the top." Never mind that Sullivan's own colorful sexual foibles were exposed in the gay underground press last summer. Soon after the September 11 attacks, he wrote that a "Fifth column" of terrorist sympathizers would develop in the states which voted against Bush. Reminded rather forcefully that New York was one of them, he shifted blame to "enclaves of the decadent left." Pressed for examples, he directed his critics to a "United Peoples" website, which turned out to be located in Denmark.

By Kanan Makiya
The Observer

The Arab and Muslim worlds suddenly find themselves facing a civilisational challenge such as they have not had to face since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For, in the years to come, the greatest price of the madness that was unleashed upon New York and Washington on 11 September will be borne by them and by all individuals of Arab or Muslim origin, wherever they might live in the world.

I am not talking about the next war in Afghanistan or greatly redoubled efforts to hunt down Muslim and Arab terrorists from Boston and Hamburg to Cairo and Karachi. The price I am talking about is not paid in blood or by being the victim of the kinds of humiliating slurs and racist attacks that are everywhere on the rise in the West. It is the much greater price brought about by continuing to wallow in the sense of one's own victimhood to the point of losing the essentially universal idea of human dignity and worth that is the only true measure of civility.

Arab and Muslim resentment at the West is grounded in many grievances, some legitimate, others less so. Without question, the West has blundered in its dealings with the Arab world. The United States has in recent years behaved unjustly towards the Palestinians. The Allied victory in the Gulf War of 1990-1991 was a lost opportunity to rectify this record, to show that the West, and the United States in particular, was capable of reaching out the hand of friendship and support to the peoples of the Arab world, to their democrats and civil libertarians, not merely to a host of tyrannical and unrepresentative regimes.

Like Germans after the First World War, Arabs felt they deserved a different lot after the Gulf War. They thought of themselves as having tried to change the ways they did politics in the past, and got nowhere. Palestinian living standards have actually declined since the Oslo accord in 1993, and Iraqi society (much less its polity and economy) is in a state of steady disintegration. So Arabs grew more resentful and angry at the West than at any other time in modern Arab history. This resentment can be felt everywhere; it has taken root in the most Westernised sections of the Arab population, among businessmen and students of science and engineering, and even among the sons of the mega-rich like Osama bin Laden.

However, grievances alone do not explain the apocalyptic act of fury that was unleashed upon New York and Washington. Arabs and Muslims need today to face up to the fact that their resentment at America has long since become unmoored from any rational underpinnings it might once have had; like the anti-Semitism of the interwar years, it is today steeped in deeply embedded conspiratorial patterns of thought rooted in profound ignorance of how a society and a polity like the United States, much less Israel, functions.

Attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel, has been the driving force of Arab politics since 1967. As a powerful undercurrent of Arab culture and politics, it has been around much longer than that. After 1967, however, it became the legitimising cement upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Hussein's Iraq were built.

From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, anti-Americanism was passed on to religious zealots. In 1979, it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become the animating force of the Iranian revolution and, with that seminal event, major sections of the Islamic movement. Today, it has become a murderous brew of passions fuelled by paranoia and frustration.

In the five-page letter left in a suitcase in the car-park of Boston's airport, this passage, giving guidance to the hijackers in case they should meet resistance from a passenger, appears: 'If God grants any one of you a slaughter, you should perform it as an offering on behalf of your father and mother, for they are owed by you. Do not disagree among yourselves, but listen and obey. If you slaughter, you should plunder those you slaughter, for that is a sanctioned custom of the Prophet's, on the condition that you do not get occupied with the plunder so that you would leave what is more important, such as paying attention to the enemy, his treachery and attacks. That is because such action is very harmful [to the mission].'

This is not Islam any more than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. No concessions can be made to either mindset which have more in common with one another than they do with the religions they claim to represent.

To argue, as many Arabs and Muslims are doing today (and not a few liberal Western voices), that 'Americans should ask themselves why they are so hated in the world' is to make such a concession; it is to provide a justification, however unwittingly, for this kind of warped mindset. The thinking is the same as the 'linkage' dreamed up by Saddam Hussein when he tried to get the Arab world to believe that he had occupied Kuwait in 1990 in order to liberate Palestine. The difference being that if the argument was intellectually vacuous then, it is a thousand times more so now.

Worse than being wrong, however, it is morally bankrupt, to say nothing of being counterproductive. For every attempt to 'rationalise' or 'explain' the new anti-Americanism rampant in so much of the Muslim and Arab worlds bolsters the project of the perpetrators of the heinous act of 11 September, which is to blur the lines that separate their sect of a few hundred people from hundreds of millions of peace-loving Muslims and Arabs.

But it is now up to Arabs and Muslims to draw the line that separates them from the Osama bin Ladens of this world just as it was up to Americans to excoriate, isolate, outlaw, imprison and eventually root out the members of the Klan from their midst. Mercifully, the very same Western leaders who are preparing for the coming 'War Against Terrorism' are trying hard, and genuinely, to say their efforts are not directed at Muslims and Arab or Muslim culture. Constantly, they are being seen with Muslim clerics and visiting mosques. That is all for the good.

But it is not enough to turn the tide of public opinion which will increasingly need and want to know who is 'the other' in this coming war. Terrorism is a tactic, after all, not a side. Usage of the word 'war', however understandable, was a strategic mistake by the American President. For like the wars on drugs or poverty it inculcates expectations at the risk of showing few results. The problem is deeper than bin Laden and his associates, and will not end with their demise. As I wrote in Cruelty and Silence, citing the 1930s Iraqi alter ego of Tom Lehrer, Aziz Ali, Da' illi beena, minna wa feena: 'The disease that is in us, is from us and within us.' Against this kind of enemy the West can do nothing. We have to do it ourselves.

Right-wingers have an amusing and annoying habit. Amusing because it's so predictable; annoying because...well, because it's annoying. The habit? Hypocritically accusing others (specifically, liberals) of doing something distasteful/immoral/dishonest/what-have-you in an attempt to divert attention from the fact that they are doing something distasteful/immoral/dishonest/what-have-you. And not just any old 'something' -- usually, it's the very same thing they claim their counterparts are doing. And usually, their counterparts aren't doing any such thing.

Case in point - the outraged squawks emitted on a regular basis by regressives any time someone suggests that perhaps - just perhaps - U.S. foreign policy hasn't always inspired feelings of deep gratitude, respect and love in the world community. Have you ever heard a "conservative" (I use that term loosely, since the vast majority of Republicans these days are not true conservatives) say "Gee, we ought to take into consideration the fact that we've done some pretty shoddy things in the past, and there are probably people who hate us because of it"?

Neither have I. To hear the regressives talk, one would think that the only reason other people might dislike us is because they "hate freedom". And suggesting that people might have a legitimate claim to hate us, and that such hatred might inspire a few sick, murderous extremists to take that hatred out on innocent civilians, is - again, to hear the regressives talk - tantamount to treason.

"You're a Blame America Firster!" they sputter in response.

It's a clever tactic, which is why they drag it out when opportunity knocks (the term was, I believe, first coined by Jean Kirkpatrick during the Reagan years). It accomplishes three things - first, it makes the target of the accusation seem unpatriotic (since patriotism, under the Bush regime, means waving a flag, insisting that America is superior and can do no wrong, and accepting without question anything the Bushies want to do). Second, it suggests that the 'Blame America Firster' has nothing valid to say -- they'd rather place blame than look for solutions, and therefore aren't worth listening to. And third, it relieves the right-wingers of any responsibility to actually address the issue of whether or not the U.S. ought to take a good hard look at its foreign policy, and perhaps quit arming terrorists, toppling democratic governments and replacing them with quasi-dictators, bossing everyone around, etc etc etc.

Someone who 'blames America first' would not, presumably, be interested in any real debate about how to prevent the attacks of September 11th from happening again; they simply want to make a sweeping condemnation of the United States (no doubt because of their underlying commie-pinko agenda) and leave it at that.

It's one of their better tricks; I'll give them that. It works well on people who would prefer to be told what to think rather than figuring things out for themselves, which unfortunately is an accurate description of many people in the U.S. (and if that sounds too insulting, I will remind you that close to half of the people who voted in the presidential election last year voted for Bush, who was arguably the sorriest candidate ever put forth by any party).

Whenever right-wingers begin finger-pointing and accusing others of doing something, I immediately look for the proof that they are doing it themselves. They nearly always are, though the proof of their hypocrisy isn't always obvious (i.e., if they accuse liberals of caring more about trees than people, one shouldn't assume that THEY care more about trees than people; however, one will soon realize that they are hurling the accusation to hide the fact that they care more about corporations than people). Thus, when regressives put the label of 'Blame America Firster' on anyone who questions whether the U.S. has done the right thing in the past, it doesn't mean that the regressives secretly place some of the blame on the U.S. -- but it DOES mean that they are more interested in placing blame than in looking for a solution. Oh, I know, they pretend that a 'solution' is to start issuing dire threats and bombing any country that they claim harbors terrorists, but as anyone with a brain knows, that's no solution at all -- that's part of what got us into this horrible situation in the first place.

It didn't take long for the right-wingers to start blaming President Clinton for September 11th. They were a little cautious at first, but the party's just getting started for them, and we can expect the level of vitriolic rants against Clinton to rise in volume. I don't think that Dan "Watermelon-head" Burton has initiated an investigation into Clinton's "role" in the attacks, but I'm sure he will soon.

God forbid that they should actually take a cold hard look at what the U.S. has done in the past, at the decisions and policies which have led other people to hate the U.S. with such dark passion. Not only would that mean being accountable - something regressives NEVER like - it would mean actually changing said policies. As is growing more evident every day, the Bush regime has no interest in avoiding or correcting the mistakes of the past; instead, they're busily planning to not only repeat them, but add a few new ones as well.

Hence the steadily-growing ranks of "Blame Clinton Firsters". It's Clinton's fault! No need to look further, boys and girls! Now that we know who's to blame, you can go on about your business and we'll take care of everything. And if you dare to say anything negative about our decisions, we'll call you a "Blame America Firster"!

I won't go into detail about why blaming Clinton is so idiotic, primarily because it's already been done so well by William Rivers Pitt in his excellent essay "The Real American Traitors"; but I'll make a couple of points. One, the Hart/Rudman Report, which came out last January, warned of the dire threat of a terrorist attack upon U.S. soil, and was completely ignored by the Bushies and the corporate media. Two, the attempts by the Clinton administration to go after terrorists' financial assets, which was hysterically and successfully fought by Republican Phil Gramm and discarded by the Bush administration, yet is somehow now presented as one of the ways in which Bush has decided to fight terrorism.

I will, however, go into a bit of detail about why the "Blame America Firster" label is so stupid -- not stupid as far as a debate tactic, since it is, as I said, a rather clever one for people who enjoy using dishonest and sleazy debate tactics, but stupid as far as accuracy. I feel perfectly comfortable debunking the accusation, because I'm one of the people who'd be labeled a "Blame America Firster" by the right-wing troglodytes.

America didn't send those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I have yet to hear any reasonable (or even unreasonable) person claim any such thing. The attacks, therefore, must be blamed first and foremost on the terrorists who carried them out.

No one thinks the terrorists acted on their own. I'm a skeptic by nature, but even I've been convinced beyond reasonable doubt that this was bin Laden's work. And even if that turns out not to be the case, it's certain that SOMEONE was in charge; someone who didn't go down with the planes. Therefore, bin Laden and whoever else planned this is second on the list of "blamees".

We don't know for sure if the September 11th attacks would have happened had other circumstances, such as airline security, U.S. foreign policy, etc., had been different, but we do know that had bin Laden and the hijackers never been born, the September 11th attacks would not have happened. One can speculate that something similar might have happened, and one might be right, but it remains a fact that the September 11th attacks would not have happened. Therefore, the crime was committed by the terrorists, and they are to blame.

Certain circumstances led to the terrorist attacks. Because terrorism has been around for a long time, it is reasonable to assume that it's not going to disappear, no matter how many bombs the Bushies toss about. Therefore, while it is imperative to bring those responsible to justice, it is JUST as imperative to take steps that will lessen the likelihood of such attacks happening again.

When the U.S. finances and trains extremists, the U.S. should know by now that there's a high likelihood of said extremists eventually turning on the U.S. The old saying "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" is well worth remembering here.

When the U.S. tromps about the world acting like a schoolyard bully, there's a good chance that some people will take exception. To not recognize this is not only arrogant and ignorant -- it's dangerous.

Large, powerful terrorist groups do not, as a general rule, form in countries which are free, democratic and have a good standard of living. There are terrorists in every country (even ours), but it's hard to find many followers in places where life is enjoyable. Therefore, helping to create and maintain despotic governments which oppress the population is not a good recipe for preventing terrorism.

Allowing corporations which care more about the bottom line than about the public's safety to "police themselves" is beyond stupid. Surely we have learned that by now. The genuflection and reverence given to the "free market" needs to stop; a $15 billion government handout does not a free market make.

So there you have it. Because I dare to point out that the U.S. is not perfect, I am - according to the regressives - a "Blame America Firster". I should not waste my time blaming the terrorists, or foreign policy, or U.S. aggression, or lax airline security...I should, instead, blame Clinton!

It's all about accountability. Funny I should bring that word up...don't right-wingers constantly accuse liberals of "not wanting to be held accountable"?