Thursday, February 12, 1998
U.S. ones capable of inflicting real terror
COLUMN: Domestic crises proven deadlier than any foreign
threats
By Jake Sexton
I am a little incredulous at Daniel Inlender’s column about
America and terrorism ("United States should terrorize terrorists,"
Feb. 10); it seemed a throwback to the paranoid 1980s.
Anti-American terrorism is not much of a threat these days, and
even in its heyday, Americans were much, much more likely to be
struck by lightning than to be the victims of terrorist attacks.
Granted, the media played up such fears, which made Americans feel
that they were at risk, but statistically, terrorist attacks
against Americans were almost non-existent.
Inlender talks about how the United States should "remind
terrorist governments that we can detonate bombs in their countries
wherever and whenever we so desire." First of all, that kind of
threat sounds like terrorism in and of itself (but then the United
States is no stranger to terrorist practices). Let’s not forget
that a number of these "terrorist governments" were created by or
supported by the United States, including our current enemy, Saddam
Hussein.
Most of the U.S. government’s terrorist activities are not done
outright by American forces, but by proxy. The CIA often creates,
organizes, supplies, and/or provides arms, reconnaissance, and air
support for various indigenous forces inside the country being
subverted: the Contras, the Hondurans who overthrew the Guatemalan
government in the ’50s, the fighters in the Bay of Pigs, Iran’s
SAVAK, Gladio in Italy and Germany, the Khmer Rouge, a cavalcade of
U.S.-instigated coups in nations around the world, you get the
idea. And let’s not forget the CIA’s "School of the Americas,"
which has trained hundreds of soldiers, dictators and military
strongmen in Latin America, guilty of the most heinous repression
and torture that you or I can imagine. The CIA is probably the
world’s largest and most powerful terrorist organization. Using
Inlender’s logic, nations affected by the CIA’s violent operations
should have the right to come over to the United States and bomb
CIA headquarters to defend themselves.
It’s also interesting how Inlender focuses on terrorism by
foreigners, when the most recent and most deadly terrorist attacks
in the United States have been committed by Americans.
But let’s put some of this aside for a moment, and look at some
of Inlender’s other claims and ideas. He looks longingly back at
the days when suspected criminals could be hung at sea, without
trial. (Ah, the good ol’ days of lynching!) He advocates
surveillance of the entire world via American spy satellites. ("I
love you, Big Brother.") We should remind third-world dictators
(the ones we don’t support, I imagine) that we could hit them with
smart bombs and cruise missiles at any time, by showing them
footage of such attacks from the Gulf War. While this sort of
resolution would kill much fewer people than outright air strikes
(which no doubt we will no doubt see in Iraq shortly – damn
Clinton), it is not as certain as everyone thinks. Forty percent of
smart bombs in the Gulf War missed their targets, killing hundreds
of civilians. (The numbers are not important. Everyone knows that
Americans don’t care about dead foreigners.) On top of that, only
about 5 percent of bombs dropped in the Gulf War were of the
"smart" variety. "But all the stuff I saw on TV were those cool,
green-screen video shots of missiles going down chimneys and
stuff." Hmm, wonder why the military didn’t release more footage of
"dumb" bombs missing their targets and blowing up apartment
buildings and schools …
To sum up: Inlender writes an article encouraging us all to
support more iron-fisted, warlike methods to deal with the near
non-existent threat of terrorism. Good idea. If only he spent as
much time studying American history as he appears to spend learning
cool Latin phrases.