Forgive me if I don't join in the howls of panic about the latest allegedly avoidable failure to keep we American flight passengers snug and secure. And forgive me if I say that the whole post 9/11 notion of "filtering out terrorists" is and will continue to be a theatrically staged performance for a nation in denial. The denial being our refusal to face the contradiction between our relation to the dispossessed of the world and our desire to not be unduly impaired in our virtuous ease of movement.
Yes, an obvious bearer of deep ill will toward the American state made it onto an American-bound plane with an ingenious and ridiculous explosive concoction in his underpants. And yes, but for sheer luck and the perp's bumbling lack of expertise there could have been a horror in the sky above Detroit on Christmas Day. And yes, plenty was known about this man by plenty of folks in plenty of positions in the well-advertised enterprise of American security.
And this phenomenon, in various forms, with occasionally horrific consequences, will happen again. And again.It will keep happening because there are so many tens or hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who harbor furious beefs with the United States -- some of them legal and vocal American citizens who constitutionally make their dissent known -- that any proportionate "no-fly list" would be far too massive to manage in a democracy but still far too small to screen out any more than a fraction of all the folks who might render harm.
It will keep happening because while America suffers a national anxiety attack about air travel, our passenger trains and highway bridges and subways and buses and shopping malls and office complexes and public parks remain wide open, and we will never be able to significantly secure all of them without paralyzing the nation and ruining our lives as we know them.
It will keep happening because the professionals -- not the amateurs who ignite shoes and underwear -- will always seek the next chink in the armor. Like all guerrilla fighters, they find and strike available targets and then disappear and move on to the next, and their desperation and willingness to die will keep on fueling an ingenuity and audacity that the state operatives who pursue them will never possess. Sorry, but it's true.
It will keep happening because cracking down according to insurgents' past actions -- the unfortunate role of those ordered to defend us -- will never anticipate future inventions of desperation well enough to do us very much good. There will always be another open avenue, another surprise equivalent of plunging an airliner into a skyscraper. Is the best possible international detective work and forward-looking security work essential? Of course. But it will never be enough, and as the heart of a strategy to prevent terrorism it is a joke, just as good detective work and forward-looking police work is a joke in preventing robbery and murder. Good police detectives understand that the reasons why people rob and murder have nothing to do with policing. And anyone doing true anti-terrorism work needs to understand that terrorists' ceaseless motivation to innovate their way through our barriers has nothing to do with the quality of our airport (or highway) security.
Just as cops in bombed-out neighborhoods understand that they are up against poverty, hopelessness, and rage, we bomb-fearing travelers had better understand that we are up against an American tradition of cynically buddying up with brutally convenient states (e.g., Saudi Arabia) and fostering economies worldwide that fuel fundamentalist fury toward American modernity.
Barack Obama understands some of this: even in knuckling under to our next insane war he continues to speak (if timidly) about changing American international behavior. But I don't think he understands it nearly well enough.
In the wake of the Christmas near-disaster in Detroit, the familiar script -- "If we whip our anti-terrorist security system sufficiently into shape we can feel safe" -- just won't fly.
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