Commentary –

Retaliation, By Us Or Them?

By William A. Collins

     Terrorists,

     We all abhor;

     But they needn’t,

     Spur a war.

As Connecticut and its neighbors lick our wounds and seek some logic behind recent mindless events, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have rushed to our aid. They first sought divine counsel, then concluded that God was punishing us. He is sick of our dalliance with abortion, homosexuality, secular schools, liberal courts, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Thanks.

Next, an erudite reporter for The New York Times volunteered a competing explanation, nearly as inane. He attributed fundamentalist Arab hatred of the United States to our vaunted freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism, and universal suffrage. Right. Later, yet another serious cleric sent me a proposed column wondering why our nation should be so reviled when our main export is democracy. Please.

But the Connecticut press, though serving a remarkably educated and savvy audience, seems likewise content to wallow in these and similar self-serving and self-deceiving misconceptions. By shielding us from the true nature of America’s behavior abroad, the media leaves us unprepared for the inevitable backlash. Even now, when that backlash has killed scores of innocent Nutmeggers, there is no attempt at sincere reporting.

Surely we readers and viewers deserve better. Information is available to editors easily enough. Fax machines and websites are awash with reports on why fuming foreigners have retaliated against us. Alert organizations and individuals have been warning us for years that we were dangerously creating an ocean of animosity. Now that ocean has spawned a hurricane. But we were totally unprepared because American media scrupulously avoids reporting that sort of meteorology.

Thus can President Bush get away with making incredible analogies to Pearl Harbor. America, he says, has been the victim of another sneak attack, and war has now been declared. One would think that the earlier bombings of US embassies and the USS Cole might have given us a clue. But by focusing only on the current surprise, the president can ignore, for example, the cheapskate security at our airports. He, and we, can cheerfully avoid blame for the underpaid, under-trained, under-supervised guards who check us in and out. In fact, we allowed this under-preparation so that the airlines could make another buck per ticket.

But the war that the president just detected has actually been raging for decades, and Connecticut remains a major beneficiary. In military terms, even as we speak our helicopters are spraying Colombian peasants and their farms with poison. Our jet engines are bombing Iraq. Our submarines are poised to fire cruise missiles at terrorist targets, real or imagined. In civilian terms, our lawyers busily overturn labor and environmental laws in other lands, and our currency traders beggar foreign money. And that’s just Connecticut.

As a nation we have so far killed more than a million Iraqis through deprivation of food, medicine, and sanitation. And last month our ambassador in Managua stood up on TV between menacing soldiers and told Nicaraguans that they had better not vote for Daniel Ortega, or else.

Of course it’s true that some wild-eyed extremists might be happy to attack America simply because we sip Beaujolais and let women drive. But nothing like this. Only widespread revulsion at America’s treatment of other people could generate passion on such a scale. Or on the scale of the mass protests that now greet every meeting of the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Group of 8. Clearly our government will never voluntarily convey this understandable rage to us. That’s why we need a free local press.

Unfortunately that press has failed us utterly, leaving us unready for the latest attack in our totally unnecessary World War.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)