American Patrol

The Republicans are scared yet again. The unsuccessful attempt by a London educated, Al Qaeda trained young Nigerian to detonate a crotchload of plastic explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight landing in Detroit on Christmas day has dominated news coverage for the last week, largely because it has been seized on by conservative politicians and commentators keen on bringing back the War on Terror as an issue for the 2010 midterms and (with al Qaeda’s implicit cooperation—it will take more attacks to keep this going) the 2012 Presidential race, and threatens to dominate political debate and the legislative agenda for at least the first part of the coming year. While Janet Napolitano’s assertion that “the system worked” in the attempted Northwest Flight 253 attack was flatfooted and clumsy, the fact remains that, whether because of the valiant effort of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s fellow passengers, his own incompetence, or the gimcrack nature of his underpants and syringe bomb, there was no explosion and no harm came to the flight, its passengers, or the airport facility. Unfortunately for us, no political hay can be made from a counting of blessings and a sigh of relief that the attack was unsuccessful.

In point of fact, little political hay can be from this situation at all without a sort of white knuckled, adrenalized suspension of the sense of perspective that the Republicans have been advocating since Christmas Day. Historical perspective, of course, absolutely must go—whether the system worked or not, it is a system that was largely designed and implemented by the previous administration, who embarrassingly enough seem to have released the main leaders of the conspiracy from custody. For all the use of the word “unprecedented” in Republican talking points over the last week, the Richard Reid shoe bomb incident back in 2001 provides an apt basis for comparison, and turns to solid horseshit just about every criticism made thus far concerning the Administration’s reaction to the incident: that reaction, to the extent that it wasn’t triangulated to blunt right wing criticism, was both more prompt and more thoughtful than the Bush Administration’s after Reid. In essence, conservatives have chosen to criticize the President for not making a bigger deal of this, for not going on immediate high alert and issuing statements before the facts were in, for not responding with posturing and tough talk and “enhanced interrogation” and other grand displays of pointless activity. The danger, it seems, is that the Administration, and by extension the American people, just aren’t acting scared enough in the face of The Enemy.

Again, it should be pointed out that The Enemy failed every bit as badly as the system did, and a response commensurate to such a bungled attack probably shouldn’t include military high alerts and declarations of new war fronts. The Obama Administration’s decision to treat the attack as a criminal matter is neither unprecedented nor historically unsuccessful, and if left at that, would probably address the incident and its implications fairly completely.

It is, unfortunately, very unlikely to be left at that, and some of the postures and pointless activities the right has been exhorting for have already begun. We have already seen an attempt to respond to the incident with a new level of airline security theater, including new guidelines about passenger behavior that have already been rejected as unweildy and a call for more stringent use of both watch lists, scanner technologies, and searches that will probably turn out to be both outrageously expensive and an immense pain in the ass for the flying public. The time and attention of both the Congress and the Executive Branch are likely to be taken up with hearings, investigations, and attempted fixes on this issue for some time to come, conveniently distracting it from a long list of domestic priorities the right would rather not have to address. And the disruption of our society and our government, the implied aim of all terrorist attacks successful or not, will, as usual, be accomplished far more by the fearmongering of the candy ass opposition than by, in this case, the hapless young African with the burnt genitals.

Worse, the fantasy that there is such a thing as complete safety and that it is the government’s job to pursue and provide it for us will be perpetuated, to the detriment of dozens of other displaced priorities. A country that might have used the historical marker of a change in decade for a reasoned assessment of its situation will likely be spending the next little while with its leaders on an extended visit to the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Happy bloody New Year indeed.

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While we’re handing out New Year’s greetings, here, belatedly, is mine to you. Thanks to all of you who have read and commented on this blog over the last year, and special big wet ones to those few of you who followed me here from other locations and other media. I’m especially grateful to all of you because despite the many strides that have been made in information technology in the last decade, a Google search of “EC Fish” will still get you thousands of entries about seafood and aquaculture in the European Community before the first mention of me. Thus your presence on this page is the result either of a happy accident, and bless those, or a concerted effort, and bless you. I hope that you can spend the year having fun with people you love, because in the final analysis, there’s hardly anything else worth having. Hang in there, y'all, and stay tuned...