A headline on the MSNBC web site today was, "FBI struggles to keep up in post-9/11 world". It nicely summed up what to me seems like an impossible game that our government is playing.

Look around us: war rages in Iraq, with a record number of Iraqis (more than 3,400) killed last month and total U.S. fatalities just topping 2,600. U.S. fatalities in Afghanistan have increased each year since our invasion in 2001. Hundreds of Lebanese civilians have been slaughtered by Israel in an invasion we've supported and perpetuated. Our "diplomatic" rhetoric isolates and stonewalls every country we're having difficulty with, such as Iran and North Korea, the result being no diplomatic progress at all with these countries during Bush's terms in office.

And what do we have to show for 5 years of anti-terrorism military actions abroad? For all of our black-and-white, good-versus-evil posturing?

Fear, paranoia, and ridiculously convoluted security measures. One delirious lunatic brings explosives on a plane in his shoe, and the result is millions of Americans taking off their shoes every time they get on a plane. Now liquids and gels are banned on planes. At this rate, we'll all be nude and cavity-searched every time we fly--it's the logical conclusion to this progression.

Do we feel safer? No, we're inundated with violence and mistrust of those who are different. Republicans construct tidy fantasies for themselves of a rising tide of anti-American violence of which we're innocent victims, with our stern-father president protecting us.

Any intelligent person, however, sees the absurdity in this. We're stoking the fires of violence around the world, and we're failing to keep up with it. The FBI won't be able to keep up with it, our soldiers won't be able to invade and conquer it. We're simply tapping into more violence around the world than we can keep up with.

It's not the same as, say, WWII, when we had a massive but very focused military undertaking. The violence we're facing is diffuse, granular, spread in tiny packets all over the world, and it's reactive. Reactive to our economic policies, our corporations' abuses of foreign sovereignty and civil rights, our devaluing of the lives of dark-skinned people abroad, our imposing of our evangelical Christian mores on countries whose poor and ill need help without conditions, our hypocritically selective military actions, the cultural, economic, and military presence we push on the rest of the world.

We simply can't bomb that out of existence. It's like trying to take out a huge killer bees' nest with a pistol--one shot, and suddenly you've got a cloud of angry enemies spread out with no clear target or way to overcome them. Each enemy is small, but can hurt you badly, and you can't keep up with all of them.

Iraq and Afghanistan are quagmires. Lebanon became a quagmire for the Israelis after only a couple weeks, and they look to be pulling out in shock. The last few years of failed American policies have revealed that we're simply not that effective at dealing with this type of adversity.

This game we're playing, of detaching cause from effect, where terrorism is turned into some spontaneous evil devoid of other motivation, where enemies are simply evil and have to be destroyed, is childish and deadly. Like Hercules and the hydra, we can't keep up with the violence our violence is spawning--we're only one country and we're simply getting overrun. Until we take the time to be adults and confront the roots of hatred and violence toward America--and take steps to remedy those causes, and to dismantle our sense of privilege and superiority in the world--the swarm will keep growing, and the result will be more misery for everyone involved.

Labels: Culture, Politics