The Poet's Eye 
            commentary by Lightning Rod

the Poets' Eye is skeptical
without being cynical, innocent
without being naive and
critical without being
judgmental

The Poet's Eye
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The Pelican

for release 07-25-04

Well Hurray! The 9/11 commission has returned a report that tells us what anybody with a lick of sense, a third grade education and a TV should have figured out a long time ago, that our intelligence organizations amount to a Tower of Babel,

The report also underscores something that this writer has been saying since 2001, that fighting an enemy called "terrorism" is at best a vague enterprise and too diffuse to be effective. It's a PR war.

On 9/11, with his spectacular act of vandalism, Osama bin Laden handed Bushco the biggest political get out of jail free card in history. They had just stolen the election and the economy was going into the crapper. The Poet's Eye can just see the mad sheik arriving at the White House with one of those oversized checks like Publisher's Clearinghouse delivers. But this check wasn't for a million or even ten million, it was blank.

The Bush government has used this political currency to pursue agendas that were in place well before 9/11, notably the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Under the banner of the war on terror, they have pursued their international imperial goals and ratcheted down our rights and freedoms here at home.

The Poet's Eye of course has not read the commission report, it's WAY bigger than Atlas Shrugged or The Bible. At least it weighs more. But from summaries of the report it seems that the members in general avoided playing the blame game and focused on what could be done to streamline our security and intelligence apparatus so that it can perhaps be more effective in preventing future attacks.

The commissioners did an admirable job. I commend them. They acknowledged that the "war on terror" was mainly a political instrument. Their solution to the intelligence problem was predictable--add another level of bureaucracy. That's what government does best after all, it proliferates.

There is one fact that all of this investigation and all of these recommendations fail to admit. The fact is this: There is No Amount of Intelligence or Security That Will Protect You From an Enemy Who Is Willing To Die For His Cause. If there is someone who is ready to give up his life in order to take you out, then you had best find out what is eating the fellow.

The main case in point is Israel. which has the highest security and the best intelligence of any country in the world. There are checkpoints on every corner. They have walls for the Palestinian apartheid. And we see how effective that has been in preventing terror attacks. You can't stop a man who is willing to blow himself up in order to hurt you
.
The solution is not to prevent that man or his endless brothers from acting, it is to remove his reason for wanting to act. You must remove his cause. As long as the Palestinians are treated like niggers in their own country, Israel's problems will persist. The rest of the Arab world sees Israel's actions and America's support for them as a grave insult. They feel like it threatens their way of life. It's the kind of cause that you would fight for if you were a young Arab
.
Then we add insult to injury by invading two countries in the region. Now they really have proof for their contention that America is an imperial bully and The Great Satan. And more young Muslims join the jihad. America's foreign policy and military adventures have created terrorists in exactly the same way as America's "Justice System" has created criminals. One time I was busted for pot and in order to pay my lawyers off and get out of jail I had to go sell heroin. Injustice creates desperation and desperation leads to desperate acts.

The Poet's Eye sees that if we really want to stop terrorism we will address the problems that cause it rather than trying to stop it at our borders or in our airports. If we going to use our military might in the Mideast we should be trying to enforce order in Palestine and Israel, not Baghdad.

A committee is a life form with a hundred bellies and no brain.
- Robert A. Heinlein
------
The Pelican
by Dixon Lanier Merritt (often incorrectly attributed to Ogden Nash)
 
A wonderful bird is the Pelican,
His bill can hold more than his belican.
   He can take in his beak
   Food enough for a week;
But i'm damned if i see how the helican.

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