January 7, 2008: On Watch
The facile slugline for a review of Ronald Kessler's book The Terrorist Watch would be "a book as defensive and fragmented as the War on Terror itself."
And it is, I suppose, true: Kessler's book is largely designed to defend the current execution of the War on Terror, and most of its paragraphs hang together with all the cohesion of an undergraduate paper on Barnaby Rudge. Kessler darts from one subject to the next crying, "See? People are working to save you, all while the mainstream media undermines their every effort."
Yet for all its faults, the book has the virtue of being largely true. There ARE thousands of smart, conscientious people risking their lives to fight terror all over the world, and we never hear about their work. Their only mention in the media comes if they fail, and it is a sad fact that terrorist-fister Lyddie England got more press than the people who are actually doing heroic things.
This book remedies that as best it can, and even it doesn't cover all of the things we'll one day know about the hidden struggle against these crazy nihilistic people with nothing left to live for except destruction. But I think it is worth reading, if only to remember that there are people laboring hard to prevent death and horror in good faith, and we rarely give them the benefit of the doubt when they err or any credit when they succeed.
I've written before that our enemies are more hapless and pathetic than we think, that they're hardly "the varsity team" of sophistication and ability. Maybe that's often true. But the people fighting terror don't have the luxury of debating the talents of every threat, and an idiot with a box of hand grenades can be as dangerous as a genius with an elaborate scheme. They have to stop them all.
I still think the War on Terror is largely existential, that it is the last gasp of rage of the primitive against the sophisticated, of the past against the future. Like inner city gang members, terrorists have nothing to live for but the tenuous values of companionship, loyalty, and struggle supposedly embodied in their anger against a society in which they believe they have no place. I still believe that the best way to defeat them is to be steadfastly courageous, productive, free, progressive, and hopeful, trusting the filtering process of history to make their cause obsolete.
But I have the luxury of thinking that from the comfort of my desk while other people fight these berserkers in the real world. While I'm being existentially patient, other people are doing the grunt work of keeping entropy at bay, often at the cost of their lives.
Are there excesses and missteps in the War on Terror? Of course, and we should certainly examine them.
But sometimes it does some good to examine the successes, too. It certainly did me some good.
