Is the world really safer?

It’s so discouraging to hear the same story every monring on the radio — “X number of marines/soldiers/Americans dead after car/suicide bombing in Iraq.” It’s the same story every morning, but it’s not really. Every morning, it’s a different bomb and different victims. What a tragedy.

And this is where our American focus seems to be. We are so focused on Iraq and our own trials that we regulate the suffering of other countries to the back pages of the papers and the 20 second blurbs before the weekend weather report. God forbid, our desire for a sunny weekend filled with barbeques be interrupted with too much news about how the rest of the world is faring in the war against terrorism.

I’m not sure I agree with Mr. Henninger’s editorial from the OpinionJournal — in fact, I’m not really sure what he’s trying convince us of or what the solution is to the things he dredges up, but it certainly brings up some interesting facts and observations about the American POV:

According to the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (established after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), there have been about 8,300 terrorist bombings in the world the past 10 years. They have killed more than 10,000 human beings and injured–often appallingly, one assumes–some 43,000 people. (There are separate tallies for arson, kidnapping, hijacking, etc. September 11 is listed as an “unconventional attack.”)

Before September 11 happened in the United States, and ever since, factions with grievances have been blowing up unprotected people going about the act of daily life–shopping, praying, taking their children to school, laughing with friends, burying the dead–all over the world. Places where the sudden cloudbursts of blood don’t always merit our front pages include Spain, Colombia, Israel, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Russia, Afghanistan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt and elsewhere.

Living in the U.S., one could make the cold-blooded calculation that 21,000 dead and 55,000 injured from all terrorist acts over 10 years is a drop in the bucket and that the war in Iraq has mainly increased the rate of death. This may be true. But if as many suicide bombs went off in Manhattan as have gone off in Israel, Manhattanites would have demanded martial law and the summary execution of suspects on street corners. Their greatest goal in life would not be, as it is now, the closing of interrogation rooms on Guantanamo but instead the erasure of terrorists hiding across the East River.

The death march of homicidal zombies in Iraq is trying to push us toward accepting the idea that acts of unrestrained violence against other human beings is now a normal part of politics. It is not normal. Any civilized person should want to resist the normalization of civilian killing as a political act–whether in Iraq, Spain, Indonesia or Kashmir.

tags: Suicide Bombers, Iraq, terrorism

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