Progressive Democrat Issue 43: LOSING THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM

Sometimes I feel like we are slowly being surrounded by a wall of violence and hatred. I feel like extremism is growing and spreading and it really seems like Bush is completely failing to prevent this spread of violence and hatred.

9/11 was traumatic for all of us. By coincidence I was going through old emails and I came across those from 9/11/01 when my friends from around the nation wrote to see if my family and I were okay. I vividly remember many things from that day and from the days that followed, including an initial irrational hatred of Islam which was thankfully negated by the presence of my Muslim coworkers and friends who reminded me that it isn't the religion that is at fault but the fanatics of any religion who create the current violent atmosphere.

But there is one thing I had forgotten about my thinking after 9/11 that has just come back to me...come back as a missed opportunity.

A little while back I saw a diary on My Left Wing and an article on BBC about a wave of 300 small bombings across Bangladesh. I was horrified and greatly saddened by this.

Why does this matter?

I remember after 9/11 wondering about the conditions that encourage terrorism. It is not a simple equation, but instability breeds violence, and instability mixed with fanaticism breeds terrrorism. This is an oversimplification, but it isn't far off the mark. And environmental degradation as much as anything breeds instability. This point is well argued in the later portions of Jared Diamond's book Collapse.

For those offended by profanity, please forgive me. I feel so angry and sad I will indulge in some profanity.

300 bombings across Bangladesh and Jamatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, an outlawed group that wants to establish Islamic law in the country, claims responsibility.

Shit! That was my first reaction to hearing this news, because it really drove home to me what a lousy job Bush is doing. Bangladesh didn't have this happening! Now it does.

Bangladesh. One of the most devastated nations in the world thanks to poor environmental policy. A case-study in the terrible tragedy that can result from deforestation. Terrible deforestation leads to an annual cycle of devastating floods in the rainy season followed by drought and famine in the dry season. Year after year this happens and has been happening for 20 or 30 years. The result is one of the poorest nations on earth. And yet it remained something of a democracy and seemed to have avoided the worst of the Islamic fundamentalist upsurge that has swept so many other nations from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan.

Since 9/11 I have thought we should focus on Bangladesh. They need help more than almost any other nation on earth. The US often has been accused of being anti-Islam. Well let's belie that accusation by looking to Bangladesh, recognizing its obvious and well-understood problems, and let's put up the necessary money to help them. Not only will it save lives, but it would stabilize a tenuous democracy and it would show the world that America cares about Muslims as much as any other group.

But there is mroe. I have thought that we should look at Bangladesh to find out why fundamentalism has given them a miss. Why is one of the poorest Muslim nations not also another breeding ground for terrorism the way Somalia, the Sudan and Afghanistan are? What has kept Bangladesh from going the way of the fundamentalist, war lord-dominated nations of Somalia, Sudan and Afghanistan? What can we learn from Bangladesh? These lessons could be invaluable in figuring out how to defeat terrorism world wide.

Too late...We may have missed the opportunity.

It looks like our failure to pay any attention to one of the poorest Muslim nations on earth has finally allowed fundamentalism to get a more solid foothold. We are stupid! We miss the best opportunities to do the right things, and we seem to take all the worst opportunities to fuck up. Maybe our efforts wouldn't have helped. But at least we would have made the effort to help those who most need help, show the world that we aren't all about oil and imperialism, and maybe, just maybe, we could have headed off the further expansion of Muslim terrorism into yet another nation.

Too late. In our stupidity we let another opportunity slip by and Bangladesh has now taken a big step down the path taken by so many other nations that lost all hope and turned to fundamentalism and petty war lords. The tenuous democracy of Bangladesh is now threatened even more than ever. Will we finally take notice? Will we finally realize that Bush's insane, stupid foreign policy is only making things worse? We are spending billions of dollars and we are becoming LESS safe, LESS free and MORE debt ridden.

That is the Bush legacy, and Bangladesh may be yet another casualty of his stupidity.