Mugged by Reality

The cognitive dissonance was strong after Boston. [Link]

What is most striking as one reads over the list is the ease with which we compartmentalized and discarded each plot as it was revealed, how simple it was to return to “normal” life in the midst of an ongoing and global terrorist campaign, how lazy to reason that these “isolated incidents” were nothing more than the false echoes of an organization “decimated” by presidential action.

But Boston was impossible to ignore. Two brothers, granted asylum and residency and citizenship and welfare benefits by the United States, who attended American schools and one of whom married an American girl, viciously turned against the country that had sheltered them. Before they were stopped, they killed four and shut down a major city. But these were not the only consequences of their actions. The insouciance with which Islamic radicalism was downplayed or dismissed or ascribed to “Islamophobia” in the halls of the executive branch and on air on MSNBC became another casualty of the attack.

The prejudiced individuals who said or wrote of their suspicions and hopes that the Boston bombers would turn out to be Tea Party activists or gun nuts or pro-lifers were exposed as fools. The writers who ostentatiously dismissed early reporting that instructions for pressure cooker bombs could be learned from the pages of the al Qaeda webzine looked willfully blind. The spokesmen for liberalism who said on television that the brothers Tsarnaev were more like Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine killers than like al-Awlaki or Bin Laden seemed naïve if not dishonest. I say dishonest because to downplay the obvious religious dimension to the Boston bombing is to obfuscate the known facts of the case. The surviving brother himself says he and his accomplice were motivated by religious belief.

The commentators who argued over whether Chechens are “white” were engaging in academic babble that put medieval scholastics to shame. The civil libertarians who falsely said terrorists have continued to talk to authorities after being read Miranda rights were shown to be dupes when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev shut up as soon he was charged. The self-congratulatory bureaucrats who insisted everything was under control found it difficult to explain why the name Tamerlan Tsarnaev was present in two government databases prior to the attack, or what made the Russians so worried enough to alert the FBI and CIA, or how Tamerlan could be interviewed once by the FBI and then disappear into a cloud of militant religious fervor. The media that so fastidiously examined every aspect of Dzhokhar’s life and personality, interviewing acquaintances who pronounced his goodness and in a preposterous search for what American society might have done to provoke his jihad, insulted the men and women whose lives have been irrevocably altered by this Millennial barbarian. And those who, before all the facts are known, so desperately denied that the Tsarnaevs may have had additional accomplices or overseas connections were openly evading the global aspect of brothers’ origin and ideology.

The response to Boston on the part of so many intellectuals, inside and outside government, was a sign of perplexity. They had been concussed when mugged by reality. Doing the opposite of what Bush had done did not, in the end, improve the global situation or make America safer. On the contrary, it may have made the situation worse. The plots against America continue. The ideology that motivates them has not died. Indeed, the space in which that ideology’s adherents operate is expanding: From Mali, to Libya, to Sinai, to Somalia, to Yemen, to Syria, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, those who act in the name of al Qaeda have more room to maneuver. Presidential outreach has not mattered. It has been dismissed. The Muslim world is growing more violent, and it is exporting that violence and conflict overseas.

What Boston showed was that some problems defy the easy answers proffered by American politicians, and that some problems cannot be hid from for long. Such problems include what to do about the Greater Middle East and the global jihad. In other news this week Iran, which continues its nuclear program, stands accused of complicity in the recently revealed plot against the Canadian rail system. The U.S. government said it has evidence Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his people. The Muslim Brotherhood strengthened its grip on Egypt. Ethno-sectarian conflict reemerged in Iraq.

The tide of war is receding, Obama says. But that is the old narrative, the narrative of the last four years, the narrative of peace and comity, the narrative being pulled apart by events. We know now that you cannot control the tide.