Neighbors

Listening to the radio just now, I heard a news report begin: "A bomb has exploded" -- and my mind raced ahead of the report as I tried to guess where the bomb had exploded. "... In a crowded marketplace" -- the reference to a marketplace, of course, meant that the attack probably took place outside the West. So was it in Israel? Or Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Or Jordan or Syria, even? Maybe Somalia? Sri Lanka?

It occurred to me that a few years ago, listening to the same report, I could probably have assumed that the location would be Israel. Of course, that does not mean such attacks never happened elsewhere back then; our journalists simply didn't think we would care as much about the other places.

But a marketplace bombing would have been unlikely in Iraq or Afghanistan a few years ago. The people there had other forms of terrorism to deal with. Usually not when they went shopping.

The United States did not go to war to stop those forms of state terrorism that gripped Afghanistan and Iraq in the year 2000. We have coexisted with such terrorism, mostly out of necessity but occasionally out of convenience, for a long time, and we continue to do so. No, the U.S. went to war to stop precisely the kind of terrorism that happened today in that marketplace, because some of that sort of terrorist came after us.

The targets today were Shiites in Iraq. According to the Associated Press, at least 15 were killed and 56 wounded. Survivors began shouting, "Down with the police!"

| Posted by Wilson at 13:49 Central | TrackBack
| Report submitted to the Power Desk