Tuesday, August 21, 2007
By JAMES P. PINKERTON
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001? All of us remember, and those memories give us thoughts and intuitions about what might come next.
On that Tuesday morning, nearly 3,000 Americans unexpectedly died. As for the 300 million of us who were mere witnesses, we knew that our lives were nonetheless changed forever. Like those who were alive during Pearl Harbor in 1941, or on the day that President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was obvious that future events would spin differently.
How to capture that sense, when the big change came? The before, and the after, of tragedy?
One who captured it, lyrically, was Anglo-Canadian poet Robert W. Service. Best known for such poetry as “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” he also penned “The Premonition.” In that work, Service set a scene of serenity: “’Twas a year ago, and the moon was bright.” Walking along with his sweetheart, they basked in a serene “sea of light.” Then suddenly, “the moon grew strangely dull.” To his horror, he “looked on the face of a grinning skull.”
That was more than just a nightmarish fantasy; it was a prefiguring of sad events. Because a year later, Service continues, the evening moon was once again bright — but his beloved was dead. Interestingly, Service died on Sept. 11. In his case, it was Sept. 11, 1958.
So what was our world like before we learned about the sinister potential of box cutters? Or when getting through airport security was a comparative breeze?
We all have our answers about the past, but even more important are premonitions about the future. One such foretelling is John Robb’s “The Coming Urban Terror,” appearing in The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
“Iraq is a petri dish for modern conflict,” Robb writes, “the Spanish Civil War of our times.”
A petri dish, of course, is the place where small quantities of germs grow into large quantities.
From 1936 to 1939, Spain was the place where at least a half-million people died in civil strife. More to the point, it was the place where the brutal tactics of World War II were tried out — not just armored warfare and aerial bombardment, as pioneered by Hitler’s Nazis, but also the systematic murder of civilians, as practiced by the Spanish combatants.
Learning to win
Iraq today, Robb continues, is the place where “small groups are learning to fight modern militaries and modern societies and win. As a result, we can expect to see systems disruption used again and again in modern conflict — certainly against megacities in the developing world, and even against those in the developed West, as we have already seen in London, Madrid, and Moscow.”
So what premonitions arise from the latest news from Iraq? Surge or no surge, the violence seems to be getting worse; Iraq is an infernal school for new graduating classes of mass killers. Thus attention must be paid to the hamlets of Qahataniya and Sinjar after four truck bombs exploded last Tuesday, killing perhaps 200: “It looks like a nuclear bomb hit the villages,” one Iraqi officer told The New York Times.
Meanwhile, closer to home, what’s the larger import of the continuing series of scoops from The Washington Times?
The paper has reported that employees of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been accused of “aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain.”
We also learned that investigations into these charges — including that “a USCIS officer in Harlingen, Texas, sold immigration documents for $10,000 to as many as 20 people” — have been stymied because of “lack of resources.”
What do these reports tell us? Do they reveal sniping and backbiting within a bureaucracy? Or do they tell us that something is rotten within our homeland security apparatus?
On this eve of the next Sept. 11, how long before the bright moon grows strangely dull — and then turns into a grinning skull?
X Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.