Inspired by Pandagon: No Plan, No Problem, and a comment.

I lived through 9/11 in New York, and I recall doing quite a lot of very serious thinking in the days and weeks and months after about what the hell we should do. The vision that kept returning was of Jefferson's post Amercan revolution revelation that unless the sharecropping rentier farmer class that had been a large part of the revolutionary army were tied to the new order somehow, a series of unproductive repeat uphevals were in the mail for sure.

There are so many people out there who are not in any way partners in our massive and unparalelled prosperity. That's a significant root cause of the problems we face.

If you follow this line of reasoning, some people might accuse me of wanting to kowtow to murderers. You obviously can't have a policy of negotiation with individual terrorists as in a hostage situation, but there's a lot of value in looking at the ends a group of people are attempting to achieve by means of a campaign of terror, and try to figure out if there's a way to solve with without killing. We make truces with people who go to war. Sometimes it's even a good idea.

The resistence to this kind of reflection in America -- a resistence characterized by accusations of some isiduous desire to "blame America first" -- is really just a desire for us to be easy on ourselves and not challenge our assumptions about how the world works.

So, I don't want to sound un-American, but if you look at the set of reasons the likes of Bin Laden gives for making war on the US, they're pretty understandible. They don't "hate our freedom." That is and always has been an outrageous lie. This war isn't about Playboy; it's about geopolitical power.

What they hate is having US troops in Saudi Arabia (and now Iraq), US companies buying their oil at discount prices, and US power backing repressive and corrupt regimes throughout the region. The realities of petropolitics mean we can't just grant concessions on most of these things, but the demands are not really crazy or anything. It's really, "get your boys out of my hood, quit jackin' my shit, and quit backing up local thugs."

Until we can find a way to meaningfully address these concerns without sacraficing our national interests, we're stuck with more-than-nuisance terrorism. The Neo-Con fantasy in full regalia sort of represented one way out: proving the terrorists wrong in the moral sphere by conjuring a prosperous, US-friendly democracy in their midst. Problem is you can't "create" a democracy any more than you can "give" anyone freedom. It doesn't work like that. It was a great wet dream, but come the fuck on.

The alternative as I see it is waging a serious campaign of law enforcement, counter-proliferation and diplomacy while systematically weaning ourselves of the Saudi Smack over the next 10 to 20 years to the point where we can actually give the people what they want: the chance to take their freedom from the regimes which supress them and charge us whatever they want for that sweet black gold.

That won't be easy, and it will take a lot of political will, and I'm not saying Kerry will do it. But it's probably going to have to be done.