A safer world
American citizens should feel safer now. In a dramatic address to the nation on June 6, US President George W. Bush called for creating a Cabinet-level agency to oversee intelligence on terrorism. This seems to be the most striking restructuring of police and intelligence services since the establishment of the CIA and National Security Council in 1947, by President Harry S. Truman, early in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, there is always someone to look for the fly in the ointment – for example The New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. In an article titled «All-American Osamas,» Kristof lays out six cases of far-right Christian extremists from six American states, who all formed their own private militias armed with machine guns, bazookas, chemical or biological weapons and who prepared terrorist attacks that made September 11 look puny by comparison. Cynics might say that similar revelations by the same newspaper that the anthrax-laden letters were not fabricated by Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein but rather by American laboratories, were aimed at deflecting public attention from the «axis of evil.» With his historic speech at West Point, the US president brought a real revolution in international law, declaring America’s self-evident right to unleash a preventive war – using the nuclear option if necessary – against 60 countries that nourish terrorism. It was about time. It feels like centuries ago when in June 1981 President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, clearly under the influence of Islamic-Communist ideological terror, had condemned, by imposing sanctions, Israel’s preventive strikes on Saddam. Today, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tries to assassinate so-called terrorist Yasser Arafat without facing any similar hysteria from the civilized West. At last, we live in a safer and more just world.
