Opinion: In today’s pages: Terrorists abroad, terrorists at home
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
The editorial board examines global insurgency after a violent few weeks around the world:
Last week’s news underscored the problem. In Afghanistan, Taliban fighters, who enjoy sanctuary in Pakistan, blew up a fourth telecommunications tower as part of a campaign to silence cellphone service at night. In Pakistan, missiles of unknown origin smashed into a Taliban compound in what appeared to be the second unacknowledged U.S. Predator strike into that country this year. Turkey struck at Kurdish rebel enclaves over the border in northern Iraq. From Gaza, Hamas pelted Israeli towns with increasingly longer-ranged missiles. And Colombia, fed up with attacks by guerrillas from jungle camps in Ecuador, staged a cross-border raid and was denounced across Latin America for violating Ecuadorean sovereignty. Wiping out terrorist sanctuaries after 9/11 wasn’t supposed to be so difficult -- except that it always has been. The Bush administration assumed that swift and massive U.S. military might, followed by democracy and massive infusions of money for development, would sweep the terrorists into the dustbin of history. It hasn’t happened anywhere.
The board also looks at California’s electricity deregulation ten years later, and says a new cap-and-trade plan could be just as disastrous.
As if global insurgency weren’t bad enough, author Philip Jenkins thinks conditions are ripe for home-grown terrorism. And East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice director Angelo Logan says that a firm that wans to expand port service isn’t as green as it claims. Craving more bad news? The University of Vermont’s Robert Costanza says the latest recession is small fry compared to the three-decade decline in the American quality of life. Finally, some levity: Columnist Gregory Rodriguez wonders if appearing on ‘The Colbert Report’ to hawk his book makes him a sell out. (If you missed it, watch it here.)
On the letters page, readers react to the latest false memoir scam, this one by a white Sherman Oaks woman writing as an African American surviving foster care and gangs in South L.A. San Diego’s Michael Bolger gives her some comeuppance: ‘I was in three foster homes, a continuation of the hell I lived with my mother in the San Fernando Valley. Having survived to become a high-functioning member of society, I have thought often of writing a memoir. But morally bankrupt individuals like [Margaret] Seltzer make it harder for others to tell their stories of survival.’