The Squeegee Men of the New World Order

What are terrorist acts and how should we respond? This question has been raised and continues to be argued, especially now that the Israelis have decided that random acts of terrorism via homemade rockets are no longer tolerable. So now we have the same old leftist arguments: should the fact that the rockets fired by Hamas are not well aimed mean that Israel cannot treat their use as an act of war and respond with overwhelming force?

Jonah Goldberg raises this question with regard to the turn America is taking. Are we going to allow terrorist acts to again be the daily background noise of the news? Treated as the cost of being here? Something for the cops to report or try to stop?

In 1993, near the height of America’s anger over out-of-control crime, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal article for the American Scholar on “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan argued that crime had gotten so out of control, Americans responded by simply defining deviancy down until many crimes seemed normal.
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We learned a similar moral after 9/11. For years — starting around the time of Klinghoffer’s murder, as it happens — policymakers in both parties debated how to define terrorism. Is it a law-and-order issue or a military threat? If it’s a military threat, how do we define a “proportionate response” — this legalistic phrase entered the national-security lexicon back then, too. By the end of the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration found the answer in a lawerly kind of proportionality, blowing up empty office buildings as a way to “send a message” in response to attacks on America and her interests.

After 9/11, the gloves were off. The far left beseeched the government to retaliate with, at most, a proportionate response, but no one cared. We toppled the Taliban as a warm-up act. Terrorists weren’t criminals anymore, they were enemy combatants, ineligible for the Geneva Conventions. But the war in Iraq and reports of American zeal in the war on terror have left a sour taste in our mouths. That there have been no terrorist attacks on our soil only bolsters the sense that terrorism is manageable, even banal. Barack Obama leads a counteroffensive from a legal establishment that wants to treat terrorists like any other criminals. Terrorists in Mumbai or Jeddah are little more than the squeegee men of the New World Order.

This vain legalism will run its course for a good long while, I suspect. And we will hear and then forget a lot of names before we relearn some hard lessons.