Now that the would-be bombers in Great Britain have all been tracked with closed-circuit television, the FBI is going to want a CCTV network for the U.S., and We, The People are likely to agree. There are all kinds of reasons this is a bad idea, and I don’t need to echo the sadness most civil libertarians feel at the willingness of Americans to part with their rights. Among the rights we frequently forget is the one forbidding unlawful search and seizure, which, if we had the kind of CCTV coverage England has, would certainly be violated 24/7. But then, Britain does not have a Bill of Rights, so they can get away with it. We should not let our law-enforcement agencies get away with that here.
But what’s as frustrating as our willingness to part with our rights as Americans in order to “fight” terrorism is that we wouldn’t feel the need to had the U.S. and Western Europe engaged in a more enlightened foreign policy over the last few centuries. Our unbridled hubris and basic lack of consideration for the consequences of our own actions have pissed off the very people we now fear as terrorist threats, but that same hubris does not allow us to come to terms with our own complicity in our problems.
Even the fact of a substantial population of pissed off Muslims in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the U.S. is the result of colonial powers having wrecked the crap out of much of the world or the U.S. having overthrown popular governments and replaced them with evil dictators during the Cold War. Dangerous émigrés would never have emerged had their home countries been more livable, or had their cultures not been co-opted by those of their oppressors.
I am not saying that all of this is our fault, of course: terrorism is reprehensible and uncalled for by any account. But I am saying it all could have been relatively easily avoided had we in the West put even half the thought into diplomacy that we put into invasive schemes of law enforcement or Machiavellian schemes of invasion in other nations the world over.