Terrifying Lessons of the Boston Terrorists

 It wasn’t Al Qaeda, It was the Golden Gloves.

The investigation is still continuing into the motives and methods of the two Tsarnaev brothers, but it may well be that the most terrifying lesson of the Boston Marathon bombings is that what precipitated it were not exhortations of Al-Qaeda-linked militants; not the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; not the carnage wreaked by America’s drones —though all that may have played a follow-up role--but a decision made by the folks who ran the U.S. Golden Gloves boxing competition in 2010. 

This is according to a must-read article in the New York Times.

What happened was that in 2010, the men running the boxing national Tournament of Champions changed the ground rules so that only American citizens could compete. The result was that several top amateur boxers were barred--among them, Tamerlan Anzorovich Tsarnaev, 23, a young man who had immigrated with his family from Kyrgyzstan a few years earlier and had just won his second consecutive title as the Golden Gloves heavyweight champion of New England.

According to the Times, that decision was a major blow for Tamerlan. Amateur boxing had become an intrinsic part of his identity in his new homeland—a sort of emotional underpinning. He had talked about wanting to represent the U.S. in the Olympics, and then turn pro.

According to the Times, who interviewed dozens of people and relatives who had known Tamerlan,  “His aspirations frustrated, he dropped out of boxing competition entirely, and his life veered in a completely different direction….”

His views on Islam became increasingly radical, as did his hostility to the U.S. and its actions in the Muslim world. Presumably, he also radicalized his younger brother.

But, again, all that occurred, said the Times, “only after his more secular dreams were dashed in 2010 and he was left adrift.”

On the other hand, an in-depth piece on the Tsarnaevs by the Washington Post , makes no mention at all of Tamerlan’s being barred from the Tournament of Champions. But it does chronicle in tragic detail the way in which the dream that had brought Tamerlan’s family to the United States in 2004, had slowly tarnished, until it all seemed to fall apart in 2010 and 2011—when his father, with cancer, divorced his mother, and moved back to Dagestan. 

Again-all this on the heels of Tamerlan’s being barred from the tournament of Champions.

Was that the precipitating factor that led to the tragedy in Boson?  We’ll never know for sure. But that convoluted and very human tale rings far truer than the facile clichés and pontifications of the so-called experts on terrorism who filled the media over the past couple of weeks.

  

It also brings home the ultimately impossible task of the 200,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, with a budget of 50 billion dollars a year—dedicated to protecting Americans from exactly the kind of terrorist activity as occurred in Boston.

How do you provide one hundred percent protection to Americans when the decision by a Golden Gloves official can propel a young man towards violent jihad, much more effectively than a fatwa from Osama bin Laden himself?

(You may be interested in an earlier piece I did on the Boston Bombers: America the Blind.)

Boston & Cowardice & America the Blind

As I write this, we still don’t know who was responsible for the horrific bombing attack in Boston. Perhaps it will turn out to be the work of home grown rightwing nuts; perhaps it’s the act of foreign terrorists. But, whatever the source, what strikes me is the number of times the barbaric assault is being denounced as “cowardly”

As in Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis’s warning that “This cowardly act will not be taken in stride.”

Indeed, “Cowardly” is the epithet being used by political figures across the United States; it was used by an editorial writer in Kansas City Star and a spokesman for the United Maryland Muslim Council in Baltimore.

“Cowardly” is the term being used in messages of support from abroad, from the Prime Minister of India to the Prime Minister of Italy.

After all, what could be more cowardly than for some unknown, unseen, unannounced  killer to blow apart and maim innocent men women and children, without any risk to himself.   

But, if that be the definition of cowardice, what could be more cowardly, than the now cliché image of the button-down CIA officer agent driving to work in Las Vegas to assume his shift at the controls of a drone circling high over some dusty village on the other side of the world?

How different are the images produced by such attacks—shattered bodies, dismembered limbs, severed arteries, frantic aid givers and terrified survivors—how different from the moving images of the tragedy in Boston now being broadcast and rebroadcast on TV stations around the globe?

With those scenes in mind, I would ask you to read a portion of a blog on Drone Wars I posted a few weeks ago, citing the fact that over the past few years, U.S. drones have made mincemeat out of an estimated 3000 to 4000 people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.  At least 200 of them were children.

“The figures are very rough because no one--certainly not the U.S. government--is releasing an accurate count.  The London based Center for Investigative reporting, which attempts to track the drone strikes, has been able to identify by name only a few hundred of the actual victims. Who knows what their political affiliations really were? Or even less, what considerations—legal and otherwise—went into justifying their demise?

“It’s a terrifying situation.” Jennifer Gibson told me. She’s an American lawyer in London with Reprieve, an organization taking on the “drone war” issue. “There are villages in Pakistan,” she says “that have drones flying over them 24 hours a day. Sometimes they’ll stay for weeks. But my clients and people there have no way of knowing if they are being targeted. Or what kind of behavior is likely to get them killed.

“They don’t know if the person riding beside them in a car or walking with them in the marketplace may be a target. It’s terrorizing entire communities. Even after an attack, there is no acknowledging by the U.S. government, no response at all, absolutely no accountability. And the vast majority of casualties don’t even have names attached to them.”

“Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards. He suggested that some strikes may even constitute “war crimes”.

“But, few Americans seem to carry about U.N. rapporteurs. It’s only when Americans are potential targets for those drones, that Congress and the media get stirred up.

“And they’re probably right. A recent poll taken by Farleigh Dickinson University’s Public Mind, found that by a two to one margin (48% to 24%) American voters say they think it’s illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens abroad with drone strikes.

“But, when it comes to using drones to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.” voters were in favor of a margin of six-to-one [75% to 13%].

(You may be interested in checking out another blog I wrote-“Drone Wars: The End of History?”)

Since I first posted  this blog, a reader, Jim Rissman has sent me the link to a brief news article about a drone strike in Pakistan on Sunday--day before the Boston attack:

A US drone strike killed four militants on Sunday in the Datta Khel tehsil of North Waziristan Agency.

A security official said the US drone fired two missiles at a compound in Manzar Khel area of Datta Khel, some 40 kilometres towards west of Miramshah, the headquarters of the agency.

Tribesmen recalled seeing six drones hovering in the air since the afternoon, spreading panic and fear in the area. One of the drones fired two missiles at around sunset, killing at least four militants.

The compound caught fire after the strike leaving all the bodies burnt.

The last drone strike occurred in the agency on March 22, when US drones targeting a vehicle in Datta Khel killed four militants.

A UN envoy last month said US drone attacks violate Pakistan’s sovereignty.

Mali: Mission Accomplished! Hollande’s Bush Moment:

Still No Crazy Glue in Sight

As Colin Powell famously warned George H.W. Bush on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.” 

France is not responsible for “breaking” Mali. The country was already a West African basket case long before the French intervention.

But France, which enraged many Americans by refusing to participate in the invasion of Iraq, now finds itself stuck with the results of their own intervention.  And there’s no crazy glue in sight.

That’s what I wrote a couple of months ago after President Francois Hollande dispatched French troops to Mali. 

The irony today is that not only is there no obvious solution to Mali’s plight, but Hollande himself is having enormous problems running his own deeply troubled country. 

Back in January Hollande’s aides hoped that a forceful intervention in Mali would give the lie to the charge that he was a feeble, indecisive leader.

But now, in mid April, with 4,600 French troops in Mali, the magazine L’Express is running an abject photo of Holland on the cover, over the humiliating headline: “M. FAIBLE.” (Mister WEAK). Similar devastatingly mocking jibes fill the media—from all sides of the political spectrum.

Indeed, with Hollande confronting a major domestic political crisis, after his Budget Minister-in charge of collecting taxes--admitted to having stashed money in secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Singapore, the president’s popularity is still plummeting (now about 20%).

It’s being driven ever lower by France’s abysmal economic situation,  mounting crime and racial tensions. With three of Hollande’s own ministers now publicly challenging the government’s economic program, the ineluctable conclusion is that no one’s really in charge.

Yet this is the same man who is supposedly leading the battle to save Mali from ruin.

When France intervened in January, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius vowed the action would be over in “a matter of weeks.”

Now in mid April, 4,600 French troops are still in the country, supported by about 6,000 soldiers from several African states. Led by the French, they’ve retaken most of the major population centers from the jihadists who had threatened to overrun the country. They’ve also pummeled rebel redoubts in the North, reportedly killing hundreds of radicals and destroying tons of equipment.

Yet the situation is still tense. Islamists who had faded into the villages and rugged mountains are still capable of deadly hit-and-run attacks. And the ethnic Tuaregs in the North, who began the rebellion, are still demanding autonomy or independence.

Hollande  is also out on a limb. Though he claimed he was acting to protect Europe from radical Islam spreading in Africa, he has received precious little support from his European allies. Nor—aside from some important intelligence and logistics support—has he received much real backing from the United States.  After Iraq and Afghanistan, no one is rushing to get involved in yet another quagmire.

Meanwhile the Mali adventure is costing France—whose budget is already in disarray-- close to three million Euros a day—probably much more. By this summer, the cost will probably have risen to at least half a billion Euros…and counting.  

Hollande’s predicament now is not that different from the one facing President Obama in Afghanistan: how to drastically decrease France’s involvement in Mali without making it look like France has cut and run, leaving an unseemly chaos in his wake.

The solution: France will turn over the mess in their former colony, as soon as possible, to a new “democratically-elected” Malian government.  

Thus it was that Hollande dispatched Foreign Minister Fabius to Bamako to lay down his dictat to the major political actors:  presidential and legislative elections were to be held by July.

The rebel Tuaregs were supposed to lay down their arms, though they still occupy Kidal and a part of Northern Mali; a French reaction force would stay in place to ensure that “the terrorists” didn’t come back.

We imagine the plans also include a kind of George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished” moment: A beaming Hollande attending the inauguration of Mali’s new leaders. He salutes the sacrifice of the heroic French and African troops, vows undying support for the future of France’s former colony--and continues to withdraw French troops.

By the end of 2013 only 1000 French troops will be left to work with a UN Peacekeeping Force from other mainly African countries.

That’s the deal. The problem, according to many observers, is that attempting to hold meaningful--never mind democratic-- elections by July is just a wishful figment of Hollande’s desperate imagination--a frail fig leaf for France.

Even if Mali were secure, the idea that it might be possible to organize a real campaign in a country twice the size of France, draw up lists of electors when at least 400,000 Malians from the north have fled south or to their African neighbors, is a chimera.

With no time for new political leaders or parties to organize and present themselves, the field is left to the same threadbare, corrupt politicians who presided over the country’s ruin and final collapse in 2012.

After that debacle, it turned out that what had once been trumpeted as a showcase for post-colonial government in Africa, was in fact a  “Potemkin” democracy—all façade, no substance.

Which will probably be the upshot of the elections scheduled for July (if they actually take place.)

The scenario after that: those 1,000 French troops, with 10,000 soldiers and police from the new U.N. force—many of them poorly equipped and trained—will somehow maintain order in Mali’s restive towns and cities and vast hinterlands, while the new government struggles to resolve the country’s huge problems, made even more desperate by the changing climate of the Sahel.   

Bottom line: fifty years after it became independent, Mali has still to rely on its former colonial ruler to keep the country intact.   

But after half a century, France, like the other once great powers, no longer has the appetite nor the resources to play a colonial role. Hollande, as we’ve noted, is having a hell of a time, just attempting to rule his own restive nation.

Nor for that matter does the United States have much in the way of state-building zeal these days. President Obama would much rather deal with terrorist threats through killer drones, than boots on the ground and massive aid programs.

Which means that imposing elections for July on Mali, though a flawed, cynical step, may be the only realistic way forward. It may at least get some kind of political process sputtering again. 

And France and the rest of the world will provide some aid, some investment, some military training—and Mali and its peoples will almost certainly endure decades more of political turbulence and strife.

Their desperate situation will be mirrored in the turmoil, which may also last for decades, of failing states across the region, from Tunis to Libya to Egypt to Syria.

After all, the reverberations of the French Revolution, which took place in 1789, are still being felt in France to this day. 

France: From Gloire to Desespoir

President Francois Hollande’s government is reeling from the latest scandal to jolt this country-the admission by Budget Minister, Jerome Cahuzac, after months of denying the charge, that he had secret offshore accounts. This newest affaire only adds to the strange brew of outrage and despair that has enveloped the citizens of what was once Europe’s greatest power.   

Nothing brings home more starkly France’s awful decline than a visit to the Basilica of Saint Denis in the northern suburbs of Paris. It is still considered one of the architectural marvels of Europe. Its vaulted domes, 13^th century nave, slender towering walls and luminous stained glass windows were models for the high Gothic style that that inspired the architects of Notre Dame in Paris and other great abbeys and temples to the Christian God throughout Europe. Inside are the tombs—though not always the remains--of most of the kings and queens of France over the past 1500 years. 

It’s a memorable sight. But there were precious few tourists there when I visited yesterday; and non apparent on the streets outside. 

Once you exit the cavernous, hushed Basilica you’re suddenly walking the main shopping streets of one of Paris’s most notorious urban slums, filled mainly with immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from the sprawling lands that France once ruled in Africa, not that many years ago.

Today, however, Saint Denis is more notorious for its crime and drug rate than its basilica. Probably 25% or more of the young people on these streets are unemployed. Saint Denis is also associated with gang violence, car burnings, housing complexes that even the police fear to enter, and a predominately Islamic population that feels increasingly estranged from the rest of France.

And Saint Denis is far from being an exception in France.

Despite President Hollande’s vow when he entered office to reduce unemployment, the number of jobless is still high—more than 10% and growing higher--throughout the country.

As is the crime rate, from petty street and auto thefts to apartment break-ins, assaults, and all-out gang warfare on the streets of Marseilles. The Interior Minister talks darkly of new violent mafia-like organizations in France, run by legal and illegal immigrants who have swarmed into the country from Eastern Europe in the past few years.

Despite President Hollande’s promise to revitalize French industry and block factory closures, factories continue to shut down. Others continue to lay off thousands of workers. The 35-hour workweek still reigns supreme.

Meanwhile, Hollande’s politically-driven drive to raise taxes on the wealthy, particularly a charge of 75% on those making more than one million Euros a year, has probably cost France far more than any such tax could ever bring in. The latest demented development is that the companies that pay those salaries will also have to pay the taxes. That includes France’s major football teams and millionaire stars.   

Hundreds of thousands of French—many of the best and the brightest--have fled abroad over the past few years, more than 400,000 to London alone. But a survey taken found most of them left not to so much to avoid French taxes, but to escape stifling French bureaucracy and regulations, and do something about the huge waste.

Every French government in recent history has promised to do something about that bureaucracy. None have succeeded in tackling the entrenched labor unions and special interests.

In fact, most French long ago gave up their claim to be a major power. They would happily settle for a good, secure government job, with decent schools, housing, a comfortable retirement and continued access to one of the world’s best medical systems.  They would settle in short for security, in their own land..

But that’s exactly what’s being threatened in an atmosphere of moral decay and crisis—of underlying rot.

Francois Hollande was elected eleven months ago to deal with all this-to bring an end to the frenetic bling-bling reign of Nicolas Sarkozy, to restore order, to return to a feeling of probity; to be, as he promised, “a normal president.” Instead, he's turned out to be weak, indecisive, uninspiring.

And now comes the affaire Cahuzac

Jerome Cahuzac, Francois Hollande’s Minister of the Budget, who had vowed to clean up France’s huge deficit, its finances, and go after tax dodgers. This past December a new investigative on-line journal Mediapart, reported that Cahuzac had an illegal bank account in Switzerland. Cahuzac solemnly swore to his colleagues in the National Assembly, swore to all who would listen, that the charge was false.

This week, however, he finally admitted that, yes, he had secret account in Switzerland, which he then moved to Singapore. The account totaled about 600,000 Euros. 

The French media immediately compared Cahuzac with Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky affair, Richard Nixon and Watergate.

Cahuzac’s humiliating admission is like blood in the water to the France’s political and media sharks. Before this scandal broke, the level of public approval for Hollande had plummeted to less than 30%. 

Today, it could only be lower. Now all sides are demanding to know how, if a small muck-raking journal could discover Cahuzac’s misdeeds, how is it that President Hollande—with all the investigative tools at his disposal--couldn’t have found out earlier.

Then today came further embarrassing news for Hollande. The revelation that the treasury of his last election campaign—the one that was waged to bring honesty etc. into government—the treasurer also had a couple of off-shore companies in the Cayman Islands.

There are increasing calls—even from within his own party--for him to completely reform his government, to strike out in some heroic new direction, to revive France’s faith in its future.

There’s no indication that Francois Hollande has either the stomach or the backbone for such a challenge. Nor that the French would willingly make the sacrifices necessary to retool and rebuild their nation.

They’re reluctant to even seriously discuss what’s needed.

Perhaps that’s because the problems they confront—like unemployment, economic growth, crime, racial strife, the survival of the Euro ----perhaps because those problems are so complex, the French—like other nations—find it much easier to obsess about other simpler issues—issues someone can have a real opinion about. Like..well, should a Muslim woman working in a government office be able to wear a veil?  Or, should France’s social security system pay for a homosexual couple to have a child using artificial insemination and a surrogate mother?

Yet all the while, France’s real problems keep growing.

This week for instance, the Canard Enchaine, reports that, according to a recent government study, the time-off taken for such things as “sickness” and “accidents at work” by the 57,000 people employed by the City of Paris, came to an average of 20 days—that is about one month—per employee. That’s in addition to the five weeks of holiday they get each year.

That represents a total of more than 1.15 million days of work—a cost of 160 million Euros per year.

Meanwhile, as part of a project to refurbish the Basilica of Saint Denis, its marvelous stained glass windows, which looked over the tombs of France’s greatest monarchs, were removed from the church, replaced by artificially colored panes, and sent off to be repaired by skilled French artisans. Ten years later, those windows, according to a guide I spoke with, are still locked away in their protective cases.

The authorities can’t find the money to restore them.