A decade ago, when my wife’s weathered Nissan was nearing the end of its natural life, we joked about setting the car free on the highway to find its way from Washington to North Carolina a route it followed countless times when we were interstate daters. A couple of years of that commute inspired a lot of musing about computerized cars that could drive themselves but alert the occupants when they needed to resume control and exit for gas. And, of course, these cars would know where the gas stations were and which had the best prices.

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The American consumer is king. That’s evident in the latest news about the economy, which showed that a drop in purchases of everything from flat-panel televisions to clothes to cars is pushing the United States into a potentially deep and prolonged recession.

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[NOTE: This column was written on Nov. 26, before terrorists attacked Mumbai, India. -Ed.]

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CQ Transcriptswire

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CQ Transcriptswire

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Many Indians have called the attacks in Mumbai “India’s 9/11.” As an American who lived in India, I can feel that country’s anguish over these horrific and indiscriminate acts of terror.

Most Indian observers, however, were critical in 2001 (and after) of how exactly the Bush administration (i.e. Dick Cheney) responded to September 11. They were right, and they would do well to remember their own critique at this fateful moment.

What where the major mistakes of the United States government, and how might India avoid repeating them?

1) Remember asymmetry

The Bush administration was convinced that 9/11 could not have been the work of a small, independent terrorist organization. They insisted that Iraq must somehow have been behind it. States are used to dealing with other states, and military and intelligence agencies are fixated on state rivals. But Bush and Cheney were wrong. We have entered an era of asymmetrical terrorism threats, in which relatively small groups can inflict substantial damage.

The Bush administration clung to its conviction of an Iraq-al-Qaeda operational cooperation despite the excellent evidence, which the FBI and CIA quickly uncovered, that the money had all come via the UAE from Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was never any money trail back to the Iraqi government.

Many Indian officials and much of the Indian public is falling into the Cheney fallacy. It is being argued that the terrorists fought as trained guerrillas, and implied that only a state (i.e. Pakistan) could have given them that sort of training.

But to the extent that the terrorists were professional fighters, they could have come by their training in many ways. Some might have been ex-military in Britain or Pakistan. Or they might have interned in some training camp somewhere. Some could have fought as vigilantes in Afghanistan or Iraq. They needn’t be state-backed.

Keep your eye on the ball.

The Bush administration took its eye off al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and instead put most of its resources into confronting Iraq. But Iraq had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Eventually this American fickleness allowed both al-Qaeda and the Taliban to regroup.

Likewise, India should not allow itself to be distracted by implausible conspiracy theories about high Pakistani officials wanting to destroy the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai. (Does that even make any sense?) Focusing on a conventional state threat alone will leave the country unprepared to meet further asymmetrical, guerrilla-style attacks.

Avoid Easy Bigotry about National Character

Many Americans decided after 9/11 that since 13 of the hijackers were Saudi Wahhabis, there is something evil about Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia. But Saudi Arabia itself was attacked repeatedly by al-Qaeda in 2003-2006 and waged a major national struggle against it. You can’t tar a whole people with the brush of a few nationals that turn to terrorism.

Worse, a whole industry of Islamphobia grew up, with dedicated television programs (0′Reilly, Glen Beck), specialized sermonizers, and political hatchetmen (Giuliani). Persons born in the Middle East or Pakistan were systematically harassed at airports. And the stigmatization of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans was used as a wedge to attack liberals and leftists, as well, however illogical the juxtaposition may seem.

There is a danger in India as we speak of mob action against Muslims, which will ineluctably drag the country into communal violence. The terrorists that attacked Mumbai were not Muslims in any meaningful sense of the word. They were cultists. Some of them brought stocks of alcohol for the siege they knew they would provoke. They were not pious.
They killed and wounded Muslims along with other kinds of Indians.

Muslims in general must not be punished for the actions of a handful of unbalanced fanatics. Down that road lies the end of civilization. It should be remembered that Hindu extremists have killed 100 Christians in eastern India in recent weeks. But that would be no excuse for a Christian crusade against Hindus or Hinduism.

Likewise, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as a Sikh, will remember the dark days when PM Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards after she had sent the Indian security forces into the Golden Temple– and the mob attacks on Sikhs in Delhi that took place in the aftermath. Blaming all Sikhs for the actions of a few was wrong then. It would be wrong now if applied to Muslims.

Address Security Flaws, but Keep Civil Liberties Strong

The 9/11 hijackings exploited three simple flaws in airline security of a procedural sort. Cockpit doors were not thought to need strengthening. It was assumed that hijackers could not fly planes. And no one expected hijackers to kill themselves. Once those assumptions are no longer made, security is already much better. Likewise, the Mumbai terrorists exploited flaws in coastal, urban and hotel security, which need to be addressed.

But Bush and Cheney hardly contented themselves with counter-terrorism measures. They dropped a thousand-page “p.a.t.r.i.o.t. act” on Congress one night and insisted they vote on it the next day. They created outlaw spaces like Guantanamo and engaged in torture (or encouraged allies to torture for them). They railroaded innocent people. They deeply damaged American democracy.

India’s own democracy has all along been fragile. I actually travelled in India in summer of 1976 when Indira Gandhi had declared “Emergency,” i.e., had suspended civil liberties and democracy (the only such period in Indian history since 1947). India’s leadership must not allow a handful of terrorists to push the country into another Emergency. It is not always possible for lapsed democracies to recover their liberties once they are undermined.

Avoid War

The Bush administration fought two major wars in the aftermath of 9/11 but was never able to kill or capture the top al-Qaeda leadership. Conventional warfare did not actually destroy the Taliban, who later experienced a resurgence. The attack on Iraq destabilized the eastern stretches of the Middle East, which will be fragile and will face the threat of further wars for some time to come.

War with Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks would be a huge error. President Asaf Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani certainly did not have anything to do with those attacks. Indeed, the bombing of the Islamabad Marriott, which was intended to kill them, was done by exactly the same sort of people as attacked Mumbai. Nor was Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kiyani involved. Is it possible that a military cell under Gen. Pervez Musharraf trained Lashkar-e Tayiba terrorists for attacks in Kashmir, and then some of the LET went rogue and decided to hit Mumbai instead? Yes. But to interpret such a thing as a Pakistan government operation would be incorrect.

With a new civilian government, headed by politicians who have themselves suffered from Muslim extremism and terrorism, Pakistan could be an increasingly important security partner for India. Allowing past enmities to derail these potentialities for detente would be most unwise.

Don’t Swing to the Right

The American public, traumatized by 9/11 and misled by propaganda from corporate media, swung right. Instead of rebuking Bush and Cheney for their sins against the Republic, for their illegal war on Iraq, for their gutting of the Bill of Rights, for their Orwellian techniques of governance, the public gave them another 4 years in 2004. This Himalayan error of judgment allowed Bush and Cheney to go on, like giant termites, undermining the economic and legal foundations of American values and prosperity.

The fundamentalist, rightwing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, which has extensive links with Hindu extremist groups, is already attacking the secular, left-of-center Congress Party for allegedly being soft on Muslim terrorism. The BJP almost dragged India into a nuclear war with Pakistan in 2002, and it seeded RSS extremists in the civil bureaucracy, and for the Indian public to return it to power now would risk further geopolitical and domestic tensions.

India may well become a global superpower during the coming century. The choices it makes now on how it will deal with this threat of terrorism will help determine what kind of country it will be, and what kind of global impact it will have. While it may be hypocritical of an American to hope that New Delhi deals with its crisis better than we did, it bespeaks my confidence in the country that I believe it can.

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Aljazeera English interviews victims of the Mumbai attacks in hospital, several of them Muslims.

Aljazeera English also reports on the reaction in Pakistan to the Mumbai events, both on the part of Foreign Minister Qureishi and in an interview with hard line radical fundamentalist Gen. Hamid Gul, a former head of the dreaded Inter-Services Intelligence.

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SPEAKER: PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

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[b][link:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/26/AR2008112600386_pf.html|FDA Draws Fire Over Chemicals In Baby Formula][/b]

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 27, 2008; A02

[div class="excerpt"]…..

The FDA collected 87 samples of…

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Among the many political successes of the Barack Obama campaign was that it kept the frequently restive liberal wing of the Democratic Party unified. That was no accident: Several high-profile liberals — among them 1960s student activist Tom Hayden, actor Danny Glover and author Barbara Ehrenreich — joined forces in a group called Progressives for Obama. Now, however, one of the lead organizers of that group, Bill Fletcher Jr., a senior scholar at the liberal Institute for Policy Studies, is already airing some second thoughts.

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their history of introducing anti-abortion bills. It is something we need to be on the guard against.

We will have more control in the House come January, but we had a majority in 2007 when two incidents occurred that failed to address serious concerns. One was the fact that women on military …

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A suicide bomber detonated his payload outside a mosque in the largely Shiite town of Musayyib on Friday, killing 12 and wounding 23. Musayyib is in Babil province, and the US turned over security duties there to the Iraqi government last month. The Sadrists plamed the bombing on the security agreement and continued US presence in the country.

Hamza Hindawi of AP asks whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was weakened by the deal-making in which he had to engage to get the security pact through parliament. He had to agree to a national referendum, and to a package of reforms aimed at making Iraqi government more consensual and less concentrated in the executive, as for all practical purposes, it has become under al-Maliki. I am quoted as wondering whether the current alliance between al-Maliki’s Islamic Da’wa (Mission) Party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim will survive. If not, the two will square off against one another in December, during the next federal parliamentary elections. The constitutions stipulates that the largest single bloc in parliament gets first shot at forming a government, and that might not be the al-Da’wa Party.

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that controversy continues to rage around the security pact, dividing communities against one another. The Association of Muslim Scholars condemned the Iraqi Islamic Party and other Sunni Arab parties for “selling Iraq” with their votes in its favor. Muqtada al-Sadr announced three days of mourning in protest against its enactment, but he did not order his supporters to engage in confrontation to overturn it, “in order to safeguard the unity of the country. One of the aides to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani called it a “diminution” of Iraq’s sovereignty.

Muqtada asked his followers to mourn formally in mosques for three days, and to hold wakes (for all the world as though someone had died in the family). Muqtada all by himself will leave behind enough material to keep symbolic anthropologists busy for centuries. He sent out a statement expressing his “condolences” to Iraqis at this calamity, an agreement of abasement and humiliation. Hundreds of Sadrists managed to demonstrate after Friday prayers, despite strict security, and to burn American flags.

In Karbala, an aide to Sistani, Sheikh Ahmad al-Safi, said he had two concerns. First, would the Iraqi government actually exercise sovereignty to the degree stipulated in the agreement? And, second, he regretted the lack of any guarantee that Iraq would be removed from Chapter 7 of the UN Charter (and thus regain its independence from the UNSC). He pointed out that as long as US troops were on Iraqi soil, the government in Baghdad would not be truly sovereign, since it could not inspect the mail of American residents of Iraq, and US troops retained freedom of movement.

Ayatollah Muhammad al-Ya`qubi expressed his “disappointment” that the pact was enacted. (He is the spiritual leader of the Islamic Virtue Party or Fadhila, which is strong in Basra).

The Bush administration finally released the official English text on Friday. Some parliamentarians have expressed fears that it is not exactly the same as the Arabic text.

The European Union on Friday urged member states to take in 10,000 of the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria. While it is a praiseworthy step, it cannot in itself resolve a massive crisis of 1.5 million Iraqis displaced abroad.