Terrorism

Apparently there's a stooshie over Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. Whatever. As might be expected, America's worst Congressman, Peter King of New York, is busy offering his opinion: Robinson's views are well out of the American foreign-policy mainstream. Rep. Peter King (R-LI) says, "She is definitely from the school of moral equivalency which somehow invariably comes down on the side against vibrant democracies such as Israel and the United States." Fairness demands that we absolve Mr King of all charges of moral equivalency. After all he's been a keen supporter of terrorism and torture for years.

From the Departments of a) Modern Britain and b) Modern Childhood. The Lancashire Telegraph reports: Primary school pupils are to be shown a film about the dangers of terrorists as part of an organised safety day. More than 2,000 10 and 11-year-olds will see a short film, which urges them to tell the police, their parents or a teacher if they hear anyone expressing extremist views. The film has been made by school liaison officers and Eastern Division’s new Preventing Violent Extremism team, based at Blackburn. It uses cartoon animals to get across safety messages. A lion explains that terrorists can look like anyone, while a cat tells pupils that should get help if they are being bullied and a toad tells them how to cross the road.

The theatre of yesterday's speeches from Barack Obama and Dick Cheney was irresistible. And phoney. That is, this was a pretty strange "duel" given that the matter was decided long ago and not just as recently as last November's election. Or, to put it another way, Dick Cheney might have given a largely and substantively similar speech had John McCain been the 44th President of the United States. After all, McCain had also promised to close Guantanamo and confirm the prohibition on the use of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" Cheney says are so essential to preserving American security. There's nothing too surprising about this: Condi Rice also wanted to close Guantanamo and even President Bush held its eventual shuttering as a stated long-term policy aim.

The great thing about Washington is its variety. Sometimes it's the Republicans who infuriate you and sometimes it's the Democrats whose bone-headed nitwittery is singularly depressing. Today it's Harry Reid's turn to annoy: "QUESTION: If the United States -- if the United States thinks that these people should be held, why shouldn’t they be held in the United States? Why shouldn’t the U.S. take those risks, the attendant risk of holding them, since it’s the one that says they should be held? REID: I think there’s a general feeling, as I’ve already said, that the American people, and certainly the Senate, overwhelmingly doesn’t want terrorists to be released in the United States. And I think we’re going to stick with that.

Sometimes it's the seemingly minor events - minor, that is, in the grand scheme of matters, not necessarily small or insignificant at the moment they occur - that can carry more weight than more obviously important or telling developments. Lord knows, there's been no end of troubling news from Pakistan in recent years. But, silly as it may seem, there's something especially terrible about today's attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team which killed at least six policemen and injured five members of the Sri Lankan team. (See Cricinfo's rolling updates for the latest news.) Political assassinations, for instance, are hardly unknown in Pakistan (or elsewhere on the subcontinent) and so it's easy - perhaps too easy - to file them in a drawer marked Terrible Stuff That Sometimes Happens.

A statement of the obvious perhaps, but a welcome one nonetheless given that it's hard to see how Stella Rimington, as a former head of MI5, can sensibly be caricatured as a weak-kneed, soft-on-terrorism simpleton: “Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy,” Dame Stella said in an interview with a Spanish newspaper. “It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state,” she said. Quite so.

Responding to Stephen Walt's hypothetical (What if Gaza were full of jews?), Megan McArdle compares the Israel lobby to the Irish-American lobby. Ross Douthat says, OK, but the IRA was still considered a terrorist organisation. Daniel Larison dives into the weeds of US attitudes towards Irish terrorism. He writes: The IRA was a genuine terrorist group, but it was listed as such by our government most of all because it was a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. The record seems clear: terrorist groups that are useful to us or harmful to states we officially oppose are given a pass, while those that target us or our allies are condemned in the strongest terms.

Bruce Schneier suspects we'll probably learn the wrong ones. After all, as he points out, there's very little you can do to stop 18 men with guns and grenades once they've begun their attack. I suspect John Robb would agree. Well-planned low-tech attacks that "leverage" a city's own infrastructure are one of the nightmare scenarios. Yet since this kind of mission is more likely than not to end in the deaths of the terrorists themselves (cf the Chechen attack on a Moscow theatre) it remains, happily, an unpopular career choice. And for that one should be truly thankful. Imagine how easy it would be to cripple the railways, or, armed with just a bag or two of grenades to knock-out much of a city's electriciy system.