Rice: “Stop making excuses for terrorists.” Good idea

During an appearance on PBS, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice told the News Hour’s Jim Lehrer that “we need to stop making excuses for the terrorists and saying that someone is making them do it.”

MR. LEHRER: What about the additional element here that, increasingly, terrorism experts and Muslim experts are saying that the combination of Iraq and other foreign policy decisions by the United States are actually creating more terrorists every day than they are eliminating them.

SECRETARY RICE: When we are going to stop making excuses for the terrorists? The terrorists on September 11th attacked the United States. We weren’t in Iraq. We weren’t even in Afghanistan on September 11th. They have attacked in places that had no forces in either place. They’ve attacked all over the world. They’ve attacked in Morocco and in Bali and in Egypt and in London and in Madrid.

When are we going to stop making excuses for the terrorists and saying that somebody is making them do it? No, these are simply evil people who want to kill. And they want to kill in the name of a perverted ideology that really is not Islam, but they somehow want to claim that mantle to say that this is about some kind of grievance. This isn’t about some kind of grievance. This is an effort to destroy, rather than to build.

We agree: When are people going to stop making excuses for terrorists? When will the US stop providing brutal, dictatorial regimes with support that terrorists point to as evidence of our ill intentions? When we will stop killing civilians in Iraq? When will we stop the Abu Ghraibs and Guantanamos that provide terrorists with excuses? When will we stop kidnapping terror suspects and sending them to third countries where torture is a routine component of interrogation? When will we brand as stupid and counterproductive remarks from members of Congress advocating “taking out” Muslim holy sites, and when we will grant that man the verbal savaging he deserves?

Unfortunately, those are questions that only the Bush administration can answer, and they won’t.

Led by Dick Cheney, the administration adamantly oppose efforts by congressional Republicans to moderate the administration’s contempt for international treaties and other standards of behavior for treatment of prisoners. Led by Don Rumsfeld, the administration adamantly refuse to forswear permanent military bases in Iraq. Led by an entire cabal of clueless idelogues, the administration adamantly refuse to acknowledge that their own behavior has an impact on the other side’s more clued in ideologues; the ones who make terrorist recruiting posters from every bit of Bush administration arrogance and inhumanity.

Since the Bush administration took office, terrorists around the world have killed more than 4,000 civilians, nearly 3,000 of them in the US. Since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration have killed somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 civilians directly — what we call “collateral damage” — and tens of thousands more indirectly, by creating conditions that lead to disease, by creating such an insecure environment in Iraq that Baghdad morgues are overflowing with victims of violent crime, by throwing open Iraq’s borders to suicide bombers and other committed fanatics who take a terrible toll on civilians.

Whatever they may be, terrorists are not subhuman. They are not aliens. And in many instances, they’re very smart and highly motivated people. It should go without saying that killing people whose primary sin is being in the wrong place at the wrong time is an unspeakably barbarous act. But we’re doing it too, and on a scale terrorists can only dream of. We too have “detained” and tortured and killed people who had nothing to do with the actions we’re trying to combat. And every time we do that, we create more terrorists.

People are not born wanting to strap explosives to themselves and walk into a public place to blow themselves and anyone who happen to be around, up. People do not live in a contextual vacuum, and terrorists cannot recruit them by appealing to some innate desire to kill other people they don’t know and who have done them no harm. They need an excuse, and through short-sighted foreign policies and callous military ones and the misguided, idiotic notion that we have to be as merciless as terrorists in order to combat them, we continue to manufacture those excuses.

So, yes, Ms. Rice: When we will we stop making excuses for terrorists?