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TDR CommentThe Age of TerrorismHave the events of September 11, 2001 “changed everything”? Certainly theBush government, wanting to stay in power, is doing all it can to make it so. Theplan is to perform a historical reenactment—in postmodern dress—of the ColdWar. Remember the Cold War? A world divided roughly in thirds: Us, Them,and the Unaligned (aka the Third World). The Cold War pitted an “empire”made from the geographically contiguous but otherwise diverse entities of theUSSR the “satellite” nations of Eastern Europe against an alliance of WesternEuropean nations the USA, Canada, and Japan. Over time, it was plain thatthe Cold War was orchestrated primarily by the USA. The American and Eu-ropean homelands were “protected” by means of MAD—the policy of “mutuallyassured destruction” guaranteed by a surfeit of nuclear weapons. MAD meantthat the blood fights of the Cold War were played out in the Third World—Korea, Vietnam, and various locales in Africa and Latin America. Very conve-nient.In a weird global dance, the USA’s regressive policies made Communism at-tractive to millions in the Third World. By creating the need for an alternativeto American domination, the USA actually made it inevitable that the very en-emies it proclaimed it was opposing would thrive, giving the USA a reason tolaunch attacks. These took the form of covert operations, economic manipula-tion, training and support of local anti-Communists (often enough, butchers andthugs) ...