``...I'm impressed by Chuck's sang froid, but if I'm not mistaken, it is out of character with the rest of the country, which seems to be in a state of hysterical panic...'' James Heartfield
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Nobody I know or have talked to or seen around here in the SF bay area is in the slightest worried---except by the ridiculous police-state turns of the federal and state governments---or pissed at the war on Afghanistan. The network media reports are a total bore and seem more like void fillers to mask the complete lack of even basic war coverage, political analysis, or actual reporting of any sort.
I talk at work in exactly the same way as I write here and get pretty much the same sort of response---mostly zeros with a few laughs.
And there is a concrete excuse. It turned out that in the middle of the great anthrax scare, I was on doxycycline(?) to prevent post gum surgery infection. Doxycycline is the cheaper generic of Cipro (I think).
In any event, I've been reading or rather slowly slogging my way through the Old Testament, with breaks to the Quran, Hadith, and Babylonian Talmud. It is gawd-awful boring, yet somehow also electrifying. A very odd and contradictory reaction. I would suggest it to the list, but I am sure people here will have the same reaction as my work buddies---nice idea Chuck, but no thanks.
If reading the primary textual works is too obnoxious, then people should take a quick read of Saudi Arabian history at the Library of Congress site. Go to (http://memory.loc.gov/) and type in Saudi Arabia as the search topic. It's informative up until post-WWII when US foreign policy and Saudi interests begin to filter the events---but at least they are obvious about it.
The OT, Quran, and Hadith reading comes in handy when you get to Wahhabi Islam. It turns out that Taliban means student, but it also refers to the second generation `students of the Quran' who first wrote down the visions or inspirations that compose the Quran. Mohammad and his followers---at least the first generation elite command memorized the inspirations. Part of the reason was they were illiterate, and part of it was that they didn't believe in writing them down---that the written words would degrade both faith and understanding (probably an excuse to get out of doing the homework).
A lot of this reading, especially the Saudi history re-enforces the immediate impression that if the US were really interested in finding the sources of the WTC/Pentagon attacks, they should have been digging in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and maybe Pakistan. Since all of those countries are theoretical allies and are also too politically fragile to bare much rough scrutiny, Afghanistan was picked instead---with Iraq as a back-up or Plan B. Even if bin Laden was the inspiration and maybe the money, these were still the first places to start digging.
Just finished the Kagarlitsky and Tariq Ali interviews in the LBO newsletter this afternoon and they say similar sorts of things (K doesn't think bin Laden was behind it, and Ali says look in Egypt and Saudi Arabia). Both agree that the fifty years of US policy to destory left reform movements in the third world made religious fundamentalism the only other source of reform by default. I would add, that since US domestic policies have pretty much followed the same course, they fostered similar religious based bullshit here.
Chuck Grimes