Homicidal Maniacs On The Loose

But surely much of the credit for our thus-far-clean record of public safety is owing to stringent federal measures to catch or head off terrorists: domestic surveillance included; Guantanamo included; the Patriot Act included; conceivably even water boarding. (As if the momentary terrorizing of a terrorist, for the sake of prospectively vital information could offset the prospect of preserving American lives and property!)

Mumbai reminds us that terrorists aren't idealists, they're barely identifiable as human; it reminds us, further, that heading them off is a proposition more urgent than cleaning up after them. Clearly a civilized nation, which we still were, the last time I looked, shouldn't and won't insert bamboo slivers under fingernails to extract The Truth. That nation has a right anyway to snoop effectively in order to protect even ACLU members against threats of mayhem and massacre.

The Western left gives lip service to the idea of self-defense without acknowledging the danger of defending too little or too lethargically -- the very danger that the Mumbai massacres exemplify. It's an old syndrome of the left, seen back in the '60s in the context of inner-city crime and Vietnam protest. It begins with figuring that the disrupters of order enjoy at least some marginal entitlement to understanding, "victims" as they are of "society." Normally those who thus argue usually live in safe neighborhoods -- the United States, for example.

One thing's sure: No such neighborhoods can remain safe unless constantly and efficiently patrolled by the forces of law and order so as to exclude the entrepreneurial mass murderer. We're the good guys, comparatively speaking. They're the miserably, exquisitely bad guys. Why do so many Western liberals have so hard a time with that simple, undeniable proposition?