The Manpads Are Coming!

So now it's Manpads, Bush! Another thing to be scared of. The word itself is pretty damn scarey, no? Manpads? It evokes a weird scenario for a late night TV ad, along with tampax and those prophylactic devices that protect against unseemly urinary leaks. Turns out, though, MANPADS is a somewhat clumsy acronym for Man Portable Air Defence Systems, and the RAND Corporation has recently completed a study to assess its threat to civil aviation. They say, among other things, that "Al Qaeda and its affiliates have the motive and the means to bring down U.S. commercial aircraft" with these unfortunately-named shoulder-fired missiles.

Well, I'm sure your people comb the streets and rooftops for miles around before you take off in Air Force One, but that's scant comfort to the rest of us, Bush. I don't see the Secret Service scanning the horizon at Burkbank Airport, or Ontario. The rest of us have to take our chances when our plane takes off. We get little reassurance from the Rand report: "No such attempt has been made yet on a U.S. carrier, but given the measures being taken to preclude 9/11 style attacks, the use of Manpads will unavoidably become attractive to terrorists."

I don't like the sound of that word "unavoidably", do you, Bush? It makes it seem like it's bound to happen.

And coincidentally, of course, Airbus just happened to unveil its brand new A380 jumbo jet just last week. They say it can carry more than 800 passengers!

Coincidentally, too, I'm sure, Frontline aired a piece last night about the spread of terrorist cells in Europe. What a dreadful Hydra you've created here, Bush. Well, it's unfair to credit you with responsibility for the entire mess. There's blame enough to go around, not least to those barbarous terrorists themselves. But it's like I was saying just yesterday about our response so Castro: as I see it--as many of us out here see it--violence fails singularly as a cure for violence. On the contrary, it simply creates more. One of the French (uh-oh!) pundits whose expertise is in the field of terrorism was saying on Frontline that many experts are simply incredulous to see the United States address the terrorism of the 2000s as though it were the terrorism of the 1980s. It's a completely different animal, he insisted, multifarious, multi-cellular, continually expanding. To cut off a head is not to kill the creature, but rather to stimulate the growth of another two heads in its place. Your war in Iraq was the gift beyond Osama's wildest dreams: you created not only the motivation but the perfect training ground for those fanatics you claim to be defending our country from.

By the way, Bush, I did catch most of your news conference this morning--even though Ellie, the smarter of the two of us, was trying to get me to change channels. (Fortunately, I had the remote!) You were telling us all again, for the umpteenth time, how much safer the world is now, without Saddam--in that tone of yours that's calculated to suggest that anyone who questions the wisdom of the commander-in-chief is an idiotic child. Safer? Maybe as you see it. But with the reported proliferation of these MANPADS, I personally think not.