On Tues­day Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney told an Iowa audi­ence that there would be more ter­ror­ism in the U.S. if he was­n’t re-elected Vice President:
bq. “It’s absolute­ly essen­tial that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice,” Mr. Cheney told a crowd of 350 peo­ple in Des Moines, “because if we make the wrong choice then the dan­ger is that we’ll get hit again and we’ll be hit in a way that will be dev­as­tat­ing from the stand­point of the Unit­ed States.”
His words under­score just how much the Bush/Cheney Admin­is­tra­tion have relied on the 9/11 ter­ror­ist attacks for their polit­i­cal legit­i­ma­cy. Ter­ror breeds ter­ror and fear, anger and vio­lence esca­lates in its wake. The wars in Afghanistan and iraq are shap­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of Amer­i­ca haters, as much because the post-war rebuild­ing has been so care­less and self-serving to Amer­i­can eco­nom­ic inter­ests. War-mongerers in one coun­try sup­port the war-mongerers in anoth­er by pro­vid­ing each anoth­er with tar­gets and argu­ments. The cycle goes on.