Taunter Media

And then the riots were in China:

This shouldn’t be surprising.  It just is.

Let’s get the basics out of the way.  Twenty years and a month after Tiananmen, it is clear that the Chinese government is perfectly prepared to use maximum force against any entity it perceives as a threat.  It is clear that the Chinese government’s plan for dealing with the traditional homelands of its ethnic minorities – particularly Tibet and Xinjiang, which have national aspirations – is to encourage as many Han Chinese as possible to move there, to lay claim to the land and create facts on the ground that permanently foreclose independence.  Wonder who gave them that idea.

It is also clear that there are frequent riots in China.  A fifth of the world’s population lives there, and away from the pollution-choked Las Vegas-meets-Frankfurt eastern megalopolises there is a whole other pollution-choked world that has to make do without regular access to Macao junkets to blow off some steam.  There are cruel Party bosses and local strongmen outside town, and from time to time things run a bit more like Communism without a happy face.

Still, there is something awful about these riots, especially coming on the heels of Iran’s moment in the sun and North Korea’s gratuitous weirdness (is there even a point to launching a DOS attack on the Federal Trade Commission?).  It’s a sad reminder of just what an extraordinary percentage of the world’s population continues to live under repressive regimes, and how amazingly strong and resilient those regimes are.

One of the hallmarks of the Global War on Terror has been the confused sense that we really should be done with this.  Between 1914 and 1989 humanity turned on itself in some catastrophic autoimmune disorder; we managed two World Wars, the Soviet and Chinese Revolutions and the various phases of the India-Pakistan-Bangladesh divorce churned through Asia, the German government tried to exterminate the Jews and the Cambodian government damn near exterminated itself, and Africa was carved up.  Then the Wall fell and Saddam was bitch-slapped and Russia got wobbly and it seemed over.  Sure, there would be tornadoes of despair – Rwanda, the Balkans, Somalia – but we could relax a bit.  Even the odd leftist guerillas – the Shining Path and FARC, the IRA and ETA – seemed to be mellowing with old age.  The PLO made a peace of sorts with Israel.  November 17 turned out to be a couple of old dudes on an island.

The dogged determination of Al Qaeda to keep going has spoiled the calm we expected.  Various theories have been advanced for Clinton’s failure to deal more harshly with Al Qaeda when he was in charge (Dubya’s failures can be explained by simple incompetence), but I tend to come back to the notion that no one in the Clinton Administration could understand why this was still going on.

For the better part of eight years we have fought on against the forces of militant Islam.  We have done a terrible, terrible job of it – less occupying Iraq, more taxing oil consumption would have positioned us much better – but it has been front and center in our minds.  How incredibly depressing to see the struggles elsewhere.