Seems like everyone's bombing someone these days. A disgruntled math professor sends off explosive mail to fellow geeks. Crazed religious freaks detonate car bombs outside embassies in half-starved Third World backwaters. A sex-addicted redneck launches cruise missiles at a pharmaceutical factory (did it produce Viagra?). That's not even mentioning the Paddies going at it like it was the time of William the Orange, or India and Pakistan preparing a billion-person nuclear pyre. Hell, if I weren't so busy, I'd be trying to stockpile Scud missiles just in case the people next door got too noisy.

    With bombs galore, any rogue nation, lunatic fringe group, or deranged psycho would be foolish not to collect so-called weapons of mass destruction, if only to act as a deterrent against their counterparts.  But what's truly fascinating is how the bombers try to justify blowing up people in the name of some higher cause. In a strictly moral sense, there's really very little difference between Theodore Kaczynski's booby-trapped fan mail, Islamic extremists' car bombs, and Bill Clinton's Tomahawk cruise missiles. All three attacks killed strangers without giving any warning. Were there a world court with real authority, all three would be charged with premeditated murder.

    The religious psychos certainly showed criminal behavior. Anyone who sets off a bomb at a busy downtown intersection has pretty much gone socio-pathic. If you want to fight America, take on some Marines instead of killing and maiming a bunch of poor Kenyan office workers. Who are these freaks anyway? They want to create revolutions to overthrow corrupt governments like those in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, yet they're far from willing to overthrow the corrupt patriarchy in their own minds. Sorry, but you don't get no 1989 before you have a 1968.

    Whether or not the plant in Khartoum made Flintstone vitamins or nerve gas, Clinton pretty much got in touch with his inner war criminal by launching those cruise missiles. If you think they're producing chemical weapons why would you blow the factory up, exposing a million or more innocent Sudanese to the nerve gas? Unless, of course, you knew that there were no weapons there but needed to push Monica to beyond page 3, in which case your risking the death of some poor saps just as part of cheap, transparent spin-control maneuver.  At least Islamic fundamentalists bomb in the name of Allah  and Kaczynski bombed in the name of his Noam Chomsky-Pol Potesque psychobabble . Billy bombed just to cover up his private parts and to shore up his domestic popularity. That's pretty banal. (The Afghanistan bombings were fair game, by the way. The U.S. government set up those bases in 1982 to help the Afghans fight the Soviets. What the CIA bestoweth upon thee, the CIA can taketh away.)

    These crimes make little Teddy's solitary 20-year holy war against technology and capitalism look like a series of testy letter s to the editor. His body count was only, like, three. The man did, however, play jury, judge, and executioner with unwitting chumps. And for that hubris he deserves punishment. But, in contrast to the Wal-Mart  approach to violence exercised by Clinton, the Islamic extremists Timothy McVeigh and the Micks, Kaczynski's boutique terrorism separated the innocent from the guilty. In punishing the wrongdoers within his cosmology with carefully crafted letter bombs he at least made some attempt in making sure only his targets would get hurt.

    Kaczynski's methodology puts him on a morally higher plane than of today's bombers, save Germany's Red Army Faction, which also limits its increasingly rare attacks to carefully chosen targets. It's ironic, then, that of all the criminals mentioned above, he's the only one rotting in a jail cell.

Borzou Daragahi is a freelance journalist. After 9/11 he left New York City to report in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. He is currently (2004) based in Tehran, making frequent visits to Iraq.

Back to Archives Page