I'm still not used to it: Cosi Sandwich Bar, Sunglass Hut...machine guns.
When I lived in Mexico City, police and private security personnel armed with machine guns and shotguns were everywhere. Once, while I was lunching in one of the more popular upscale department store/restaurants with some friends, we noticed that steel shutters were slowly descending over the exits. A giant foam-rubber robot waddled past, followed by a half-dozen well-armed security guards in full riot gear. The robot was a man in a costume, part of a promotion somewhere else in the store, who was trying to get out before the lockdown. The security team was responding to a bank robbery on the floor below us.
Such events were common, and I eventually got used to the guns: at banks, in malls, at the casas de cambio where I turned my traveller's checks into suitcases full of pesos.
But it's still unnerving to see such things here. I think that's partly due to the nature of the weapons: in Mexico, the guns were of various types, some obviously old and worn, and I suspected that many of them--like the big-barrelled sawed-off shotguns--were the personal property of the men who carried them. A few of them, with their duct-taped wooden stocks, looked like they might not fire at all. It was the sort of thing you expected to see in a capital of the Third World.
Here, the weapons are all shiny and black, with various scopes and gadgets attached, dark and metallic and intricately lethal. First World technology, to be sure, but one of the supposed benefits of living in the First World is that you don't often see such technology on ready display. Not any more. These days, security squads patrol malls, ferry docks, train stations, and random street corners.
The squads are made up of New York City police officers wearing combat boots, body armor and helmets. Today, as I walked through the mall space of the World Financial Center, there were four of them standing by the doors that exit onto the promenade, near the North Cove boat basin. Their gun barrels were pointed towards the floor, and their hands rested easily on the extended aluminum stocks. I had an impulse to ask one of them: "Is something going on, or is this just a routine patrol?" But I knew that if something was potentially amiss, they probably couldn't tell me, so I stealthily snapped a picture and moved on.
I feel safer around the well-armed NYPD teams than I did around their Mexican counterparts, mainly because armed men in Mexico City--even if they're the police--have a tendency to mug you. But their presence is a constant reminder of how much my little corner of the world has changed over the past 28 months. Increased public firepower, bomb-sniffing dogs, two dozen shiny new cameras in my building's lobby, and that little flutter I always feel whenever I walk past a parked panel van or delivery truck on the street...it all forms a subtle, pervasive web that connects me with the mountains of Afghanistan, the deserts of Iraq, and the black rock of Mecca. Not in a hippy-dippy "we are all one family" sort of way. More in a sinister, "there are people there who would think it a very fine thing if they could kill me here" sort of way.
Over the next eight or nine months, a would-be President from Massachusetts will claim that the best way to break up this unnerving web connecting ordinary folks like me with murderers halfway across the world is to rely on local, foreign law enforcement to act at the expert direction of American intelligence. He will imply that, somehow, picking off an extremist here or there, and jailing the members of a terrorist cell in North Africa or Germany will end the threat.
But that won't end the threat: it will only mitigate it.
I have to wonder about the mind behind such ideas. Confronted by a movement whose members have sworn to wage war against us, the best it could come up with, it seems, is that putting more people in jail would be helpful. All very orderly, subject to the rule of international law, with none of this messy war business. And while we're patiently developing effective, open channels of communication with our allies to facilitate this process, our enemies will be patiently regrouping, plotting and, eventually, they'll come around to kill some more of us. Confronted by the smoking, flaming failure of eight years' worth of "law enforcement," John Kerry emphasizes...law enforcement:
The war on terror is less -- it is occasionally military, and it will be, and it will continue to be for a long time. And we will need the best-trained and the most well-equipped and the most capable military, such as we have today.But it's primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world...
I'm sorry, Senator, but I don't think you get it. I don't think you get it at all. Law enforcement is good for guarding malls and sniffing out bombs hidden in delivery trucks on the streets of New York, not defeating our enemies. Do you hear that, Senator? Not criminals...enemies. Criminal activity does not result in the routine patrol of body-amored security teams with shiny automatic weapons or the application of shatterproof film to all the windows of my office building.
Say it with me: en-e-mee.
For someone who fought in Vietnam!™, you don't seem very familiar with the concept. You've got quite a lot of work to do if you want to convince me otherwise.
