Bombing Palermo

Gore Vidal, in his usual provocative way, has said that our campaign against Al-Qaida is like trying to destroy the Mafia by bombing Palermo.

I think that’s a good analogy, and it points out the through-the-looking-glass quality that life has had in the months since 9/11. In a fascinating interview recently Vidal said:

None of the terrorists was an Afghan. They were mostly Saudi Arabian. And the embarrassment is that Saudi Arabia is the center of the plot, and Osama is in with the royal family, his whole family is, and he’s still in with his own family. So the idea that he’s some sort of renegade hiding in the hills, playing Lawrence of Arabia in there, up there in Tora Bora is nonsense. The plot is elsewhere. But we don’t dare go into that, because the oil people who now govern us are too closely allied with the royal family of Saudi Arabia. We haven’t really gone anywhere near where the trouble is.

Something to think about in these lockstep, flag-waving times.