So, Now What?

In retrospect, we can see that things were not going very well for Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Their parents had divorced and left the country. The older son had failed to achieve his boxing dreams and was apparently unemployed despite having a wife and a three year-old daughter. The younger son was failing most of his classes at college. That gives a whiff of a motivation for what they did, but little more than that. At this point, we don’t have a whole lot to go on. We can see that perhaps they felt like they didn’t have much of a future, but we can’t see why they responded by bombing innocent civilians.

It’s clear that there was broad concern about Tamerlan. A foreign country, probably Russia, was concerned enough to ask the FBI to look into his possible ties to terrorist organizations. The FBI actually interviewed his parents and sat down with Tamerlan to assess his state of mind. Apparently, they didn’t find anything sufficient to arrest or deport him, but he must have been doing something to arouse suspicion. It’s safe to say that there a lot of people in our country who arouse suspicion and that the FBI monitors, and some of them will fall between the cracks.

Contrary to Paul Waldman’s assertions, I didn’t have a hope for who the bombers would be. I just wanted them apprehended. It’s true that their identity matters and has consequences, but there would be unfortunate political consequences regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or motivation.

I have been somewhat amused by the discussion of their ethnicity. Before we knew that they were literally from the Caucases, and therefore quintessentially caucasian, there was debate about whether they were white or not. This exposed a lot of preconceptions about skin tone and race. For me, the only reason to debate their ethnicity was to assess the probability that they might be Muslim and therefore potentially part of a larger Islamic-based conspiracy against American civilians. Since they didn’t look like northern or western Europeans, it was more likely that they might be Muslim. Others thought they were clearly white, but that missed the point of why people were asking the question in the first place.

Now we know that they were Muslims. We have some reason to believe that their Muslim faith may have been central to their motivation, but we still don’t understand precisely how. We will learn more about their internet habits, their religious leaders, and their associations, and that will help us understand. The point of this should be not only to understand but to see if there are steps we can take to protect ourselves from similar attacks in the future.

One thing we know is that our military operations in Islamic countries produce civilian casualties. That invites reprisals. Under the circumstances, there are bound to be people who think these reprisals are justified in a tit-for-tat manner. We don’t have to agree with them to see that this is an inevitable consequence of our actions and policies. To the degree that we can stop creating civilian casualties in Muslim countries, we should do so. We have left Iraq and we are planning to leave Afghanistan, but we are still operating a drone program in places like Pakistan and Yemen and we are getting more involved in Syria’s civil war. We should consider that possibility that the Boston attacks were basically payback for those policies.

There is a muddled distinction between rewarding terrorism by making the changes in policy the terrorism is intended to force us to make, and realizing that our policies are inciting blowback and can be altered to lessen that threat. We need to be smart about this.

If we are unwilling to consider changes in policy, then our reaction will be wholly based on making it safer for us to continue doing precisely what we have been doing, and that means that all we will do is ramp up surveillance and curtail civil liberties.

I don’t want that to be the legacy of this tragedy.