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Waco, Oklahoma City, and the Post-9/11 Left-Right Dynamic
Ten years ago, on April 19, 1995, the largest terrorist attack in U.S. history on American soil occurred when an explosion brought down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and snuffed out the lives of 168 individuals, including nineteen children.

After the initial shock, the political implications began to surface. Clinton implicitly blamed the attack on right-wing talk radio and its "purveyors of hate and division," and many left-liberal pundits echoed the same line. Reactionary anti-Clintonism – opposition to the gun grabbing, the social engineering, and the taxing and spending of the Clinton regime – was the root cause of the Oklahoma massacre, we were told. The more libertarian and less establishment wing of the conservative movement was the culprit.

Either forgotten or distorted at the time was the connection between Oklahoma and Waco. Exactly two years before the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI put the finishing touches on the federal government’s fifty-one-day standoff with the Branch Davidians, finalizing the embarrassing chapter in federal law enforcement by sending a tank through the home of David Koresh and his followers, injecting the building with poisonous CS gas, launching incendiary devices at the building and shooting with machineguns those who attempted to escape the inferno. About eighty civilians, including about twenty children, died at Waco, and Timothy McVeigh referred to the attack at Oklahoma City as payback for what the federal government did two years earlier.

Those who pointed this out in the days after Oklahoma were walking on eggshells. The left-liberal establishment, along with most of the Republican politicians, did not want to think of Oklahoma as somewhat explainable – even if in no way excusable – in the context of the criminal acts of the U.S. government. To say that State violence paved the way to terrorist violence was condemned as making excuses for the latter. Even worse, to focus too much on the federal government’s atrocity at Waco, or even its run-of-the-mill bureaucratic despotism in general, became seen as somehow aiding the enemies of American civilization and even encouraging mass murders like Tim McVeigh....

...On September 11, 2001, the largest terrorist attack on American soil, the hijacking of four planes and the destruction of the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, and more than three-thousand American lives, far exceeded in bloodshed, property damage and government reaction what had happened about six and half years earlier in Oklahoma.

But this time, the Republicans were in power.

"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists," uttered by the Republican president, became the new slogan for most of the conservative movement. Concerned and thoughtful Americans, libertarians, liberals and even some conservatives, pointed out that 9/11 occurred as a result of decades of inexcusable U.S. foreign policy – atrocities such as the First Gulf War, the sanctions in Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of children, the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, the propping up of anti-democratic tyrants in the Middle East and the military support of Israel – and these concerned and thoughtful Americans were accused of aiding the enemy, defending the terrorist attacks, siding against America. As Bush rammed the PATRIOT Act through Congress, erecting the surveillance state that conservatives rightfully feared Clinton wanted to implement throughout the 1990s but never had the political capital to do so, many conservatives this time went along with the federal power grab, agreeing with the new post-9/11 John Ashcroft that "those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty… only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends." ...

...The bipartisan support for police-state responses to Oklahoma and 9/11 also blurs the issue. So too does the bipartisan support and whitewashing of most federal atrocities, whether in the Middle East or on American soil, demonstrate that this is not a Republican vs. Democratic issue, at least not as far as the establishment is concerned. After all, it was during the first Bush regime that the Waco siege was initially planned and the Ruby Ridge massacre was conducted, and it was Clinton’s Madeline Albright that called hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi children a price well "worth it" to put pressure on former U.S. ally Saddam Hussein.

The American police state and warfare state often draw criticism predominantly from either the left or right, depending on the partisan flavor of the regime. During Waco, although some bold leftists saw through the federal lies, there was silence among mainstream liberals, who didn’t want to agree with the right-wing "extremists" that Clinton had done something so awful. In thinking of Iraq today, even conservatives who should know better, and realize on some level that this in not in any way a proper response to 9/11 – that indeed this is the kind of intervention that led to 9/11 – are reticent to agree with the "extremist" far left on American foreign policy.

The left and right disagree on many issues, but such crucial ones such as aggressive war and the dangerous federal police state have drawn similar criticisms from people on both sides, often at different times. For liberty to triumph, the more libertarian wings of both left and right need to see their common goals, see through the partisan smokescreens, and recognize, at all times, that opposition to and fundamental criticism of the State do not necessarily imply hatred of America or solidarity with its most murderous enemies....