In Louisiana, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, both sides of the Mississippi River are lined with factories. Oil refineries, chlor-alkali production facilities, plants producing plastics and polyolefins. The Chamber of Commerce types are proud of the concentration of industry; they call the area the “Chemical Corridor.” If you stop in a diner down there, you may have a placemat with a map of the various plants laid before you.

The people who live along that stretch of the Mississippi have another name for conglomeration of chemical facilities. They call it “Cancer Alley.” In the last 50 years, Louisiana has gone from being the rural “Sportsman’s Paradise” the state’s license plates still boast of, to becoming America’s own third world country; there are now over 140 petrochemical and other factories along the 85-mile stretch of Cancer Alley.
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We are now one month into our war against terrorism and everything is – for now – pretty quiet. This war has been predicted to run for decades, so I suppose we can’t expect an embassy bombing or a cruise missile attack every week.

The embassy bombings, in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam on August 7th, were claimed by the Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places, but within days the newspapers were carrying stories about Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire and Islamic fundamentalist. The Clinton administration couldn’t have found a more suitable bad guy if they’d called Hollywood and ordered one; a shadowy militant who looks like a younger version of the Ayatollah Khomeini. And like villains Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein, we had a hand in creating bin Laden in the 70s and 80s when he fought the Soviet Union as a mujahedin in Afghanistan.
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History moves in circles and cycles. That’s why it’s important to study history, because through the study of history you can learn to recognize your current place on the cycle and better anticipate what might be coming next. Sometimes you even meet the same people over and over.

Seymour Hersh has a new book out called Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government. Seymour Hersh was the reporter who first uncovered evidence of the massacre of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops at My Lai 30 years ago.
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“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost. For the want of the shoe the horse was lost. For the want of the horse the rider was lost. For the want of the rider the battle was lost…” and so on.

We don’t rely much anymore on horses, horseshoes or horseshoe nails, but the analogy holds. For the want of two bytes, the date was lost, for the want of the date the computer was lost, for the want of the computer — what was lost? The power grid? The stock exchange? The air-traffic control system?
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