Imagine you’re a writer sitting in Sean Hannity’s production booth at FOXNews.  You hear that Baithullah Mehsud - Taliban leader extraordinaire and mastermind behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto - has threatened to attack DC.

Your heart races!  Your hands start shaking!! Your mind is a flutter!!!

Are you afraid for the country?  Fearful for your family?  Of course not! You’ve just been handed a gold mine of material.  What better way to combine a solid sense of fear-mongering with a snide shot at the new administration.  Quothe Mr. Hannity:

We are learning about a frightening warning from the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Baitullah Mehsud, who has claimed responsibility for the deadly siege at Pakistan’s police academy this past weekend, now says the group is setting its sights on a new target: Washington, D.C.  …

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke on the subjects of Afghanistan and Pakistan Tuesday at a conference of world leaders and voiced her support for a program that would allow former Taliban and Al Qaeda members to be offered “an honorable form of reconciliation and reintegration into a peaceful society, if they are willing to abandon violence.”

Madam Secretary, just make sure this guy isn’t on your list of former terrorists that you plan to make peace with.

Sean Hannity is (one of the many reasons) why the Baithullah Mehsuds of the world make these statements.   The Taliban wants America to be divided, it wants America to be afraid, it wants America to view the “Overseas Contingency Operation” as an enduring clash of civilizations.  But Mehsud can’t do it alone - he needs media outlets to interpret and amplify the message.  And Hannity takes the bait hook, line, and sinker… every. single. time.

If you value national security over you own ratings, Sean, you’ll take a page from Bill O’Reilly and just shut up.

After taking a holiday break, AOM is reinvigorating our series of postings from Truman National Security Project fellows.  Katherine Southwick writes:

Struggling to sneak a photo of a vine-shrouded statue before throngs of other tourists trekked by, it was hard to agree with our tour guide’s assertion that 4,000 visitors a day to the Angkor Wat temple complex was a good thing.

But he was correct that the lure of the UNESCO World Heritage Site created jobs and income, and that “foreigners become aware of Cambodia when they visit the temples, not just our ancient past, but our recent history, too.” Indeed, while the temples’ grand scale and intricate carvings can transport you back to the twelfth century, occasional bullet holes in the sandstone structures are jarring reminders of the horrors of the twentieth. The brutal Khmer Rouge regime had used nearby areas as killing fields in the late 1970s and controlled the region even after its downfall.

That’s why it’s worth noting that America was not the only country that marked a major milestone this January. On January 6, 40,000 people attended a stadium ceremony in the capital of Phnom Penh to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Vietnamese-led overthrow of the Khmer Rouge. Taking power in 1975, within less than four years, the Khmer Rouge oversaw approximately 1.5 million deaths, around 20 percent of the country’s population. Under its radical communist policies, the Khmer Rouge concentrated nearly the entire population in collective farms, splitting up families and targeting religious groups and social elites. People died as a result of forced labor, starvation, torture, and execution.

Coming to terms with ancient and recent history are two separate endeavors. Read the rest of this entry »