Stardate 20021014.0151

(On Screen): Tony writes:

The other victims of this atrocity are the people of Bali. Not only were many of the injured and killed locals who worked and lived in the area, but their entire local economy was based around the tourist industry. I'd guess it just ceased to exist. I also doubt the bombers were from the mostly Hindu local community.

The Balinese just got the royal shaft. Tony is right: in many ways they may be the worst victims of all in this. Their tourism industry is unlikely to recover until after the war is over; it may be fifteen years or more.

But the entire nation of Indonesia is going to suffer for this, not just the Balinese. Tourism in the entire nation will collapse now, and from what I've been reading, that was as much again as Bali had. All of that is probably dead now.

Overall, it will cost them several billion dollars per year in foreign income that they can't afford to do without. As a result of that, and the expectation that western corporations will be pulling out and foreign investment will dry up, the news reports say that the Indonesian stock market collapsed today and the rupiah is dropping like a stone.

This seems to have gotten the attention of the government, in a way that months of warnings did not. Sadly, it's too late for that.

On Monday, Indonesia's government tried to play down the economic impact of the attack, and pledged to restore foreign investor confidence.

"The government will show its intention to make sure the country isn't a place for terrorism now or ever," Senior Economics Minister Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti said.

Only it is a place for terrorism now. That's why hundreds of people died Saturday. And that was not the only terrorist incident in Indonesia; it's been a problem for a long time now. (There have been a couple of bombing attempts at the US embassy, for one thing.)

And I'm afraid that "showing intention" ain't nearly good enough. Christ, it's like something out of the pomo playbook. WHO ARE these people, anyway? When our ambassador tried to warn them about this stuff, and when he closed the embassy once due to a credible threat, they accused him of being anti-Muslim and anti-Indonesian, as if playing the victim would instantly make it all better, and now they're going to fix it by thinking determined thoughts. (Visualize the tourists not leaving. Come on, now, work with me here. Visualize thousands of happy tourists who are unafraid. If we only think about it hard enough, it will happen, and then we won't actually have to do anything like actually start to deal with the terrorist organizations operating openly in our nation. OOMMMmmmm....)

There's only one good thing to come out of this. Just one: Indonesia is now an object lesson for anyone else who's been sitting on the fence and trying to pretend that they, too, could sit out this war. The next time we privately send a warning to some nation who doesn't take it seriously, the second warning will ask if they want to become the next Indonesia, with an economy in collapse due to a wholesale foreign disinvestment. And then they'll have to make a decision: who's opinion is more valuable to them, their own Muslim activists, or the foreign tourists and businessmen who bring in the money that keeps their economy going?

For that's what Indonesia is facing now. They're not being punished by deliberate acts of the Australian and US governments. Those governments are both pissed off (particularly the Australians, for obvious reasons) but I doubt they'll retaliate in any substantial way.

But millions of tourists and thousands of businessmen, individually, will make the decision to take their business elsewhere, because Indonesia is too dangerous. It isn't going to be at all easy for the government of Indonesia to lure them back, and announcements about showing intention will not cut it.

In fact, I don't see how anything will cut it. I don't see anything that the Indonesian government can do now prevent economic catastrophe there. The horses are already out of the barn, and the barn is on fire and filled with Australian corpses.

Tony also writes:

You wrote "Looking at potentially two hundred or more Australian dead and many hundreds more who will survive minus arms and legs, or were horribly burned,"

Australia only had 496 men killed during our entire commitment Vietnam war.

I don't consider that "only", but it's a good point and puts the magnitude of Saturday's loss into perspective. Another way to think of it is this: The US lost about 2,000 people a year ago. (The rest were non-Americans, including over a hundred British.) We have a population of about 280 million. Australia has a population of about 20 million people, which means that it's likely that this will end up being a larger relative loss.

Update: The leader of the group who is most likely to be behind this says that the US is actually behind the bombing. If the government of Indonesia really wants to work on trying to restore foreign confidnece, this bastard will be behind bars by the end of the week.

Update: The Indonesian government is shocked, shocked, to discover th