Faisal Shahzad was no Timothy McVeigh, let alone a Mohamed Atta. McVeigh, who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 with a massive truck-bomb, took the trouble to learn how to make a bomb that actually works. Atta, who piloted one of the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers on 9/11, even learned how to fly. Shahzad, who left a vehicle rigged to explode near New York’s Times Square on Saturday night, was a bumbling amateur.
He might still have killed some people, of course. “(The bomb) certainly could have exploded and had a pretty big fire and a decent amount of explosive impact,” said New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. But the casualties would have been in the dozens, at worst, and more likely only a few. Not enough, in other words, to drive Americans crazy again.
I’m choosing my words carefully here. Ever since the 9/11 attacks nine years ago, the US media (with the eager assistance of the Bush administration until the end of 2008) have worked to persuade Americans that terrorism is the greatest threat facing the country. The enterprise has succeeded, and most Americans actually believe that terrorism poses a serious danger to their personal safety.
Quite a few Americans have already died as a result of that belief, not just in the wars overseas that were justified in the name of fighting terrorism but even at home. In the first year after 9/11, for example, many Americans chose to drive long distances rather than risk flying, and highway deaths went up by 1,200 people as a result. Nobody died in the planes.
Nobody has been killed by terrorists in the United States since 9/11, but the fear is so great that just one big attack with lots of casualties would still have disastrous consequences. There would be huge public pressure for the government to do something very large and violent, in the delusionary belief that is the way to defeat terrorism. That is what I mean by “driving Americans crazy.”
The main goal of terrorist attacks anywhere is to drive the victims crazy: To goad them into doing stupid, violent things that ultimately play into the hands of those who planned the attacks. Terrorism is a kind of political jiu-jitsu in which a relatively weak group (like Al-Qaeda) attempts to trick a far stronger enemy (like the US government) into a self-defeating response.
The US response to 9/11 was certainly self-defeating. A more intelligent strategy would have been to try to split the Taleban regime of Afghanistan, many of whose leading members were outraged by the threat of an American invasion that the action of their Arab guests had brought down on their heads. A combination of threats and bribes might have persuaded the Taleban to hand over Osama Bin Laden and his whole Al-Qaeda crew.
(Courtesy Arab News)
He might still have killed some people, of course. “(The bomb) certainly could have exploded and had a pretty big fire and a decent amount of explosive impact,” said New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. But the casualties would have been in the dozens, at worst, and more likely only a few. Not enough, in other words, to drive Americans crazy again.
I’m choosing my words carefully here. Ever since the 9/11 attacks nine years ago, the US media (with the eager assistance of the Bush administration until the end of 2008) have worked to persuade Americans that terrorism is the greatest threat facing the country. The enterprise has succeeded, and most Americans actually believe that terrorism poses a serious danger to their personal safety.
Quite a few Americans have already died as a result of that belief, not just in the wars overseas that were justified in the name of fighting terrorism but even at home. In the first year after 9/11, for example, many Americans chose to drive long distances rather than risk flying, and highway deaths went up by 1,200 people as a result. Nobody died in the planes.
Nobody has been killed by terrorists in the United States since 9/11, but the fear is so great that just one big attack with lots of casualties would still have disastrous consequences. There would be huge public pressure for the government to do something very large and violent, in the delusionary belief that is the way to defeat terrorism. That is what I mean by “driving Americans crazy.”
The main goal of terrorist attacks anywhere is to drive the victims crazy: To goad them into doing stupid, violent things that ultimately play into the hands of those who planned the attacks. Terrorism is a kind of political jiu-jitsu in which a relatively weak group (like Al-Qaeda) attempts to trick a far stronger enemy (like the US government) into a self-defeating response.
The US response to 9/11 was certainly self-defeating. A more intelligent strategy would have been to try to split the Taleban regime of Afghanistan, many of whose leading members were outraged by the threat of an American invasion that the action of their Arab guests had brought down on their heads. A combination of threats and bribes might have persuaded the Taleban to hand over Osama Bin Laden and his whole Al-Qaeda crew.
(Courtesy Arab News)
