Guys,
First I want to assure you that I am an american patriot who chose this country for myself and my children with all its good and numerous bad sides - unlike many who were lucky to be born here.
I would have much rather have written some piece like "letter to the terrorists" or "terrorists suck and stupid" but many people with more time on their hands have beaten me to it while my office's Internet access is not back after the blast...
There is always a devil's advocate in any discussion and since nobody has volunteered so far, I intend to post a series of thoughts on the subject.
Never from the point of view that America is evil but with the intent of assesing what kind of people I will have alongside me when the next load of crap hits the fan and what we think we know that may not be true.
We know the enemy or at least quickly learning about him. Let's not forget about knowing ourselfs.
1. I have always had the greatest respect to the expert opinion. They usually know what they are doing being experts and such...
My observation is that quite a few educated and intelligent experts on terrorism, terror tactics and terror effects strongly believe that it is productive to apply terrorism to our country. That is can be forced to change it's behavior. That we, Americans, can be scared. That we can be split more. That we are spoiled by comfort and easy life.
Those people lived among ourselves for quite a few years, head a chance to study us, learn our strength and weeknesses.
They knew that we will try to retaliate and cause problems for them. They may actually have counted on that. In their view the benefits obtained from terrorism outweight the disadvantages.
Those people were giving their (or their accomplices lives) largely for religious reasons. Nevertheless they did not think they expected to die for no gain to their cause.
Think about thet carefully. If the enemy is shooting at you, he may wrongly think he is in range but there is a chance he knows what he is doing. Flag-waiving and boasting is the last thing you would want to do. The right thing to do would be to drop man the trenches, don the helmets and look carefully behind you. The shooter in front may be the least of your troubles.
2. That brings me to my second point on how effective the terrorism can be here. If I look on the recent history, US does not strike me as a particularly brave nation.
I am not even talking about politics, like abandoning Cuban's patriots and South-Vietnamese to communism (and throwing away the casualties borne by heroes that fought there).
There was a time when Atom was the bright and shining future. When people planed to excavate harbors by nuclear explosions to having nuclear-propelled planes. Cheap energy, independence from totalitarian religious regimes that have the oil. Nothing seemed too small for a country on the forefront of the technological progress. Nobody expected the process to go along without errors.
That all came to a screeching halt after one accident - which could have been terrible but luckily actually was quite small. The whole world learned from it. Do not build the station over the ground waters, next to the river in the middle of a densely-populated area. Make safer reactors. Dig the whole stuff deeper underground in some desert and put thicker concrete shell over it. There are dozens of nuclear power stations working in the world. Hundreds of ships powered by nuclear power.
But americans got scared. All their dreams disappeared. All the faith in america's science and engineering, in the ability to overcome any difficulties was lost overnight.
The whole direction of progress based on cheap electricity was closed - electric cars, magnetic trains, clean industry.
Guess what - there is no life without risk. If you do not take risk of a nuclear station blowing up on you, you run a risk of hostile powers controlling your lifeblood - oil. You have to intervene into that God-forsaken area to ensure the supply. You have to pay trillions of dollars to people who are hostile to us and get entangled into their politics.
Any engineer can tell you that there is no way to avoid risk in a system. You can move it around. You cannot lose risk but you can lose control.
Why risk an accident if some saudi promises to supply us with oil for reasonable price - if we support his corrupt and oppressive regime against population and other countries.
Why be capable of owning and using weapons if the policeman is going to protect us...
That is enough rumblings for tonigt.
Obviously there must be argumants contrary to those two points.
But I would not post them here if I did not see for myself some validation for them. Which one will prove stronger - I do not know.
What do you guys think?
Most importantly, if you take this stuff seriously, what do you think we can do to improve the odds?
miko
