(no subject)

[xiphias]

querldox brought up an interesting question in his livejournal, here.. I had a response to a small part of it, which I'm reposting here.

And I'm still trying to figure out why there hasn't been a second attack of some sort on American soil.

Well, let's consider some possibilities:

1. There have been attempts, but competent law-enforcement/security/whatever has stopped them.

This is such an annoying hypothesis, because it's non-falsifiable. I mean, presumably, Bush knows if this is false, but he won't say. Virtually nobody else can know if this is false. If it's true, then there are people who know it's true -- the people planning them, the people directly stopping them -- but if it's false, it's impossible to determine that fact.

2. We're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here.

According to this hypothesis, people hostile to the United States would rather take their actions in Iraq and Afghanistan than in the United States. I have trouble believing this one, as people have managed to attack England, Spain, Jakarta, Bali, and so forth. But, perhaps the United States is genuinely far enough away from the rest of the world, in some practical sense, that it just isn't worth attacking here when you could attack somewhere else. But that seems . . . foolish somehow.

3. There's no point in attacking us, because we're already doing to ourselves every single bit of damage that terrorist action is supposed to provoke a country into doing.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but this is the one I like.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

4. There is no enemy.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I think that hypothesis is falsifiable.

Getting *really* cynical now

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

It's very hard to prove that no one is trying to plot terrorism within the USA. No incidents have occurred, and any unsuccessful attempts could be staged. ;) But I meant something more like, 'our enemies are not as dangerous as they are made out to be'; it just sounded more eye-catching when succinctly stated.

I think it's a mix of 1, 3, 4. We certainly are making it more difficult to do crime, with a mix of offensive and defensive measures; but if you listen to the hard-core rhetoric from potential sources of terrorism, they certainly wouldn't be satisfied with current progress. And really, if with 10 years of planning and a large budget, the best they could do was fly some planes into a building -- recall that there's evidence they were as surprised as everyone else when it caused the buildings to collapse -- then maybe successful terrorism is really hard in some non-obvious way.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

re #3: We've done everything they want, except for renouncing our universal faith in Jesus, burning our bibles, signing up for their particular brand of Islam, declaring war on infidel nations, and enforcing obedience to their brand of Islamic law in the way they want. Their goal is not entirely just to make us unhappy, I mean, I'm sure that every overreaction does please their leaders and all. But that's not the overall goal. It's not what drives the average propaganda victim over there (and we have our propaganda victims too). It is, after all, their twisted vision of Jihad, not just a war on the constitution.

[ron_newman]

We haven't given up our alliance with Israel, which presumably is near the top of things 'they' want us to do.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Yes--to me #3 reads very similarly to Bush's contention that they "hate freedom," which runs the I think very dangerous risk of construing "them" as mere photo-negatives of "us," whether "us" is the nation as a whole or some group within it particularly invested in the preservation of civil liberties. "They" are not our arbitrary opposites, against whatever we are for; they have their own motivations, which we would do well to try to understand.

[sethg]

...or evacuated our troops from the Arabian peninsula.

[ron_newman]

I thought we did, in fact, remove our troops from Saudi Arabia.

[sethg]

Yes. And we moved them to Qatar. And I think we still occasionally dock in Yemen.

Shoes

[(Anonymous)]

Just because the other shoe hasn't dropped does not mean there isn't another shoe. Considered from the practical standpoint, we have a multitude of vulnerabilies, all of which can still EASILY be exploited when the time is right. To name a few (and nothing that hasn't been said already) while we're busy watching the air, who is watching the water (urban water supplies), the electric grid (remember that single isolated substation in Erie(?) 2 years ago that took out New York City?), the telecommunications infrastructure, to name a few. What would a few well placed devices that take down the internet backbone do to this country? Can you imagine doing without email, VOIP, etc for only a few days, much less weeks? Ditto, just a small vial of some toxin or other in Boston, New York, Chicago, or LA's drinking supply. We'd be parallized. Think New Orleans on a national scale.

So, to answer the key question -- why hasn't this happened yet? Yes, we've been vigilant and have rounded up a lot of crackpots. But consider the psychology of terror. When is it most effective? When it's least expected.
If you want the maximum effect, you disrupt things when people feel safe. Right now, no one feels safe, so why do it now? Wait for people to get complacent again, then shake them up.

History lesson -- think back to what you have heard about the 1950's. There weren't nearly as many Communists hiding under every desk as people thought. It was the FEAR, not the REALITY, that parallized people. Keep the fear up, keep them unbalanced. Yeah, that's the ticket ... and when things quiet down, ratchet up the fear level again. hmmm sounds somewhat like our government, doesn't it? Who needs Al Queda anyway?

dod

[polydad.livejournal.com]

#5) Because the initial attack was done with considerable inside support from the Bush administration, and the administration hasn't needed another attack yet. Look for one this October.

best,

Joel

[griffen.livejournal.com]

3. There's no point in attacking us, because we're already doing to ourselves every single bit of damage that terrorist action is supposed to provoke a country into doing.

Give that man a cigar. I brought this up last night at dinner with the in-laws and neither of them could accept or even entertain the idea.

We also know who the terrorists are - and they're not brown-skinned Middle Easterners, either.

[madame-urushiol.livejournal.com]

I'm with you; my money's on #3.

[darkrosetiger.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely voting #3.

[dancing-kiralee.livejournal.com]

Re: #3... You're right, terrorism is designed to provoke this kind of reaction... but I don't think terrorists are that patient. The idea (sick as it is) is to keep doing it until the crackdown on liberties causes the people to revolt and bring down the current regime. Meanwhile, the terrorists win friends and influence people with their daring rebellion against oppression - the very oppression they themselves have orchestrated - so when the revolution happens, it's in the name of their favorite party, and they are sweep into power by the "will of the people."

And that's just not happening... or, if it is, it's not happening fast enough (from their point of view). The most violent action Americans are willing to talk about using against the current regime is impeachment.

Kiralee

[sethg]

6. It's very hard to find Muslims in America willing to carry out or be accessories to terrorist activities, because Muslims in America feel that they have more of a stake in their country than, say, Muslims in France. Not to deny that there is plenty of anti-Muslim and anti-swarthy-person bigotry in this country; it's just that it's easy enough for an American Muslim to get co-opted by the system that anyone contemplating an attack on the Great Satan doesn't know how many co-conspirators he can trust. The invasion of Afghanistan broke up the al-Qaeda bureaucracy, so while there are still cells that can pull off things like the London subway bombing in the name of al-Qaeda, nobody in the movement has the resources to sift through recruits and develop another attack on the scale of 9/11.