(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.