terrorists
By anders pearson 11 Sep 2001
well, now the US has to directly face a problem that the rest of the world has had to deal with for a while: how do you protect your people from unknown attackers?
<p>dealing with another government who is openly threatening you is one thing; you know where they live. they know that you can take the fight back to them and kill their people too. it keeps them from doing anything <em>too</em> stupid. </p>
<p>but what the fuck are you supposed to do when things just start blowing up and there’s no one to blame? or when those who are responsible are a tiny extremist group who don’t really have anything to lose. no country to bomb. if you do bomb someone in retaliation, you’ll just make more people angry and increase the likelihood of more terrorist attacks.</p>
<p>well, the obvious strategy is to just keep it from happening in the first place. so how do you do that? apparently a multi-billion dollar global intelligence network can’t predict or prevent even the largest operations, so that strategy is out. increase airport security? stop people from bringing their swiss army knives on the plane? lock up anyone who might possibly harbor ill will towards your country? enter into a total police state? </p>
<p>i’m not too excited at the idea of living in a police state. i don’t think even that would work. the whole point of terrorism is that it strikes where you’re weakest. if airport security were stronger, they’d have found a different way to cause the same amount of damage. you will always have a weakness. i don’t think there’s any way around that.</p>
<p>i’m seriously asking now. what do you do to protect the innocent people in the world from being blown to bits because of something their leaders did or just because someone with a chemical imbalance happened to have a few bags of fertilizer out back?</p>