Why has U.S. been spared?

Orlando Sentinel ^ | 08 July 2005 | Peter A. Brown

[Lando Lincoln]

The London bombing once again begs the question: Why haven't terrorists struck the United States in the past four years?

Certainly the effects of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are still felt by Americans.

Unfortunately, terrorists have succeeded in changing how we live our daily lives.

Americans worry more about being blown up now than when thousands of Soviet ICBMs with multiple nuclear warheads were pointed at the United States.

These days, we live under the constant fear of being the next victim of a random act, a mentality that makes us more fearful and less generous to strangers and forces changes in behavior that cost us all time and money.

Nonetheless, it is useful to ponder why the bad guys haven't struck within the United States itself since 9-11.

It certainly is not because Osama & Co. hate us less than they once did.

[siunevada]

It's a bit worse when you know you really are a target!

And when the alert comes there's not enough time for escape. You're stuck at Ground Zero.

Bunker Hill AFB pre-Cuban Missile. No klaxons, no sirens. In the middle of the night planes started taking off every thirty seconds.

So close together, that's weird.

Kept it up for an hour. Oh man, this is not a drill.

They must have gotten everything on base up in the air that night. I thought that was it, for sure. I was shaking that night. Sunrise looked exceptionally wonderful when it finally arrived.

[VegasCowboy]

Al Queda's plan was not to attack the US-yet. They're out to effect public opinion in other countries that have allied with the US in their efforts against the jihadists. Those countries are more suseptable to these attacks. Their focus was to be Spain, Britain and Poland as per AQ docs captured by the Norwegians. The follow up attacks after success elsewhere is to be the US.

My thoughts exactly. As long as they leave us alone, they know the left will continue to chip away at our collective support for the WOT. An attack on our soil would just re-energize the public in our stated mission, and the terrorists know it. They prefer to allow our resolve to weaken over time.

[Tolik]

His Shadow Wars book is excellent.

My link did not click, sorry. This one should work: http://www.richardminiter.com

[HungarianGypsy]

I'kk admit it! I am afraid to fly or use mass transit. Of course, I am scared of heights and I just don't like mass transit in my area.

[null and void]

And, of course, no terrorist is bright enough to look like a common laborer while he cases a target.

BTW, remember the Tennessee Driver license scandal? One of the people that woman they burned alive issued phony licenses to had a contractor's work permit to 'fix' the sprinkler system at the base of the WTC dated a few days before 9/11.

The WTC didn't contract out such work.

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed the smoke was jet black, not the paler steam diluted color that you get when water actually makes it to a fire.

Interesting coincidence isn't it? A common laborer shows up a day or two before a major terrorist event, and the emergency equipment malfunctions right on cue?

[siunevada]

Growing up on air bases might have exacerbated my concerns as well

I remember exactly when the full impact of the alert sirens hit me. If it was real, no escape.

Then I continued pedaling my bike to my Little League game. Life is worth living.

[Chappaquiddick Crawdad]

These days, we live under the constant fear of being the next victim of a random act, a mentality that makes us more fearful and less generous to strangers and forces changes in behavior that cost us all time and money.

Who does this twit think he's speaking for? I don't live in this constant fear that he speaks of, and even my relatives and other acquaintances who live around and work in New York or Washington aren't knocking their knees at what the big, bad terrorists have in store. Give me a break.

[varon]

Basically, the Islamofascists are conducting a blood feud against us, with the intent of constantly injuring or terrorizing the western world in general.

You are spot on.

Islam has begun a war till death by thousand cuts against Judeo/Christian societies.

[Little Pig]

Granted, they have the ultimate goal of eradicating our society or subsuming it into Islam, but their main thrust has been to "punish" us for perceived slights to their religion/cause, hence the idea of the feud. They aren't waging war, per se, because they do not have the foundations of war i.e. previous diplomacy, specific territorial goals, specific armed forces fielded, etc. Here is the article, taken from TechCentralStation.com, written by Lee Harris:


War in Pieces: The Blood Feud

By Lee Harris Published 07/08/2005




When 9/11 happened, no one asked me to write an article about it the next day, because no one, outside my immediate circle of friends, had any interest in my opinion. This was fortunate, because I did not need to make a snap judgment about the significance of that fateful morning. Had I rushed my violent first impressions into print, I might have found it difficult to ever get around to having any second thoughts -- second thoughts like the ones that finally came together in the essay "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," published in Policy Review a full six months after 9/11.



This morning, after Nick Schulz encouraged me to write a piece on the terror attacks in London, I was tempted to put the project off until I had had time to reflect on the events. What else could I say in the immediate aftermath of such an attack than what every other decent man or woman would say about it, namely that it was an outrage against all human decency, and a violation of everything that civilization stands for?



Then a thought went through my mind that has been haunting it for over three years now. A simple idea, really, yet one that when it is clearly stated can offer us a radically different way of understanding events like 9/11, the Bali attack, the Madrid bombings, and now the carnage in London.



Immediately after 9/11, the general consensus was that we were at war. And yet this evocation of the concept of war bothered me because it did not quite fit. Wars were things that Westerners did. They were fought for economic reasons or for territorial expansion; they were instruments of policy; they had a point and an objective. You knew when a war started, and you knew when it was over. On both sides of a war you had diplomacy -- the breakdown in diplomacy normally started wars, and a recommencement of diplomacy inevitably signaled their termination. Finally, wars, when they were fought, tended to resolve into a series of increasingly climactic battles, allowing each side to keep score of its position, as in a game of chess, and ending in some well-established gesture, like waving the white flag or slaughtering your enemies en masse.



If you try to make the random and scattered terrorist attacks since 9/11 fit into this pattern, you will soon realize that it takes a good bit of twisting and squeezing to make these events match the profile of Western warfare. Indeed, when I wrote "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," I argued that war was not the appropriate model to employ in order to gain an understanding of the enemy that we faced -- and yet at the time I was still unclear what model of conflict would make more sense.

After the London bombing, I feel more than ever that the war model is deeply flawed, and that a truer picture of the present conflict may be gained by studying another, culturally distinct form of violent conflict, namely the blood feud.



In the blood feud, the orientation is not to the future, as in war, but to the past. In the feud you are avenging yourself on your enemy for something that he did in the past. Al Qaeda justified the attack on New York and Washington as revenge against the USA for having defiled the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia by its military presence during the First Gulf War. In the attack on London, the English were being punished for their involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.



In the blood feud, unlike war, you have no interest in bringing your enemy to his knees. You are not looking for your enemy to surrender to you; you are simply interested in killing some of his people in revenge for past injuries, real or imaginary -- nor does it matter in the least whether the people you kill today were the ones guilty of the past injuries that you claim to be avenging. In a blood feud, every member of the enemy tribe is a perfectly valid target for revenge. What is important is that some of their guys must be killed -- not necessarily anyone of any standing in their community. Just kill someone on the other side, and you have done what the logic of the blood feud commands you to do.



In the blood feud there is no concept of decisive victory because there is no desire to end the blood feud. Rather the blood feud functions as a permanent "ethical" institution -- it is the way of life for those who participate in it; it is how they keep score and how they maintain their own rights and privileges. You don't feud to win, you feud to keep your enemy from winning -- and that is why the anthropologist of the Bedouin feud, Emrys Peters, has written the disturbing words: The feud is eternal.



We in the West cannot imagine a war that goes on forever; but those for whom the blood feud is the established mode of settling difference cannot imagine a world without it. We are puzzled when they attack us viciously on a single day, and then wait for years before they attack us again -- an irrational policy from the point of view of Western military strategy, but perfectly sensible when seen from the point of view of the blood feud. If your sole interest lies in annoying and irritating your enemy, and not in vanquishing him, then the sporadic and the occasional attack makes more sense to you than a systematic frontal assault.



Indeed, to those adept at the blood feud, nothing can be more absurd than provoking a feuding partner into an all out war of annihilation -- which perhaps explains why the Islamic terrorists tend to vary the locations of their attacks and to string them out over the course of years, rather than concentrating on a single target and hammering it repeatedly over the course of days and weeks, as in a normal military campaign. If the terrorists attacked the same people continuously, day after day, week after week, they would be bound to stir up a fury that would result in their own extermination. By intermittent and infrequent attacks, on the other hand, they are able to injure and wound their enemy, without the fear that they will be overwhelmed by their enemy's desperate desire to be rid of them once and for all. Even better, such sporadic violence permits the enemy to discount their own suffering, by realizing after each fresh attack that life goes on -- as indeed it does for those who chance to survive.



The art of the blood feud, if it can be called an art, requires the participants in the feud to imitate the random and unpredictable nature of what we in the West call acts of God. Like lightning, you can never predict the next attack; you can never know where it will strike, or who it will strike. You only know that one day it will happen again, as it happened again today in London. By this means, the victims of the attack are lulled into a sense of impotence and helplessness, accepting the attacks the same way we accept tornadoes and other natural disasters.



Contemporary Islamic terrorism has permitted the ancient practitioners of the blood feud to introduce its brutal and primeval logic into a world of modern technology and parliamentary politics. The sooner we grasp this fact, the sooner we will be in a position to know our enemy for who he really is. Until then we will be as dazed and confused as those who, while peacefully riding a commuter train, suddenly find themselves bloodied and blackened, in the midst of maimed corpses and twisted steel, whispering to themselves over and over, "Why? Why?"



Lee Harris is author of Civilization and Its Enemies.



Copyright © 2005 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com

[Chappaquiddick Crawdad]

"If NYNY was hit like London GWB may have bombed Tehran or Mecca"

Don't tell me you actually believe that, do you? Give me a break.

[WKUHilltopper]

because they've got brainless, idiot pawns in the US marching in the streets and flashing their tits for peace and their cause. To do anything might cause a backlash.

[sgtbono2002]

*****These days, we live under the constant fear of being the next victim of a random act, ******

I go about my life every day and dont even think about it. Are other Americans really living in fear? I fear cancer a lot ,more than I fear an Islamic dickface wearing a bomb will get me.

[null and void]

Ya gotta read this...

[Sam the Sham]

Ah, the commandante of the San Patricio Battalion speaks !

A country where being police chiefs are freely, routinely murdered in public with nobody seeing anything, where rival "law enforcement" organizations have gun battles in the streets, where elite police units become drug gangs is one sliding into warlord anarchy. Even Al Capone or the Five Families in their heyday never did that kind of stuff. Megalomaniacal Albert Anastasia was whacked because he suggested assasinating Thomas Dewey. Mexico is at a level of lawlessness that frankly endangers the security of his nation, so touting cooperation with crooked "law enforcement" authorities is ridiculous.

America cannot trust Mexico. It cannot trust the honesty or integrity of Mexican institutions on any level. It must secure that border like a drum simply in order to prevent the warlord anarchy of Mexico from seeping north.

[shezza]

I cannot believe this graphic for one simple reason, NJ is NOT red!

Here's the updated map.

[xkaydet65]

As someone who was a teen in October 1962, I can say that the author of this editorial knows nothing of the fear generated by the possibility of thermonuclear war.

Perhaps what the editorialist feels is not fear, but the uncertainty of the randomness of terror. But that randomness is an unfortunate fact of life. Ask the families of those killed by that drunk driver on long Island last week.

The people who lived the Cold War faced the potential for the end of life, not just their life. The fear of death by terorist while harrowing cannot be measured against the fears the Cold War would turn hot. Yet we not only survived, we prospered, raised families, and triumphed. The Orlando Sentinel should take a lesson.

[Little Pig]

I thought there was a Hezbollah cell in DFW too.

[spunkets]

"They prefer to allow our resolve to weaken over time."

That's an effective strategy in the art of war. Attrition of the will to fight. Especially true since they were most of the way there before the attack.

"As long as they leave us alone, they know the left will continue to chip away at our collective support for the WOT."

Exactly. They're waiting for the rest of the world to join the left. The left identifies with the jihadis.

[Alberta's Child]

I don't think the notion of a "deal" between the U.S. and Osama bin laden is too far-fetched. Remember that his primary complaint against the U.S. was that our military presence on the "sacred soil" of the Arabian Peninsula amounted to some kind of outrageous sacrilege against Islam. Fast forward from 9/11 to July of 2005 . . . in less than four years, we have a situation where our military forces are being removed from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden has never been found.

I'm not suggesting that this is exactly what has transpired, BTW -- I just presented as a very realistic possibility.

And anyone here who thinks I'm being overly conspiratorial and/or cynical about this should do some research on a highly controversial incident in the life of General Douglas MacArthur that has never really received a lot of attention. During the seige of Corregidor and Bataan in the Philippines in 1942 MacArthur had a cash payment of half a million dollars (a fantastic sum of money back then) wired to his U.S. bank account from President Manuel Quezon of the Philippine Commonwealth -- a highly suspicious transaction under any circumstances, let alone between a foreign head of state and a high-ranking U.S. military officer who would later lead the effort to recapture those Philippines.