The Christmas Day attack on a jetliner bound for Detroit was a total success for terrorism.
What’s that you say? The jet landed safely, with the only reported injuries the ones sustained by the would-be bomber. So how could it be a successful attack?
Simple. The goal of terrorism isn’t to destroy planes or kill people. The goal of terrorism is terror.
And from what I can see, plenty of Americans — or at least those in positions of power and punditry — are terrified.
You can practically smell and taste the fear. What went wrong? How could this have happened? What will we do to protect ourselves.
Al-Qaida and its ilk — watching via satellite TV and the Internet — are having a field day, celebrating their accomplishment. America is shaking in its shoes.
We are now engaged in a massive national review of our counter-terrorism procedures. And that includes a fair amount of finger pointing, name calling and ideological drivel.
And, naturally, it includes another round of restrictions and inconvenience for the flying public.
Never mind that the average American is far, far more likely to be killed by a texting driver while traveling to the airport than he is to die at the hands of a bomb-wielding terrorist. This is no time for thought or perspective. Panic is in order.
So we are warned that we must sacrifice more civil liberties at the altar of perfect security. We are told we must spend billions more so that passengers on privately owned airplanes will feel safer. You don’t expect airlines to pay for their own protection do you?
Instead, all of this money will come from tax dollars — or more likely, the Chinese who buy up our debt.
When it’s all said and done, maybe we’ll feel safer. Perhaps we really can make it so difficult for terrorists to attack a plane that they’ll give up.
And select another target.
We can soon look forward to being electronically probed and exposed every time we enter a government building, concert, sporting event, casino or anywhere else people congregate. And trains, subways and ships will similarly require a high level of surveillance.
What will all of this cost? Who cares? We will be safe at all of these venues. We just won’t be able to afford them.
Maybe that’s al-Qaida’s real strategy. It doesn’t have anywhere near the weaponry needed to defeat the United States. It does have the power, however, to bankrupt us.
Or at least sit back and watch as we bankrupt ourselves.
But I guess this is how it must be. We must spend money and give up our personal freedoms to avoid terror. What else can we do?
Well, I have some suggestions. We could stop acting like gutless cowards. We could recognize that our enemies have been reduced to stuffing explosives into the shorts of some numbskull in order to blow up an airplane. And the clown wasn’t capable of doing it right.
We could take note of President Obama, when he says the nation’s intelligence network had enough information to stop the Christmas Day attack; the failure was in communicating the details and putting the pieces together.
We could realize that some bureaucratic restructuring is in order, while our government’s power to monitor everyone and everything is beyond our capacity to fathom.
We could acknowledge that life has no guarantees. But then, that would rob terrorists of their power.
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