The October 20th issue of American Conservative has a cute but nasty little line from Taki [p.30], one of the rag's cofounders and regular commentators:"the neocon notion that waging wars in culturally alien lands to establish democracy will one day make life in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles as exciting and colorful as it is in Tel Aviv."
Lead me to an interesting train of thought. Almost all other commentators take the jihadi threat as being a super WTC [nukes, Ebola, whatever]. I agree that it is possible but see far bigger danger as the Intifata/Baghdad/the DC sniper. Two guys with an old rifle and an older car caused more chaos than 911 actually did in the DC area. They were caught mostly because they were brain dead twits. May have been jihadis. Have have been leaderless resistance splinter cell. May just be two nuts with some explaininged holes in their background. If it has been pursued it sure hasn't been obvious.
Now imagine some somewhat more intelligent actors. Not suicide bombs. Not professional speznatz, black ops types. More the sort of amateurs that make up much of ETA, Red Brigades...organized types who do this as their hobby as it were. If just shooting random people can cause the panic DC did imagine if there were 10-20 such teams operating at random intervals in the US at once. Each team only does say 1-2 kills a week. Anyone. Anywhere. The media machine does the rest. This could be more the nightmare scenario than losing one city. Greater DC did not react well to the fear. Think any other US city would have done much better?
posted by scott 12:54 PM