Someday, the people in power (who will not be Republicans) will accept the wisdom of an economist, a security expert, and a humor site. I’m not holding my breath, though.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.
That’s harder than playing Pick the Bad Guy, though.
The cracked article was, for me, the most informative part of the above link. Follow it and ponder his six steps carefully. David Wong’s opinions overlap very closely with my own, but he does a far better job describing things than I ever could.
Some day? Maybe. But now while those in power need an enemy to direct people’s anger towards. War is peace.
The cracked article is quite good; I wish it were a bit better written and less goofily crass – it belongs in the New York Times op ed pages, unlike some of the other stuff that’s there.
Terrorists use the methods they do because they don’t have the ability to offer an actual, credible, threat. Resorting to terror requires admitting that you don’t have an army, or a political mandate, or the people on your side. If you actually have army, mandate, or masses, you can use them instead of attacking the weakest point.
Terrorists aren’t cowards, though. They’re willing to die for their cause, or out of despair, and that’s not to be dismissed lightly. What they are is defeated. They’ve lost but they won’t accept it and would rather die than admit it. With 1.7 billion muslims in the world, if they wanted a caliphate, they’d have a fucking caliphate. They could do a kickstarter and buy one. So, the fact that they don’t already means ISIS are nastypants barbarous sore losers.