I’ve been hearing a lot of people saying that now there’ll be attacks because of bin Laden’s death.
I don’t get it.
The terrorists spend 24 hours a day (minus time to brush and floss) plotting ways to kill people.
So what’s going to happen? Now, they’re going to spend 25 hours a day doing it? ‘Cause now they’re really pissed off?
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s my reasoned opinion that there will be exactly ZERO reprisals.
There may be a few dates shifted around. (“Let’s do it now instead of next week.” “Let’s do it on the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.”) But there will be ZERO acts of terrorism that weren’t already going to happen.
You heard it here first. Unless you heard it somewhere else first.
That’s an interesting take on it, and being the sort of person I am, it makes me think of a new approach. If nothing we can do would make the situation worse (the terrorists are already at full capacity), we have license to try just about *anything* in the hope that it may make things better. For instance, if we started treating the bodies of dead terrorists in some way that would be grossly offensive to their culture, and promised to continue the practice on all terrorists who acted against us or our interests, maybe that would be a deterrent. Or, we could announce a sort of Pax Romana policy—for every U.S. citizen killed in a terrorist attack, the U.S. would act to kill a thousand of whatever group the attackers came from (or whoever harbored or assisted them) regardless of the victims’ actual participation. Since the overwhelming majority of terrorism seems to come from Islam, we could promise to nuke Mecca in response to the next such attack, and Medina for the one after that. The possibilities stagger the mind!
It’s not a new idea that certain politically impossible ideas might be effective. For example, before even wondering whether bombing Mecca would work, we have to wonder what the the millions of Islamic Americans would think about it.
The same could be said about fighting crime. I believe that Soviet Russia had pretty low levels of violent crime.