Posted on 07/03/2007 5:19:12 AM PDT by Loyal Buckeye
As terrorists go, last week's attacks featured The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. One of the would-be London bombers drove erratically down Haymarket St. -- presumably affected by the fumes from the gas cylinders and gasoline containers that were the heart of his makeshift car-bomb -- before crashing into a garbage bin, getting out and running away. Another parked his explosives-packed car illegally, so it was towed away. The third attack was at Glasgow airport on the following day, but nobody was hurt except one of the attackers, who set himself on fire.
More-competent terrorists might have killed dozens of people, but it's safe to say that this incident will be taken more seriously in the United States than it is in Britain or anywhere else in Europe. An occasional terrorist attack is one of the costs of doing business in the modern world. You just have to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, as people in Europe do in general.
Most major European countries already had been through some sort of terrorist crisis well before the current fashion for "Islamist" terrorism: the IRA in Britain, the OAS in France, ETA in Spain, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades and their neofascist counterparts in Italy. Most European cities also were heavily bombed in a real war within living memory, which definitely puts terrorist attacks into a less-impressive category. So most Europeans do not obsess about terrorist attacks. They know that they are likelier to win the lottery than to be hurt by terrorists.
Russians also are pretty cool about the occasional terrorist attacks linked to the war in Chechnya, and Indians are positively heroic in their refusal (most of the time) to be panicked by terrorist attacks that have taken more lives in India than all the attacks in the West since terrorist techniques first became widespread in the 1960s. In almost all of these countries, despite the efforts of some governments to persuade the population that terrorism is an existential threat of enormous size, the vast majority of the people don't believe it.
Whereas in the United States, most people do believe it. A majority of Americans finally have figured out that the invasion of Iraq really had nothing to do with fighting terrorism, but they certainly have not understood that terrorism itself is only a minor threat. "We have a threat out there like we've never faced before," said actor, former senator and potential presidential candidate Fred Thompson last month. "I don't think the (American people) realize that this has been something that's been going on for a few hundred years, and our enemies have another 100-year plan," Thompson continued. "Whether it's Madrid, whether it's London, whether it's places that most people have never heard of, they're methodically going around trying to undermine our allies and attack people in conventional ways, while they try to develop nonconventional ways, and get their hands on a nuclear capability, and ultimately to see a mushroom cloud over an American city."
There has been only one major terrorist attack in the United States since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and that one, on 9/11, is almost six years in the past. So how have Americans been persuaded that their duty and their destiny in the 21st century is to lead the world in a titanic, globe-spanning "long war" against terrorism?
Inexperience is one reason: American cities never have been bombed in war, so Americans have no standard of comparison that would shrink terrorism to its true importance in the scale of threats that face any modern society. But the other is relentless official propaganda: the Bush administration has built its whole brand around the "war on terror" since 2001, so the threat must continue to be seen as huge and universal.
Ridiculous as it sounds to outsiders, Americans regularly are told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the "terrorists." They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars, but they don't. So the manipulators of public opinion in the White House and the more-compliant sectors of the U.S. media will give bigger play to the British bombings-that-weren't than Britain's own government and media have, and they will get away with it.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Oh, you know, 9/11 was no big deal. It is just Americans who can’t take the occasional terrorist attack because we are all frightened cowards. >S<
I sincerely hope if there is a successful attack this POS is a victim.
More “competent terrorists” would have done a better job in the first Trade Towers bombing in 1993. It damaged, but did not destroy. However, the terrorists learned from their mistakes. Gwynne is a fool, and in this article panders to the knee-jerk hate-America crowd that dominates the European Left.
Wow, this guy takes the Monty Python approach to terrorism, “It’s only a flesh wound.” If England chooses to take this approach the entire country will be a debilitated torso soon enough.
Go Bucks!
Here is a more enlightened take on “misunderestimating” the terrorists. Cavuto, Mark Steyn, and Mansoor Izaz.
The terror attacks won’t matter till they strike a media center, i.e., Black Rock, the NYT building .. THEN it will be very important. Notice that the death of a group of soldiers in Iraq is given a sentence; the death of a single reporter is covered in story after story for days on end.
“Russians also are pretty cool about the occasional terrorist attacks”
Talk to all those children that were killed by Chechen r5ebels in that school a few years ago. I am sure they are real happy with how cool the Russians played it!
The Civil War did affect some US cities--just a little bit. Americans are not strangers to violence or war. Most the present population of Europe have not experienced war. Since 1945, it has been America that has borne the brunt of the battle against Communism and militant Islamic fundamentalism. We lost more people on 9/11 in a few hours than all of the casualties lost by Europeans due to their various homegrown and foreign terrorist groups.
Today, terrorists can use WMD and inflict far greater casualties than ever before. The Europeans' attitude will change overnight if a terrorist attack of the scale of 9/11 were visited upon them. If this author does not understand the true nature of the threat, then she is due for a rude awakening.
Standard Marxist talking points.
The collateral damage of Jihad argument.
So what's the "sense of proportion?": a hundred dead? a thousand? a couple of million and a mushroom cloud?
Hey, it's the "cost of doing business."
Yeah, only one major attack—that killed over 3000 Americans and cost the economy hundreds of billions. Its incredible how these critics try to minimize this catastrophe. Listening to some of them, you’d think 9/11 was just a pipe bomb thrown into a dumpster by some teenager.
Ab-so-freakin'-loutely!
His prose style is not as inflamatory as you'd expect from a Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, etc. And -- in my own paper where he often appears -- he gets a little discriptive line suggesting that he is the most impartial and educated man on earth.
His ~style~ may not scream, but his content is just as shrill, leftist, and America-hating as it can possibly be.
He occupies the role in the culture war that Joseph Goebbels occupied in WWII: He has not killed anyone with his own hands (as far as I know), but he deserves to be on any prospective list of war criminal capital defendants. Of course, if we are lucky, he will also end it all in a bunker with his fellow madmen before the people can get at him.
This woman is a complete ass.
Err, I mean guy.
Sounds like Gwynne not only brings a sense of proportion, he brings popcorn, too. Only a bright mind like Gwynne Dyer could portray terrorism like it's the common cold.
I suppose he puts that on his Happy Earth Day cards he sends to the the families of 9/11: "It's strictly business."
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