London barely had a full day to celebrate its seeming good fortune in being awarded the 2012 Olympic games at a meeting in its former Singapore colony, when out of nowhere, a group of coordinated bomb blasts in Central London’s transit system, including a bus and three underground train locations, resulted in at least 37 dead and hundreds injured in the U.K. capital. This comes, mind you, amidst presumably heightened security in Britain as G-8 leaders meet in Gleneagle in Scotland… including our own denizen of irrational security, Dear Leader himself, the President.
Those of us who haul our rear ends to work within 100 yards of another underground railway (the World Trade Center PATH train station) have all too familiar a recollection of this type of horror. It’s getting cliche: “We’re all Madrilenos”, “We’re all New Yorkers”, and now, “We’re all Londoners”.
London, as far as I understand it anyway, removed public garbage cans and placed surveillance cameras all over the place some years ago, in an effort to thwart the Irish Republican Army. None of these measures, alas, were effective against determined terrorists; I suppose Israel could tell us that story.
The simple reality of our “war on terror” is that terror is simply a method of a particular kind of asymmetrical warfare; the bad guys in a terror war have ruthlessness and the element of surprise on their side… all of the preemptive wars we can fight won’t change any of this.
Oh… btw… Iraq just announced a big new military cooperation program with… guess who? Just part of the big picture… And you thought the world was scary enough as it was!
tdog
…it’s really the underlying falacy of the so-called War On Terra. Terrorism is usually founded, one way or another, on ideas. There is no readily identifiable group of people or any particular land mass to attack that will lead to the elimination of those ideas so we know we are getting off on the wrong foot when the people in charge openly insist that their primary offensive maneuver in this war is going to involve guns and tanks and bombs instead of all that pansy wussy law enforcement stuff like those cowardly traitors over in “old Europe” insist on employing…
…the problem is, none of our high-tech smart weapons can detect threatening ideas, so as long as the nimrods at the wheel insist on a militaristic approach, we’ll just have to keep holding our breath waiting for “the next time”…
Well I am not afraid of terrorism and I am apalled at the effort to scare the shit out of everyone. More people were killed in the US by drunk drivers last year than in the entire world by terrorists. I didn’t see a worldwide war on drunk driving called for. I didn’t see conservatives proposing that we drop nukes on distilleries because you can’t tell the difference between the good drunks and the bad ones, so we should nuke them all. I didn’t see the US spend $100 billion to end drunk driving. The right is using terrorism to ramp up the rhetoric because they can squeeze political gain out of it.
The answer to which is: “Bush sold us the story that we’re safer with him in charge. Anyone feeling safer today?”
Anyway, my real point is that terrorism is awful, yes, but it isn’t the big bad bogeyman the reactionaries are pretending it is.
Long time TD followers will remember one commentor: WallyCoxLives, who stood out with his wit and wisdom.
Well, I am sad to report that WallyCoxLives lost his battle yesterday with colon cancer. This was one of his favorite sites to visit, but he had to cease his visits since he could no longer sit at his computer comfortably.
Oh my…so truly sorry.
I understand Americans are obsessed with British security cameras (I don’t understand why), but that’s not an excuse for falsehood. The growth of electronic surveillance has zero to do with terrorism; it was a response to petty theft and mugging in shopping areas and other public places.