Ed Weick said sensibly: > What September 11th demonstrated conclusively is that you can have good > relations with national governments, but those governments may have very > little rapport with, or control of, disaffected groups within their > boundaries. It also demonstrated that allegiances are becoming increasingly > removed from good old patriotism or nationalism. They are becoming > international, ideological, and extreme. And in the new warfare, weapons > are no longer only things that countries have, like tanks, soldiers, cannons > and fleets of bombers. They include ordinary civilian aircraft that you can > hijack at Logan Airport and powder you can put into envelopes and send out > in the mail.
What you are not looking at Ed are the large group connections of each of these terrorists. It would be easy, for example to aim a nuclear weapon at something that the group itself valued more highly than the country of Afganistan. For example Mecca or Medina. That may seem outrageous but the Cold War was outrageous and one suitcase bomb in the US and all gloves will be off including the still pregnant germ bank at the arsenals in Maryland and Pennsylvania. I lived close by in Pennsylvania until I got quesy about the lack of small animals in the forest around my little house trailer RV. This is the nation that said and believed that the end of the world was preferable to being communist. Not a paper tiger but a very angy sleeping one. It is easy for small groups, and El Queda is a small group relative to this potential, to feel as some on this list does, that the US is more vulnerable then it actually is. Democracy is vulnerable, liberalism is vulnerable and compassion is vulnerable but you could have another 98% die-off and still have enough people to punch the buttons and bring on a Nuclear Winter. This is the world we live in and the only sane people in the last forty years of world politics were the Soviet Politicians who gave up rather than play cowboy. Ray Evans Harrell, performing artist New York City
