Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Terrorist mentality

There is a typically insightful but rather odd post up by Megan McCardle.

The odd part first. How weird is it that an American journalist took the trouble to set out in a public forum her thoughts about how Islamic terrorists could operate against her country in ways that are more effective? Think about that one for a while.

The insightful bit that most interested me, meanwhile, was something McCardle said after listing all the "better" targets and then wondering why Islamic terrorists didn't hit those. She writes,
In part, I expect, because they don't really know that much about America. 
I expect she is right about that. It's always seemed to me that one of the prime reasons that the World Trade Center was hit is because it was called the "World Trade Center". Fantastically ignorant about America, the terrorists assumed the thing was what its label told them it was. It was a bit of typical American marketing language that made the buildings such an attractive target.

And where do Islamic terrorists get their odd ideas about America? They get these ideas from the American entertainment and journalism industries. It is one of the central conceits of both that there are certain nerve centers vital to functuioning of free society.

Looking back as the tenth anniversary of that horrible event approaches, it seems to me that one thing that was made clear that day was just how untrue that was. The idiots who use terrorism generally attempt to justify their actions on the grounds that they cannot win in conventional ways. But the worst sort of conflict they could possibly face is one in which Americans fought back not in a centralized way but a decentralized one. If a whole bunch of independent operators decided that the central institutions  of their country had been incapacitated and that the only way to defend their security was direct action, the consequences of such a moment would be so horrible for the causes Islamic terrorists care to claim about that their entire culture would be at risk.

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