I have a strong distaste for posting or even reading here (although there are many good posts here). Here goes my irrepressible 2 piastres worth, because the higher activity in this and similar threads makes my skin crawl.
The effectiveness of the Terrorism on War is clearly showcased in the lurid fascination in headlines, conversations, topics, and threads like this one, if you can take a few steps back and see. If you want or hope for any effective counterterrorism within your Homeland, then you must try and understand that job #1 is to renounce the natural ghoulish fascination we all are susceptible to, involving individual deaths that are so crassly orchestrated in low-budget "Shock and Awe" productions.
If you sincerely want to fight terrorism, then insist that those personally close to the victims be allowed to grieve in the same privacy as would be allowed the surviving family of an everyday traffic fatality. Then, drive on- and mind your own business. Go about you own life. Stop gawking.
Terrorism is a participatory activity, requiring specific responses from the target society. America remains the juiciest terrorist target in the world, largely because we are the most contagiously indignant victims, so extremely incredulous that our careful neat packaging of Death, and our comforting assumptions about our permanence, have been rudely dissheveled.
I watched uncomprehendingly at first, as my Beiruti neighbors cleaned up with great haste and thoroughness after terrorist attacks. It seemed surreal at first, how with such great effort they would get back to living, outwardly nearly unaffected, immediately after normal urban life had been shattered by an unbelievable concussion, the evil smell, the wreckage, and by the human meat, blood, bone, goo, organs, clothing, all strung obcenely and incongruously, in broad daylight on everyday objects. The cleanup always started even before the smoke cleared. The next day, you could walk through the scene of the crime with hardly a reminder of the momentary drama and tragedy that had occured- A big pothole, a pocked wall, a new window: No shrines to the dead, no little Lebanese flags on cars, just discos, bakeries, bookstores, re-opening for another day's business. Roberta Flack's "I Will Survive" came over the radio, and echoed down the streets, and we danced to it.
Beirutis endured a horrific amount of terrorism, and eventually came to clearly understand the most effective civil counterterrorism. The orgy didn't stop right away, but the victims decided to stop playing their part in the sick game.
Just because the USA is in fact more efficient, MacM, more prolific in killing innocent civilians in ways just as gruesome, just as calculating, just as public (in theatre), and just as impersonal- as a typical, unimaginative kidnapping and videotaped speech and beheading (yawn). Although occupying armies and air strikes can retaliate in causing deaths and dismemberments , they can never win this war. ("War"- like "Jihad" it's really a word so far out of context a to be very misleading)
This "war" will be won when we learn a common-looking steadfastness never seen in an action movie. We will only beat terrorism by concertedly getting back to our normal lives after each monstrous crime, whether our careers involve making widgets, or selling detergent, or hunting international criminals, or investigating organized crime. Such a responses to hijackings, bombs, and beheadings seems less spectacular, and seems to offer no chance to vent our indignance, or to climax the movie in a spectacular action scene where the bad guys get blown away.
When Americans learn this responsibility, and also demand that their government respond with police and not military efforts, then the War on Terrorism on War on Terrorism will finally wind down- But not until. Counterterrorism is not war. War is terrorism is war. Calm down and fight.
