The Fear The Fear The Fear

It's been an entire twelve days since the last post. Two weeks have happened, basically. In that time, I've been listening to the Steal non-stop. They're a raucous hardcore band that sounds like the first time you went downhill on your bike as fast as you could.

Go download all their records on their official website. The title is also the title of a Defiance, Ohio record, who are nowhere near as good as the Steal, but the title's stuck with me for years. Marathon #5 before the end of this month. And now, for a drastic change in tone.

Al-Qai'da's attack on Christmas doesn't register much with me. One, I didn't know it happened until a couple days later. There's been a lot of talk about how he evaded American security apparatus, but let's be honest: he got on a plane in Europe and came into America that way. Would New York airport security have caught him, I don't know. There's a lot of fear going around that something "could have" happened and that Al-Qai'da still has a lot of pull.

Let's examine what happened. Al-Qai'da attacks usually are redundant. By that I mean, if one plan goes down, there's still another one in place. 9/11 is an example. One plane failed. Three didn't. In this case, there was one (and only one) person, using the same method the shoe bomber did, which also failed.

The suicide bomber didn't even commit suicide. What he did manage to get past non-American airport security was incendiary, not explosive. (It burned as opposed to blow up.) I'm inclined to believe that's a victory. Al-Qai'da is also known for having camps devoted to these kind of activities, so they had to know that this device was improvised and "hoping for the best".

Fareed Zakaria puts it better: On Christmas a Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan.

That's worrisome, but not terrifying. America is not some kind of fortress and even if it was, it wouldn't be America. America was not founded on the idea to keep foreigners and "dangerous types" out. It is meant to be a place with open arms. Those that would trade liberty for security deserve neither, Franklin said. It's worth repeating.

A young Al-Qai'da affiliate (think of the terror organization like a franchise) literally threw something together that didn't work the first time around, failed on putting an explosive on an airplane and they still managed to freak out the American public.

The fear currently going isn't logical. The evidence doesn't bear it out. There's a terrorist incident, speaking roughly, every 16.5 million departures, Nate Silver tells us. It is significantly more dangerous to take a car to wherever you're going. Those who practice suicide terror want us to be very afraid. Killing tons of people is a bonus, but the point is to strike fear a mass audience. And, like a charm, we're all very, very afraid. That's why Al Qai'da celebrated it.

And that's why I'm not at all hopeful about the war on terror.