Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Let’s say that we knew 9/11 was going happen beforehand. Sure, maybe we didn’t know the exact day, and we didn’t know the exact method. But we knew there were 19 suicidal terrorists in the country and that they were in the advanced stages of plotting a major terrorist attack that they expected to kill somewhere between 3,000 and 25,000 Americans. Okay. You with me? Because this is very similar to the situation the United Kingdom claims they are in right now.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials have passed on a grim assessment to their U.S. counterparts, “It will be a miracle if there isn’t a terror attack over the holidays in London,” a senior American law enforcement official tells ABCNews.com.
…Officials said they could not cite any specific date or target but said al Qaeda had planned previous operations during the Christmas holidays that had been disrupted.
“It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be,” an intelligence official told ABCNews.com.
Authorities say they are seeking at least 18 suspected suicide bombers.
“They hope they are one step ahead, but they seriously fear they may be one step behind,” the senior American official said.
British law enforcement and intelligence officials say the ongoing plots have been in the planning stages for at least three years. The officials say the plots are all connected and track back to al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan who have been recruiting and training British citizens of Pakistan descent.
So, I am assuming this is true. And I admit it creates a hell of a problem. Yet, as soon as I started to read the comments from that article I was confronted with a proposed solution.
Maybe its time we drop the bomb and show them that we mean business when it comes to terrorism. It ended WW2 and it would either end terrorism or at least make them think of the consequences before they take action. Look at it this way; we should strike first before they use a dirt bomb on us. All the intelligence available will not work and one day we will be hit again. As the 9/11 indicated, it’s inevitable.
Posted by: Joe | Dec 21, 2006 11:46:02 AM
And that seemingly insane reasoning got a lot of support. (For the record, I am not the BooMan that left a comment in that thread).
So, I began asking myself, “would such a plan actually deter terrorists?” If we had nuked Mecca back in August 2001, would that have dissuaded the terrorists from carrying forth their plan?
Shit. You know it just might well have stopped 9/11 from happening. Ya know? I mean, sure, they willing to kill themselves, but were they willing to let millions of Muslims die in the process?
Then I snapped out of it.
There are already some 600,000 dead Muslims that have lost their lives as a direct result of the actions the 19 hijackers carried out. I kind of doubt they thought there would be any less. Clearly they knew of the military might of the United States and clearly they knew we would respond with overwhelming force against someone, somewhere. It didn’t deter them a bit.
Then you have to picture what the world would have looked like if the United States had just pre-emptively nuked Mecca just to focus the minds of some terrorists.
I guess in the UK’s case the plan would be to nuke Islamabad or Karachi.
It’s amazing to me just how scared people are of random acts of violence. Someone is plotting to kill thousands of Britains. I know that is scary. I certainly don’t want their plans to succeed. But, let’s get some courage here people. Don’t go racing off to kill millions as a way to avoid the possible death of few thousand.
This is the kind of thinking that will prematurely end the world if we let it. We can’t have bedwetters in charge of foreign policy. If we can’t prevent massive terror attacks then we will have to do something different in our policies so that people do not want to carry out terror attacks. Why is this so damn hard to understand?
