Terrorism Against America

Speculations on Evil

Biological and Chemical Terrorism:

Today's news is filled with the anthrax scare. Tomorrow it may be something else. Let's examine these areas just a bit.

Biological weapons have rarely been used in modern warfare. There are two primary reasons for that. The aggressor can never be sure that the weapon he uses will not affect his own people. Diseases caused by germs don't kill lots of people in modern societies. All of the great epidemics in history have occurred prior to the development of modern medical practices or in regions where modern medicine is scarce or non existent. The First World, America, Europe, Japan, etc. are VERY, VERY GOOD at disease prevention and control. The use of a biological weapon against a First World nation may result in some deaths, perhaps thousands of deaths, but not on the scale we all fear. No one will kill millions of Americans with a biological weapon, unless we can blame Bin Laden for the diets that bring most of us some form of heart disease.

Biological weapons are hard to deliver. Anthrax is not contagious. To kill thousands, thousands have to be exposed to the high levels of the spores required for infection. In the twenty or so known cases, about 30% were fatal. The CDC feels that another 50 total cases were prevented by the use of antibiotics. Hardly a catastrophe for America though very serious for those that died. Ebola may be one of the deadliest diseases known to man, yet less than a thousand people have ever died of it. It just isn't that hard to prevent once its presence is known.

Disease is a poor choice as a way to kill modern man. Biowar scenarios have always postulated a contagious illness, usually airborne, and hardy (able to survive in the varied climates of this country). There may be such an illness, hidden away in some military vault. This type of illness does not exist in nature. It has to be made, and that requires some serious laboratory work. It's not something you do in your basement.

It is counter survival for an illness to be so deadly that it kills all its hosts quickly. The goal of any organism is to reproduce. A quick acting yet deadly illness may be impossible, or it may loose its deadliness as it passes from host to host. In any event, modern medicine, and exposure controls used in medicine, make biowar a very iffy proposition. A terrorist trying to unleash an illness will kill primarily those people without access to these things, their friends, allies, and themselves.

Chemical terrorism... it conjures up photos of the villages of southern Iraq where Sadam gassed thousands of his own people, or the men from WW I who were gassed at the front. Poison gases, including nerve gases, may not be all that hard to create. They are hard to handle and hard to store in quantity. You risk gassing yourself long before you get to use it in an act of terrorism. The delivery of poison gas that we have seen historically was with artillery or specially modified aircraft. You can be sure that a group of Middle Eastern men dragging a howitzer into a park WILL be noticed. And crop dusters are not good delivery vehicles for most gasses, not without killing the pilot before he even gets off the ground. That wacky sect in Japan tried for years, over and over, and yet they never affected more than a couple of thousand people over the decade or more that they tried.

Some Thoughts on Terrorism:

Who wants to terrorize us? Bin Laden has the attention of the United States at this time. He isn't alone. The easiest definition of a terrorist, to my thinking, is a person who wants to deny a moral or legal choice to Americans by acts of violence, or to cause fear, or interrupt the normal life styles of Americans, again by acts of violence. Terrorists seem unable to accept that their opinions and beliefs are not central to the world, and that their wishes are not universal.

These evil people are a small minority in the world. They exist by not showing their evil completely to their supporters and allies. But, they lie. Terrorist are their most effective killing themselves. More terrorists have been killed by inept bomb building and witch hunts for traitors than have been killed by the police forces of the world. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Sadam, the Taliban... they have all killed more of their own people than anyone else ever did.

And, to steal a thought from the TV show "The West Wing". Terrorists never succeed. The IRA is a failure. So is the ETA in Spain. America's Weathermen are now aging liberals living the good life they sought to destroy. No terrorist group has ever gained its goals through force of arms. And... again stealing... don't give me that crap that Washington was a terrorist. Read the Declaration of Independence. We fought a war... and won.

Terrorism can be as simple as a cross burning, or as complex as the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, terrorism may exist without any overt actions on the part of the terrorist at all. Think of all the changes and disruptions to our lives since September 11, without any evidence that any other actions have been taken by those terrorists. People are terrified because an identified terrorist lived next door to them, or just down the street. Obviously nothing happened to the neighbors of these evil men, yet they are scared. Perhaps terrorism can be defined simply as the creation of fear where none existed, especially the creation of fear where none needs to exist.

Terrorism used to be thought of as a "dark of the night" thing. Now we recognize, as people all over the world have for years, that it can happen at any time. That bothers us. People like their lives to be routine, predictable. And, for the most part, they still are. Your odds of dying in a motor vehicle accident are still greater than being killed in a terrorist incident. Cancer, heart disease, AIDS, will all kill many more people that terrorists have. Terrorism can happen at any time, BUT it probably won't.

A grade school outing to a pumpkin patch was cancelled in the fall of 2001 because of security concerns. Nonsense! Terrorists attack symbols, the WTC, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, military units, etc. They also may attack where they can cause the most fear such as a dance hall in Tel Aviv... We have to remember, though, that nearly every activity that we normally engage in doesn't fall into a target category. And, most targets are easily protected. We went nearly ten years without an airline hijacking. To do the four on September 11, the terrorists took advantage of the existing rules, the first of which was for airline crew to cooperate with the hijacking. Rules change, and we have already seen examples of how much more difficult it will be to hijack a plane. I personally will kick to death anybody trying to take a plane I'm on.

My heart goes out to those affected by the events of September 11. God bless them and give them comfort. There will be more terrorism. Here, Israel, Spain, Ireland, China... We cannot stop acts of violence intended to kill less than a hundred people, if the terrorists are determined. Acts of terrorism intended to kill thousands of people are very difficult to conduct. We will thwart most of them, because we are now focused on the situation as never before. There are, and will always be, loopholes and shortcomings in our systems that will allow the occasional terrorist mass murder. It can't be helped.

Let's be cold and calculating for a moment. Every Israeli knows someone killed or hurt in a terrorist incident. In order for that to be the case here, we would have had perhaps 1.5 million killed or injured in the last thirty years, and we are far from that figure. The truth is that we have had little to fear and we continue to have little to fear. And let us remember, that as Americans, we are as safe as we were on September 10, and as free. And... if we want to beat Bin Laden and all his evil kind, we must stay free, and free of fear. They can hurt us, but they cannot beat us. We were here before them, and we will be here after they lie in cold, unmarked graves.

Weapons of Mass Destruction is a critical term in this entire discussion. The stated policy of the United States for many years has been that chemical and biological weapons are considered as weapons of mass destruction. And, the stated policy of the United States is that attacks upon the United States using weapons of mass destruction will be responded to in the same fashion. The United States does not possess chemical or biological weapons, only nuclear. Therefore, it is very clear that any attack upon the USA using chemical or biological weapons would result in a response by us using nuclear weapons.

Why do you suppose that Saddam didn't gas the troops in the Gulf War? Or, use his weapons on Israel? He was told that such use would be responded to. Indeed, there is some speculation that the Israelis were loading their planes after the first Scuds fell. Any nation assisting in the production of chemical or biological weapons for use against the USA by terrorists has to seriously consider what happens if the source of the weapons should ever be discovered. The FBI is like a pit bull. It never lets go, and nobody in the world does the detail sifting, the leg work, better.

Updated on December 12, 2002.