I was talking to Jeremy in the car and was letting him know how surprised I am that we haven’t seen any more terrorism in the US. The main reasoning I had behind this was that we sailed from St. Maarten to Massachusetts and landed on shore in Sandwich without a single peep out of anyone noticing us. Based on this trip it was clear to me that the borders to the US are not very secure from people importing nasty weapons and crazy people from other countries who hate America. So I still wonder based on the Sept. 11 attacks why we haven’t been attacked again.

One theory that Jeremy proposed is that the terrorists are not interested in doing anything less spectacular than the 9/11 bombing. That would make sense but the deal with terrorism is that it is equally effective when it is spectacular and when it is personal. If you want to get people to duck and cover whenever a minivan passes by in a gas station then get reports on the radio that there is a sniper shooting people from the back of a mini-van. The anthrax scare is more like what I would expect from the terrorists. They put some white powder in an envelope and suddenly everyone in the US is afraid of envelopes. If you put a little cyanide in four bottles of Tylenol then the whole country will be afraid of Tylenol. Basically all terrorists need to do is actually something very small but within the realm of every day life for all Americans in order to scare the bejeezus out of us. So why haven’t they done so?

The next theory is that our anti-terror homeland defense system is working great. By using the Patriot Act to read what people have taken out of the library we can find potential terrorists who belong to local libraries. The FBI now has lots of good tools on the Internet and can trace bits and pieces of terrorist cells quickly to their sources to eliminate them. Now I would believe this one if I didn’t think that people could just sail over to the US in a sloop, walk across the border in Mexico (if they aren’t killed by over zealous minutemen) or hop in the back of an un-refrigerated truck with no oxygen holes. The violence in Iraq, Israel, and other places shows that there are plenty of terrorists in a country despite a lot better military presence and less privacy than the Patriot Act provides. So why aren’t the terrorists here?

Jeremy discovered an interesting insight from an Army colonel who shared an airplane leg with him on the United Arab Emirates airlines on his way back to Boston from Australia. The colonel’s theory is that Iraq is a terrorist magnet and while it is terrible that the terrorists are attacking Americans or Iraqi’s anywhere in the world it is also a good thing that they aren’t attacking innocent Americans going to work in America each day. By having a presence in Iraq, a location close to the locations of most of the terrorists who are likely to attack Americans it is easier and more convenient and appears to be closer to home for them to stream into Iraq from Iran and other bordering countries.

This actually works well for our purposes as American civilians. If we are going to fight the Iraqis then we can have them fight the military that is equipped and have a job hired by us to fight back. This is much better than having vigilantes roaming the streets of the US looking for people who might be terrorists or having the terrorists roaming the streets playing nasty pranks like blowing-up buses, firing machine guns at toddlers, poisoning our water supply, or releasing a flu virus from the 50s that killed 4 million people at the time. While it costs us a lot of money to fight terror in Iraq we have seen almost no attacks in the US. I hope it stays that way.