Recently, we've been hearing a lot of noise from politicians about the level of risk of a terrorist attack. This interview finally presents a more balanced view on this whole issue.
Ted Koppel makes an interesting point saying that President Obama probably did exactly the right thing on Chrismas day by staying with his family in Hawaii. He has then been lured into spending his time doing exactly what Al Quaeda want him to be doing, namely worrying and being seen to worry about Al Quaeda.
This is where the comparison with sanitation comes in. How often does Mr Obama talk about sanitation in America? Not often. Sanitation is sorted, but wherever in the world it is not sorted, lots of people die of cholera etc. as nearly happened in the New Orleans tropical storm.
In the middle ages, sanitation wasn't sorted, people would go into wild speculation about the causes of deaths in cities. I feel we are in a similar situation with terrorism. We are trying hard to understand it, to "be on our guard" or to look like we are doing something about it if we are a politician. In reality, the only people who can do anything about it are secret agents, who by their very nature are secretive. The politicians cant tell us what the secret agents are doing so they have to "change the level of threat" even with no logical evidence that there is a greater threat.
Personally, I am happy for security measures to be increased, in a slow and invisible way. I would have been quite happy for the expenditure being put into Bushes war on terror to all be spent on covert operations, infiltration of terrorist cells, whatever help the Yemeni government needs.
All of these covert operatives would be the silent heroes of the fight against terrorism. Just as the binmen and sanitation engineers are the silent, un-talked about heroes of our streets.
This would leave the rest of us to get on with our lives as normal, and where possible laugh at the stupid people who have nothing better to do than blow themselves up. I can tell you one thing for a fact... I don't think that there is any more chance of me preventing a terrorist attack now than there was when we we at a moderate risk of one occurring. This is to say, nothing that a politician has said about terrorism recently has added anything to our collective common sense. This begs the question why do we need to be told anything? The whole think smacks of the useless protect and survive public information films of the 1970s.
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ReplyDeleteFantastic post. I suggest a 'sanitation' approach to solving climate change might be in order. On a pedantic note, I notice that the older usage of 'begging the question' ('assuming the point at issue') http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question is being replaced by a newer usage ('raise the question'). Oh well.
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