I’m almost hesitant to link to this story from the Sun Newspaper because the paper’s reputation is not quite as sober as that of the London Times, but I suspect the nub of the story is on target – mothers with bombs.
Terrorism is a form of war based on weakness. If an enemy can’t fight a standing army it finds other ways to attack so that it doesn’t have to face a superior army. America is the greatest power on Earth but, as with our own Revolution when we faced down that century’s greatest power, Great Britain, we seem helpless before our enemies. Only two large oceans and the lack of imagination of our enemies keep them from our shores. Our continued success depends on the enemy not coming up with new ideas.
If mothers willing to blow themselves up with their babies isn’t a creepy enough thought, Andrew Sullivan quoted one of the recent books about terrorism as saying that cyanide not bombs was the latest innovation that Al Quaeda was trying to perfect. It would be used to poison everyone on a plane.
A commentator on NPR recently said of the Israeli intervention in Lebanon that the only tool in their toolbox these days seems to be a hammer. Maybe that’s all we have as well and our war is a little like “Whack a Mole”, the game with a mallet where you try to bash every mole that sticks its head up. The only difference between the game and our war with Muslim extremists is that if you miss a mole it won’t blow up on you or release cyanide into the cabin of your jet.