First Position

Rethinking The War, Ctd - Andrew Sullivan

The reader here makes a good point relating to Sullivan's original premise of the war on terror. What I'm more concerned with is not an attack using any sort of mass destruction weapon but one that relies on relatively low-tech elements. There is enough potential among the chemical and industrial infrastructure in America to create a devastating attack. All it takes is the clever use of simple tools. It's what I call 'Oak Cliff engineering' in that you take simple parts and assemble them into a working whole through inventive use. This is what modern terrorism is amazingly good at. While we do need to maintain our efforts to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist groups, I think we would be remiss if we ignored the surprisingly simple ways in which an attack could occur. What this requires is getting into the minds of the terrorist, not necessarily outthinking them but looking at things the way they would. Beyond that all we can do is maintain a degree of vigilance.