I suppose I really ought to read the last 2000 posts or so to see if these things have already been discussed, but somehow I think I won't....
We can control our own borders, and the bad boys are pretty easy to profile. With a good intelligence system and the FBI doing a roundup, we should learn fairly soon how to keep them under control here.
Controlling our borders is something we have not done terribly well in the past. Profiling, while useful, is insufficient as anything but a beginning: the vast majority of those that fit the profile are not in fact terrorists, and there is a huge amount of work between profiling and roundup.
The Euros have a much bigger problem if the Terrorists go after them. They have the huge Muslim population the Terrorists can hide in. and much more porous borders.
The Euro problem is, unfortunately, our problem as well. Europe provides an ideal planning, staging, and training ground for operations aimed at the US. The amount of human and material traffic between the US and Europe is staggering, and it is virtually impossible to control it all. Unless we have specific intelligence on who they are and where they are, it will be very difficult to prevent the entry of terrorists carrying Euro passports. If you were going to smuggle WMD into the US, how would you do it? You wouldn’t send it straight from Pakistan, Yemen, or Saudi Arabia, that’s for sure. You’d run it across those pourous Euro borders and try to get it onto a ship in Rotterdam or another busy Euro port, where the sheer volume of traffic makes close scrutiny unlikely. If you were a terrorist plotting a strike on the US, wouldn’t you be more likely to hide in Europe than in the Middle East?
Whether we like it or not, it will be impossible for us to control our terrorist problem without close cooperation with Europe. It pains many of us to admit that we need the Europeans, but we do. We may not need their military assistance, but the war we are really fighting does not involve military action. We need intelligence, police, and extralegal cooperation in the places the terrorists hide, and our military prowess cannot provide those things. If we use it indiscriminately, it might make it harder for us to get what we need to protect ourselves. |
