A familiar flight and--thankfully--a familiar ending
By Thomas P.M. Barnett
I've taken Northwest 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, even connecting through the Netherlands from Africa. I remember the African security being fairly lax, and the Dutch being much tighter, with the usual screening before you board the plane by special personnel (who ask a lot of questions). Nice to see the spirit of United 93 lives on in passengers.
Will this stuff ever go away? Unlikely. But important to remember how easy it was to hijack planes in the 1970s and then how that tactic went away in the 1980s thanks to heightened security. So the general tightening up matters. As for fascination with the background of the bomber, let's just say that suicide-by-terrorism will always find a ready supply of unhappy people looking for an exit from their lives, much in the vein of the Fort Hood shooter. Higher education doesn't necessarily inoculate anybody, and ex-pat living abroad is often a discombobulating influence that can lead to personal epiphanies.
Remember, most great revolutionaries in history spent time studying abroad, often as hard scientists. Indeed, as my previous post below reminds, America has a long and twisted tradition of self-immolating gunmen looking to go out with a bang (and yes, they're almost always male and young and desperately unhappy and unsuccessful [at least in their own eyes] people). That supply will always remain strong in a modern, competitive society such as our own, with its peculiar fascination with violence, guns, and murder. And as the rest of the world moves closer to our living standard, we'll see even more of these men, and we'll need new ways to process them into harmlessness--one way or the other--as quietly as possible. |
