#10 "LH I respect your writings but I have to ask how many is too many? There's that guy (name escapes me) that recently said that the 3000 of 9/11 didn't compare to the Russkie losses in WWII so our reaction was way out of proportion.
How much is too much?"
One is too many in some level. No murder is acceptable.
An attack that takes 3000 lives, and that easily could have taken several times that, and that destroyed billions of dollars worth of property, and that disrupted the US economy, etc, etc was enough to justify what we did in afghanistan, and taking on AQ globally, etc. IE what we are already doing. Would we have done anything differently if one more individual had died at the WTC? 9/11, and the steady sequence of lesser attacks, are great enough, that I dont see why attacks at individuals would warrant more. Its like there was a ten car pile up at the local intersection, and you build a safety improvement, but not as good a one as some folks want, and then theres a fenderbender and somebody says see, we need a better safety improvement. If 9/11 didnt warrent doing anything more than we are now, why would this?
When will take things MORE seriously than we do now? When theres a second 9/11 or greater in scale, or when low level attacks become as frequent as they were in Israel during the intifadah. Not before then, Im afraid. Hell, at this point the challenge before us is to KEEP the level of concern as high as it has been, and to keep the complacency from growing. And im not talking partisanship here. I was on a subway today, and there was a bag that looked unattended (it turned out to belong to a woman sitting a row back from it) I didnt even notice it, but this more alert woman did and asked if I had noticed who it belonged to - we asked the woman sitting behind, whose bag it turned out to be, and so alls well that ends well. But the point is, this woman who noticed and asked, was APOLEGETIC, said how theyve made us paranoid. I just said, well its no cost to ask, its good we did.
What will it take to get people to again NOT BE APOLEGETIC in a situation like that? More than a foiled plot to kill one person, I fear.
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A plot to kidnap and behead a British soldier on videotape was only "days away" and led to the arrests today of nine men in Birmingham, England, a Scotland Yard source tells ABC News.