New School Politics

How America lost the war on terror

Eftychis | 20 02 2007

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Everyday thousands of Americans stand in line at airports, taking off their shoes and removing their laptops to be screened by the joke of an organization known as the TSA. What is stopping a terrorist from blowing himself up in that TSA line with one hundred and fifty people before he even enters security. The fact that Americans need to realize is we can never be secure and our attempts to be secure are costing us lives and treasure. More Americans are killed every year from drunk driving than have been killed in our entire history from Islamic fundamentalists. When the Islamists look at CNN or Fox News and see our attempts to secure ourselves they laugh.

They know they have already had a great victory, everyday hundreds of thousands of Americans are inconvenienced and billions are spent to ensure that we have an added level of comfort. Anyone who believes that putting liquids into a plastic bag before boarding will somehow deter terrorism is naive.

If you are blown up in a London bus, you got on the unlucky bus. But your chances of getting struck by lightening are often higher than being killed in a terrorist incident. The only way to stop terrorism is to deter it from occurring at its source, once someone who is willing to die is in your country, no amount of security can stop him or her from harming others.

Intelligence is key as is vigilance, but make no mistake the security we have is little more than window dressing. We could check every piece of luggage that goes onto an airplane, but a terrorist could just blow the plane out of the sky with a surface to air missile. We could screen all the passengers in the security line but a terrorist could walk in with an AK-47 and kill fifty people at the ticket counter. The Port Authority could check every piece of cargo at the port of New Jersey but a nuclear weapon detonated two miles off shore beyond the reach of the coast guard would still kill thousands and cripple the economy of half of the country. The point is, no amount of security or added vigilance will keep us safe. If every American were drafted by Homeland security we would still be exposed.

As long as we are willing to sacrifice our time, money, our lives, and our liberties for an added and false sense of security we deserve none of those things. As Benjamin Franklin said, “He who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither.” We have already given up so much, and in reality we have given it up for nothing. The west cannot do much to stop radical Islamists, Islam must confront the demons within itself and those who are moderate must kill the extremists within their religion. But make no mistake; as long as terrorists are willing to die for their cause, we will never have enough security to stop them. If America wants to win the war on terror we should use whatever means necessary to eradicate the extremists and we must accept the dangers of life and live our lives without compromising our time and energy for an added false sense of unwarranted security.