O.K., you say, but how can one possibly compare the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nukes, with Al Qaeda? Here's how: As dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us. Despite our differences, we agreed on certain bedrock rules of civilization.With the Islamist militant groups, we face people who hate us more than they love life. When you have large numbers of people ready to commit suicide, and ready to do it by making themselves into human bombs, using the most normal instruments of daily life - an airplane, a car, a garage door opener, a cellphone, fertilizer, a tennis shoe - you create a weapon that is undeterrable, undetectable and inexhaustible. This poses a much more serious threat than the Soviet Red Army because these human bombs attack the most essential element of an open society: trust.
Now, Friedman goes on to talk about there being three ways to deal with the situation: (1) Improve our intelligence to deter and capture terrorists before they act. (2) Learn to live with more risk, while maintaining our open society. (3) Most important, find ways to get the societies where these Islamists come from to deter them first. Only they really know their own, and only they can really restrain their extremists.
He leaves out a fourth possibility - to take the fight to the terrorists home bases to make the fight real and personal to the leaders who exhort their followers to readily give up their lives as human missiles. It is all well and good to carry out the first three goals, but you need the fourth to make sure that the terrorists don't get any ideas. Anything less is seen as appeasement.
Look at what bin Laden and other terrorist leaders have said about the use of force and ceasefires and it is clear that the terrorist leaders hope that their enemies use the kind of restraint that further enables terrorism. Treat terrorism as a law enforcement matter, not as an act of war, and you perpetuate the problem.
During the 1990s, Islamic terrorism was seen primarily as a law enforcement matter to be handled by the FBI. The 1993 WTC bombing should have been a wake up call for the intelligence, foreign policy, defense establishment, and law enforcement communities. Terrorists had perpetrated the largest act of terrorism on US soil, nearly toppling the World Trade Center using a truck bomb placed near to supports for one of the towers.
