Saturday, July 09, 2005

An End to the "War on Terror"?

I'm still getting used to John Tierney as the conservative columnist in the NY Times (registration required) but I did like today's column, in which he tied the London bombings to the fear he felt when the snipers were terrorizing the Washington, particularly Maryland, area. An excerpt:
"But I think that we'd be better off reconsidering our definition of victory in the war on terror. Calling it a war makes it sound like a national fight against a mighty enemy threatening our society.

But right now the terrorists look more like a small group of loosely organized killers who are less like an army than like lightning bolts - scary but rarely fatal. Except that the risk of being struck by lightning is much higher than the risk of being killed by a terrorist."
As he says, terrorists could easily imitate the snipers, and if they switched cars each time it would take luck to catch them.

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