Saturday, November 18, 2006
Not a bad investment, if you think about it.
Cost of initial attack: A bunch of airline tickets, some preliminary flight school training, a whack of box cutters and 19 volunteers who are now spending eternity with more virgins than is probably healthy.
Cost of utterly unproductive response: Over half a trillion dollars, almost 3,000 lives and counting, military readiness, national security, the House, the Senate, worldwide goodwill and any chance for peace in the Middle East.
Advantage: bad guys.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I've had similar thoughts myself. That's not just asymmetric warfare; it's asymmetric warfare on steroids with atomic rocket-boots.
Trying to think of a historical parallel of huge effects from tiny beginnings, the best one I could come up with was Gavrilo Princip and his fellow plotters taking out Archduke Ferdinand, thus triggering the flint that struck the spark that lit the fuse that set off the powderkeg that turned into the Great War.
Pursuing the parallel further, you could argue the Great War had a positive effect from the Serbian point of view -- it dismembered the Austro-Hungarian empire. Likewise, from the jihadist point of view, Bush's War is well on its way to crippling, if not destroying, the American Empire.
Talk about "significant Return on Investment".
Post a Comment