I am so tired of the twits appearing on television as newscasters, politicians, bureaucrats, or self-styled “experts,” pretending that terrorist acts are so unpredictable that it is difficult to know how to stop the murderous and destructive acts.  Perhaps these people never took any courses in physics or history as part of their major in Sensitivity Studies.  A physics course would have introduced them to Newton’s third law of motion (i.e., for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction), while a history course or two might have informed them of the difficulties invading armies experience in attacking someone else’s territory (see, e.g., the problems the French had in trying to subdue Algeria, or the ages-old immunity Afghanistan had to foreign occupation [does the 20th century resistance to the Soviet Union come to mind?).

There is one “solution” to the terrorism threat that would probably work or, at the very least, be more successful than the present “we’ll-increase-the-bomb-loads” approach:  (1)  stop engaging in the wars: (2) bring the troops home (and not for redeployment in American cities!); (3) use the money heretofore being paid to members of the military-industrial complex and using it to pay for the damages done to innocent parties.  The political establishment would not support such a measure – since, as Randolph Bourne informed us, “war is the health of the state.” But just expressing such an alternative would likely force the establishment script-writers into rewriting the party-line for the establishment parrots to recite. “Breaking news, breaking news: rawk, rawk!”

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