David's Daily Diversions

How We Lost the War on Terrorism

I haven't ventured out into the blogosphere yet today, so I don't know what everyone else is saying. I'm sure that there are a significant number of 9/11 anniversary posts. But without checking to see if I'm simply repeating what everyone else is saying, I'll offer the following:

It's not often I even pay attention to the headline of the Independent. I like to think that it is called that because it is independent of any clear thinking and common sense. I had to agree with the big print across the top of the today, "We should not have allowed 19 murderers to change our world". The underlying article by Robert Fisk was a load of bollocks about George Bush and Iraq, but the headline was right.

The murderers of September 11, 2001 may not have achieved all they set out to do, but the world is a different place. If we live in constant fear, terrorism has won. They don't have to blow up a building or and airplane every day. They just have to make you think they might.

These 19 Islamists who have traded the fires of exploding planes for the fires of perdition ("hey, where's the 72 virgins?!") mananged to cost the taxpayers of the United States about $105 billion just for the Department of Homeland Security through 2005. Now you could argue that the exisiting 22 components of the federal bureaucracy that were absorbed in the DHS were already going to cost $78 billion over 2003-2005, so the hijackers only added $27 billion.

By my estimation, that's $1.42 billion per hijacker. Not bad for a day's work, or even the two or three years that went into planning the murders. And this doesn't count the costs that aren't a part of the DHS budget.

There's the whole issues of compensation. Before the December 22, 2003 deadline, there were 7,402 claims related to deceased persons which had been submitted to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. Out of these, 5,558 resulted in award letters. The average award was $2,081,348. By my calculations that is a total of $11,568,132,184. That's $11.568 billion, for those of you who need to see the numbers in an easier to read format.

If we add this to the cost of running the DHS for 3 years, that's $2.03 billion per deluded Wahabi.

In addition to this, there are 2,679 claims for personal injury. The personal injury awards "have ranged from a low of $500 to a high of over $8.6 million after offsets." I can find no published data giving the total amount of personal injury awards to date.

I haven't even touched upon the loss of buildings, jobs, goods, and services. According to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, the tangible losses are about $100 billion. That's $5.26 billion for each satanically inspired Infidel.

But it doesn't stop there. The DHS budget is scheduled to increase by about $5 billion per year. It won't stop until it finally creates the Nation in a Bubble, able to filter out all contaminants and deadly attacks. The DHS and the US Goverment are as deluded as their nemeses if they think they can hermetically seal the borders with universal biometric passports and life will revert back to Pleasantville.

Welcome to the rest of the world, America. In Britain, the threat of terrorism has been around for ages, thanks to idiots who are still fighting the Battle of the Boyne. Thankfully that threat is, if not in the past, at least on the back burner. We now also face the open threat of Islamist attacks. The difference is that at least the Irish rang ahead of time and they didn't rape young girls as happened in the school in Beslan.

If there is such a thing as honourable terrorism, it cannot be attributed the people we are dealing with now. Somehow they think that by preying on the weakest, most vunerable members of society, they can force us to accede to their demand of submission to a false god. "I know what we need to do, guys! Let's find some little children to torture and murder! Then the world will convert to Islam!"

But as absolutely vile as these people are, we cannot let them run our lives, either individually or as nations. We have to show no fear. We can't worry about their threat to replace every "martyr" with 1,000 more. That just means 1,000 more bullets will have to be manufactured. Terrorists creating jobs - that's what I like to see.

And I don't give a pile of burning camel dung about how it is our fault that they are like they are. Stop your bloody whinging and stop importing Coca Cola. If the people in your country are becoming westernised and not following your little fringe view of Islam maybe you need to look at your methods of evangelism, Osama.

Believe it or not, absent these unstable types (look at the shoe bomber Richard Reed, if you can't figure why I called them unstable), mostly jobless young men with nothing else to do but listen to radical clerics, Muslims and Christians have gotten along peacefully for centuries. That's not to say that the religions are compatable, but rather that the people just get on with life. Even in Muslim governments, from the Ottoman Empire of the 18th century to the Ba'athist regimes of the 21st, Christians have held places of prominence and power.

Yes, there needs to be a war on terror and it shouldn't result in a siege mentality. It does not need to be a war on Islam. The only sword which you should put to your Muslim neighbours is the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And if you are worried about their values permeating your country, just remember that if you want to see Christian values as the basis of government social policy, you will find more in common with your Muslim neighbours than with the secularist who may look more like you in an epidermal sense.