On 10/4/07, shiv sastry wrote: > The US has "responded robustly" to one single attack on one September day. > Would there have been another attack? Your guess is as good as mine - but the > US was ripe for a terrorist attack (in my view). The US was sitting pretty > and secure in its relative geographical isolation and local hegemony aided by > good internal security and rule of law. >
I dont think the US has responded robustly, as you put it. If they had, the question of who is winning would have been settled by now. Older regimes like that of chairman mao and stalin immediately executed perpetrators (suspected or otherwise), and in many cases cleaned out entire villages where there were believed to be sympathizers. the boer war at the turn of the last century was won by the english by incarcerating whole boer communities into concentration camps and starving them. Using such tactics would probably mean putting protesters and dissenters behind bars or in a torture chamber - whether they can or want to do that is an entirely different question. in the abscence of such tactics they can never win. you would just need another attack to halve the statistical success of "we havent had another attack".
