montestewart wrote:I've never participated in the planning of any terrorist activities, so I just guess about motivations, goals, and tactics. The typical cautions regarding terrorism are related to public events and places, public transportation, monuments, etc. I could see an attack like this (if it is a terrorist attack) doing as TSW asserts, spreading greater terror by making everything seem vulnerable. How about an attack on the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline, or a U.S.-Mexico border checkpoint, or a relatively mainstream U.S. mosque? Any of these could further raise the sense of terror, with people increasingly concerned about what places are safe. I don't see why that couldn't be a strategy.
It very well could be, I don't pretend to know precisely what motivates terrorists, either, and they are so different that ruling anything out would be a mistake. That said, I do think the book, Unholy War, by John Esposito, spells out a bit a certain, broad level of what's going on. He's speaking more immediately about a post-911 world, but a lot of his ideas still hold, I think. I will give the caveat that I'm about to use some broad generalizations that do a bit of a disservice to Esposito's points and don't cover all terrorist activity anyway.
The idea is to use anti-Westernism as a tool to mobilize. Terrorist organizations know that a direct war against any developed country isn't one they can win. So points of more strategic significance aren't necessarily what they're after here. If you know you can't win a war head on, the goal would become to create a force that can win, or at least last. I mean, the idea of a unified Muslim state is a pretty strong, but there just so happens to be a lot of disagreement over how it would work and who should run it. So much like governments here do, they find a common enemy, and anti-American, or anti-Western sentiments relative various political policies are pretty easy targets. So the idea becomes to try and show strength that you are strong enough to start tackling these issues, and if your actions result in even more negative policies from the west, all the better. The targets might be Europe or North America, but the audience is moreso the Muslim world, and if they can corrupt an increasing amount of support to their twisted views of Islam, the better. With that in mind, I think there would be a lot of targets just as easy to hit that would have had quite a bit more symbolic value, but if this is in fact the case, you'll see someone take "credit" for it pretty soon because not doing so would defeat the purpose. There is so much that could be the case here, though, that I might be wrong, or it might even be something that none of us had even considered.
