Times Square Bomber--Ineptitude vs Luck

Over and over again I’ve been hearing how lucky we were that the “Times Square bomber” didn’t know how to build a bomb. Just lots of smoke and a big scare. And some credit to the former GIs who run concessions in the area and watch out for the rest of us.
Yes, we were lucky. There’s a reason for that luck—and it won’t last forever. I remember very vividly sitting at a sidewalk café in Beirut in the late ‘60s, watching two men in Bedouin robes trying to run an air hammer during some street repairs.
They seemed so clumsy. I concentrated on their hands. They were the hands of men with desert and riding skills—generations of them. They were not the hands of people raised to run modern machinery, be it a dishwasher or an electric drill. They had no feeling for it.
Holding the jackhammer put them in an alien world. In their own element they wouldn’t have looked a bit clumsy—but in my world, they were completely out of sync (yeah, as a kid I ran an air hammer on a summer job. Picking it up was instinctive and natural.)
The generation of Arabs I watched that day would never, every master the machinery of a modern, industrialized society. I thought of the great warrior king, Charlemagne (c.a. AD 800). He could carve an empire in central Europe. You wouldn’t have wanted to face him, sword in hand.
He learned to appreciate education. He created the first “university” in Europe after the fall of Rome. He mastered the art of reading—rare for a Dark Ages warrior; it was even considered unmanly. But he never learned how to hold a pen and write.
His sword hardened hands just wouldn’t grip the thing. It wasn’t his milieu. He was like the Arabs I was watching. They would have understood Charlemagne’s frustration at trying to master a pen; he would have seen their problem trying to direct the jackhammer.
I thought of World War II—where one of the “secret weapons” we had against the Germans was the fact that a lot of GIs came from rural or suburban settings where they learned early how to fix the engines of their cars and tractors.
When their army trucks broke down in the desert, a lot of these drivers just got out and, using bailing wire and bobby pins, got the thing running again. German drivers were, by and large, raised on farms that depended on horse drawn conveyances.
The whole German army simply was not mechanized. (In a speech, Churchill reminded the world that the German troops invading Russia were walking the thousand miles—they had so few vehicles.) If a German truck broke down, the driver had to send back to a motor pool to get a trained mechanic to the front and fix things, no matter how simple. He had no idea how himself.
The Germans have learned how to drive and maintain cars and trucks. In a war between us now, I doubt if there’d be a material difference in capabilities. My jackhammer friends will learn how to use their equipment, too. They may already have.
Right now, some people in the Arab world seem inept at bomb making. Again, it involves a sort of technology many of them are not comfortable with. They too will learn.
They too will finally learn how to build bombs that go BOOM effectively. Then we won’t be so lucky any more.
Then the last thing a concession stand operator ever sees may be a bright flash. Eventually people in Charlemagne’s court learned how to write. Making a bomb is probably simpler.