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.

Bombs, Oil Spills, Stocks and Prayer

The past few weeks have not been good for the ulcers of anyone trying to run this country. Stocks, for instance, plunged a thousand points in a single day—and no one knows why. Computers becoming peevish with other computers? Mindless panic?
Who knows? No one. They went down a thousand and then came back up a few hundred points—losing all the gains they’ve made so far this year. Which way will they go next. Again, no one really knows.
The Staten Island Ferry loses it and piles into the landing slip. (I remember all the times I stood at the bow and watched this controlled collision as we piled into the slips, bouncing from side to side as we finally settled in. But this one was for real.) Several people actually got hurt. The engine seems to have raced, Toyota style, out of control. (I used to imagine this happening years ago—this time it really did. Again, why?)
Then, again, there’s the little present the Pakistani Taliban left for us in Times Square. We can all heave a great sigh of relief that the bomb didn’t go off—the perpetrators were inept, the disable vets who sell souvenirs in the area were alert, we were lucky.
We were lucky in 1993 when some inept bombers tried to blow up a World Trade Center tower with a van full of explosives. It went boom; the building stayed up. We heaved a great sign of relief and congratulated ourselves, just like now.
Eight years later the same folk came back with a better plan—hijack airplanes full of fuel. Both towers came down. Our congratulations were premature. Yes, boys and girls, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have the ability to learn.
Oh, and Afghanistan is beginning to remind us more and more of Vietnam. The generals in Kabul are sounding ever more optimistic. The surge is working; we are winning against the Taliban. Of course, those generals are ignoring the fact that a counter surge of Taliban fighters is pouring in every night from Pakistani recruitment centers.
The top brass in Saigon remained optimistic about the course of the war right up until North Vietnamese tanks rolled into town and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City. Then, finally, everybody scrambled to put his Vietnamese mistress on a plane and get out.
Kabul seems to be living in the same dream world. The troops on the ground in dangerous rural areas don’t see quite as many signs of victory as the generals do. But the generals aren’t facing the same waves of incoming Taliban fighters. A Brit in Kabul has opened a bar and grill named after the hill where Afghani guerillas slaughtered an entire British army in 1842. Maybe the top echelon should go have dinner there.
The fancy cap BP Oil built to contain the spill in the Gulf didn’t work. They are down to their last hope—drilling a new well to relieve the pressure and capping the old with cement. This is all going to happen a mile down in the water under unbelievable pressures.
We hope. And if it does, it will take another couple months or so. Meanwhile gallons and gallons of crude oil are spilling into some of the finest fishing grounds in the world. The Icelandic volcano is still shutting down flights all over Europe.
That ash can play hell with jet engines—it can pit aircraft windows so badly you can’t see out of them. Nature keeps reminding us that she is NOT our friend—at best, she is indifferent or neutral. But she has no intent to benefit us.
And, of course, it is becoming less and less legal to pray to the divinity we have, historically, believed could control nature. So, prayerless, ignorant of basic causes, unable to control natural forces, we find ourselves completely at their mercy.
The White House, the Street and our troops can only ask, “What next?”
If we suggested that everyone pray—which we have done throughout our history—we would have whole cadres of federal judges and civil libertarians telling us we are violating the Constitution itself. So, “what next?”