NYT: Techies Now Respect Government

[John Young]

Officials, and journalists, accustomed to handling civil unrest
through police means, have to stretch to get their hands on
national security threats, in particular what to do with military
capabilities which are scaled for much greater threats than
the police can handle.

The military doesn't like civil affairs where a distinction has
to be made between innocents and opponents, where a battle
has to be fought while civil affairs continue. It blows whole
areas away, hardly affected by collateral damage laments.

Some military commentators have reported that th 9/11
losses are barely significant in military terms, but are a
big hit for police-scale mentality, and even bigger for
political mindsets which fear loss of face more than all
else.

Terrorism thrives by remaining less than a military-scale
threat but is becoming more than police, and police-minded
officials and journalists like Friedman can handle can handle.
A nuke on DC or NYC could lead all of them to grow up,
a favorite theme of the Times these days about Silicon
Valley.

The Times some months ago, by way of Jeffifer Lee, reported
on the fervor with with which high-tech firms are racing to
capitalize on the requirements for homeland security and
the rise in military actions, redefining product lines, digging
out civilian ideas for re-uniforming in national security
dress. Perhaps that is what Friedman is doing, scaling
up the picayune Palestinian dust-up to a global affair,
as he has tried futilely to do for years but failing due to
the required emphasis on its Jewish attribute for the
New York City readership yet paying the price of indifference
elsewhere.

Friedman regularly these days predicts a series of suicide
bombings in New York City, and as a sidebar elsewhere in
the US. That police scale he is good at, but the military
scale of widespread carnage appears beyond his comprehension --
in the spirit of the once-isolated and comfortably insulated USA.

The problem with dismissing the drumbeat of terrorist alarms
is that the guardians could well let a few attacks happen to show
the citizenry the neeed to show respect for government. This is
not to suggest that 9/11 was such an attention-getting operation
but it certainly has fulfilled the dreams of those who warned
about it and are now reaping its benefits -- gov, mil, com and edu.