Terrorism's New Structure

From The Wall Street Journal:

The forces driving international terrorism go well beyond religion. Martin Amis on alienation, the thirst for power, the quest for fame and the inevitable use of weapons of mass destruction.

History is accelerating; and so the future becomes more and more unknowable. Among our foremost thinkers, we find only one presentiment that is universally shared. This turns out to be a sinister variation on the idea of "convergence." Not the convergence of nations and polities, whereby the world's autocratic regimes would gradually align themselves with the democratic and contentedly globalized mainstream. This particular expectation, even neoconservatives now concede, was a triumphalist fantasy of the 1990s -- that curious holiday from what Philip Roth has called "the remorseless unforeseen."

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My Comment: I have spent a lifetime reading and trying my best to understand history .... specifically military history. One thing that I have learned is that history has a tendency to repeat itself as well as following specific trends. There is one trend that is very clear .... technology developments and the low cost of these technologies now makes the development and manufacture of low cost WMD products all but inevitable.

Another ominous trend that has developed is that in the past, genocide and the mass extermination of societies was always the responsibility of nation states and their armies. Within a generation we are now at a level where mass murder can be done by a small group or .... as in the case of biological weaponry .... be done by one person.

It is the evolution of small groups with the proper resources that is terrorism's new structure. What is fearful is that while every society will always possess dissatisfied or dysfunctional persons that harbor a cause .... with the availability of low cost WMD products we now have a change in dynamics that has all the possibility of becoming a prescription for disaster. The repercussions of such an event will change us economically, politically, as well as undermining the fundamental building blocks of our freedom.

The discussion now is not "if" this big terrorism event will occur .... but when.