Editor's letter: The return of terrorism

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s amazing that it’s taken this long. That odd thought struck me—and I suspect, some of you—just moments after this week’s Boston bombing, amid the flood of more natural reactions, such as horror, anger, and sorrow. Terrorism had returned, transporting us back to that surreal period following 9/11, when there was not just widespread fear but an expectation that we’d be hit again and again. The anthrax attacks, a week later, escalated the terror to true hysteria: Gas masks sold out everywhere, and militant moms marched into pharmacies and demanded protective antibiotics without a prescription. In one news story from that period, intelligence sources were quoted as saying there were 5,000 al Qaida operatives in the U.S., awaiting orders for the next wave of attacks.

So why did nearly 12 years pass without a bioattack, a plane hitting a building, or a bomb going off? Luck, surely, has played a role: The shoe bomber failed to light his fuse in 2001, the underwear bomber’s explosives fizzled in 2009, and the Times Square car bomb was a dud in 2010. Heightened security and aggressive counter-terrorism work foiled many other plots. But as Bruce Schneier reminds us in TheAtlantic.com, terrorism generally requires technical sophistication, careful planning, and steely resolve, and “as a collective group, terrorists are dumb.” Most of them are delusional, alienated losers, not brilliant Bond villains; they often make mistakes that tip off authorities ahead of time, or leave evidence that leads to their capture. As I write this, investigators say they already are closing in on a suspect, though we don’t yet know his identity or his motive. I’d bet, though, that he’s a dumb bastard, and that he will be caught.