Newsweek has an interview with Bruce Schneier about terrorism and security in America. He argues that we may be less safe now than we were:
We have built a geopolitical situation where more people dislike America, more people hate us, and in that respect we have made the world a more dangerous place. Though we have also done a lot of good things to increase our security. We have arrested and neutralized terrorist cells. We have disrupted terrorist funding. Our investigations—both internal in the U.S. and abroad—are much better. We are better able at preventing plots and uncovering them. Nine-11 was a very unfortunate intelligence accident. A lot of those sorts of things tend not to work because they get foiled. We were very unlucky. We are probably better prepared in that we kind of expect these things—local governments, when something like this happens, are going to be more ready because they have thought about it. In terms of the aftermath, we are more prepared. [But] in terms of whether we’ve made the world safer in the past two years, most of the things we’ve done have been irrelevant and some have been harmful.
Some of this bears repeating in fewer words. There are two ways to achieve a safer world:
Doing the second thing makes the first much easier to do. And before anyone accuses me of "appeasement," ask yourself this: did Bill Clinton go around pissing the world off on a regular basis like the Bush Administration does? Has any administration scared the hell out of the rest of the planet like Bush does? I think not.
