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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| 2002 - What�s in Store, Perhaps By Antonio C. Abaya December 18, 2001 For us in the Philippines, as for the rest of the world, the main concerns in the new year will be security and the economy, and rightly so because the two are inextricably intertwined. Despite eleven or twelve reductions in one year of the prime lending rate by the Federal Reserve Board, the American economy, which buys 35% of our exports, remains sluggish. American consumers are reluctant to spend their money because they are insecure, insecure about their jobs, insecure about their safety and security even in their own country. After September 11 and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in its aftermath, who can blame them? It is no balm to their gnawing sense of insecurity that despite the apparent destruction of both the Taliban and the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, the US military and political leadership have not, as of this writing (December 18), been able to announce the death or capture of Mullah Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden. At the back of everyone�s mind must fester like an open wound the duo�s defiant prediction that the �destruction of America� remains their primary goal, that this �will happen within a short period of time�, that it will be �beyond human comprehension�, and that it will most likely take the form of an atomic, biological or chemical attack. When? One must start from the premise that from the Islamic fundamentalists� point of view, this is and always has been a religious war, another episode in the continuing clash between Islam and Christianity that began with the Moorish invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century (which they occupied until the end of the 15th), and that reached its apogee in the Crusades of the Christian kings to dislodge the Muslim Saracens from the Holy Land from 1096 to 1270. (The plan to send a multinational, but mostly West European, peace-keeping force to Afghanistan must be considered monumentally ill-advised as this would only reinforce Muslim perceptions that they are being bullied by the Crusaders all over again. It would be vastly more sensible to send only Muslim peace-keepers from, say, Turkey, Bosnia, Kosovo, etc). Assuming that Osama�s al-Qaeda are not yet a spent force and that they do possess some weapons of mass destruction, as is generally feared, they may time their second strike, to give it a rabidly religious overtone (and thus attract more recruits to their jihad), during the Christmas or Easter season in the Christian calendar, or on the anniversary of a major Muslim victory over the Crusaders, of which there were many, in the Islamic calendar. Where? I have always believed that, for terrorists from relatively poor countries, the subway lines of a rich country�s major cities constitute the jugular veins of their enemy, totally indefensible against attack and guaranteed to bleed profusely, in more ways than one, when ruptured by terrorist action. How? The so-called suitcase nuclear bombs, given much play in media, are more hype than practical tool. Even if a nuke were to be built to fit in an average suitcase, the lead shield around the radioactive core would make the suitcase too heavy to lug around to an airport, a bus depot or a subway station. Without a lead shield to contain it, the massive radiation emanating from the core would zap the handler and all other life forms in his neighborhood even before he can assemble the device. From the points of view of practical logistics and invisibility, it would be very hard to find a more effective weapon of mass destruction than a bio-canister loaded with, say, smallpox bacteria. Unlike a bomb, nuclear or non-nuclear, which announces its presence with a bang, and unlike a chemical release (as in the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in the 1990s) that immediately causes people to drop like flies, a bio-canister loaded with smallpox bacteria can be hidden in a shopping bag or a box of chocolates, left under a seat in a subway coach, and triggered to release its lethal contents as unobtrusively as acid eating its metal container. The cramped environment inside a subway coach, the pushing and pulling of contaminated air by the rushing of the trains through the tube, and the sheer number of people riding the subway, all mean that tens of thousands of commuters will have become infected carriers of the disease two or three days before medical and security authorities become aware that there has been a smallpox attack. Are the al-Qaeda militants morally capable of such a horrendous massacre? Most emphatically, yes. Do they have the capability to pull it off? We do not know. In the meantime, the US Government is not taking any chances: about four weeks ago, it ordered a crash program to manufacture and stockpile smallpox vaccine. Osama bin Laden may yet have the last laugh. ***** One of the intriguing mysteries of the World Trade Center attack, which will no doubt be the topic of many books by American writers in the near future, is the incredibly shrinking casualty figure. One day after the attack, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani grimly announced that the figure will �probably be more than we can bear.� His calculations, which he never made public, may have given him a number not far from the results of my own calculations: 16,000 dead, which I included in my posting of September 16, titled �More Cost Effective than Pearl Harbor� (Philippine Graphic, Oct. 1). Is this number �more than we can bear�? It is beginning to look like it is. My calculation of 16,000 dead was based on the publicly announced working population of WTC, 50,000, not including visitors of which there were probably few or none at all at 8:46 am, the time of the first crash. Divided by the 220 floors of the WTC, that meant an average of 227 occupants per floor, a reasonable figure for a building of that size. I next estimated the number of floors from which there was no possible escape: the impact floors and all the floors above them, or about 70, which I multiplied by 227, the average number of occupants per floor. That gave me 15,890, to which I added the 250 or so passengers in the two doomed jetliners and the 450 or so policemen and firemen who were killed when the two towers collapsed on them. My final estimate was 16,590 dead. US Government estimate, however, has gone down from 6,000-plus in mid-October, to 5,000-plus, to 3,100-plus, to, last week, 3,001, and will no doubt go down even lower before the year is over. I think it has to do with preserving public confidence in institutional icons. In a future article, I will try to explain why. ***** This article appeared in the January 14, 2002 issue of the Philippine Weekly Graphic magazine. |