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What alternatives did these politicians have and ignored? What else could they have done?They've ignored the most important alternative that is unfortunately often forgotten or seen as weeknes - that you can also do nothing. Or at least do only things that make some sense.
Airports aren't really more secure than they were before 9/11. I'd argue they're even less secure against terrorist attack, because if you wanted to maximize the damage to people, you just go and bomb the security line. You've got hundreds of people tightly packed in a closed space there.
The reality is, terrorism (or generally, politically-motivated murder of civilians) simply doesn't happen often enough that we should care. It's also by definition pretty much completely unpredictable, because the attacker has freedom to pick their target and spend as much time on preparations as they want. Arm the population? Terrorists will use remote-detonated bombs or suicide vests. Turn all airports into high-security facilities? Terrorists will attack at security checkpoints, or just switch to bombing buses instead. If they wanted, they'd murdered us by the thousands already. The reason it doesn't happen is that humans generally just don't go blowing themselves up and/or killing random people.
Also, keep in mind that causalties in terror attacks are only collateral damage, and not the goal. The reason for such attacks is to push the harmed society into the state of panic, at which point they'll start overreacting and doing stupid things to themselves and others.
So in the hypothetical more rational world, what could have politicians done?
- Leave the airports be vs. starting the security theatre industry. Not to say all air travel security is bad; pilot cabin doors are an improvement, though after that last catastrophe in Europe you could say it's an double-edged... shield.
- Don't start two wars vs. starting two wars. This definitely made more terrorists, not to mention it killed about three orders of magnitude more innocent people than 9/11 itself.
- Don't terrorize Pakistan vs. drone-strinking the living shit out of civilians there. This definitely created more potential terrorists.
- Shut the fuck up about it in media. Ok, so the towers fell, it's a tragedy. We should mourn the dead, clean up the mess, redirect funds to investigate and bring to justice people responsible, but otherwise there's nothing to see here.
- Redirect the saved money to other programs. 'gnaritas posted a helpful CDC "top 10 causes of death in the US" list. Any money spent towards fixing any of the items on this list is much better spent than directing it towards "war on terror".
