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July 23, 2005
Egypt Bombing
Unlike the latest lame London attempt, yesterday's bombing of a resort area in Egypt was much more deadly.
As many as seven blasts ripped through the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheik in the early hours of Saturday morning, killing at least 62 people and injuring 200 more, security officials said.
At least four car bombs were used to carry out the attacks in what was the deadliest assault in Egypt in nearly a decade.
The area hit, Sharm, is a major tourist destination as well as a meeting place for world leaders....such as Sharon & Abbas' cease-fire meeting last February.
Kill some innocent infidels, hurt Egypt's tourist trade and the opportunity, however slight, to take out major political figures....certainly fits today's terrorist criteria for target selection.
In the light of such recent events, I was particularly struck by a passage from a Churchill autobiography I'm currently reading:
War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has become cruel and squalid......Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nations, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill.
He was, of course, lamenting the change from the use of calvary to the use of machinery to fight wars. We are seeing a similar change today, I think. Our war is not one of nations fighting nations. It's fought by groups of terrorists whose only goal is to destroy nations and people who don't think like them.
And like those in WWI, we are going to have to adapt our tactics accordingly.
Posted by Rita at July 23, 2005 03:34 AM