It's not nice to induce terror in little children, or anyone else, for that matter.
It's not nice to manipulate people's emotions, though that's what we pay Hollywood to do all the time, in movie theaters and the comfort of our own homes. We pay our dollars and decide when we've had enough. Whatever we might have thought, virtual terrorizing does not prepare us for the real thing.
Terror, being an emotion, is not something we can easily turn off. Turning it on is a snap. And once the program is in place, even fleeting images without any sound can set it off. War, being a fearful thing itself, can't be waged against terror. So, from the start, the war on terror was a hopeless enterprise. Partnering it with law enforcement was, at least, honest. The object was to use terror to make people behave themselves. Or, even better, do nothing except what they're told. People made timid by terror are, indeed, pacified.
Terrorizing a whole nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific was a singular accomplishment. But, if only because all men are mortal, terror regimes are relatively short-lived. Terrorism is the wrong tool for long term rule.
Terrorism is practiced by terrorists, but perhaps because the designation comes to us from the effect on the victims of what they do, the specifics of what terrorists actually do (assault, abuse, maim, slaughter, deceive, destroy, undermine, decapitate and explode) tend to be ignored and/or overlooked, at our peril. It may seem convenient to roll all the mayhem into one term, but the effects, like those mushroom clouds in the desert, which our troops were bused in to bear witness and be impressed by for the rest of their lives, serve to distract us from the preparations for mayhem, insuring out surprise. Surprising the witnesses is a necessary component. You could almost say terror is an unpleasant surprise. Terrorists are not nice.
Indeed, when you take note of the preparations required to prepare an unpleasant surprise, it becomes clear that the perpetrators are driven by pure malevolence. Terror events aren't spur of the moment endeavors. They're meticulously planned, sort of like the invasion of Iraq.
Perhaps because of their dramatic impact, the practitioners have been designated as non-state agents. That's in keeping with the popular perception of government agents as bureaucratic, meticulous bean-counters and planners whose actual accomplishments are few. "Shock and Awe" was presented as an exception, a rapid response to a terrorist menace -- that, it turned out, wasn't. Which means, certainly in retrospect and if we discount the non-state assumption, the invasion of Iraq was a gross act of terror, perpetrated by people who might as well have been playing poker, given the level of interest in either the chips or the pot. Bush/Cheney saying "I saw your four planes and raise with an air force, a few tank battalions and a hundred thousand troops" and claiming a win.
The victims of terrorism are, like the victims of domestic abuse and serial killers, perforce innocent and inoffensive for two main reasons. Abusers are cowards and can't risk attacking someone who might fight back (cowardice also accounts for their need for stealth). Moreover, the object of their intention is to impress observers with just how bad they can be. The perpetrators of terror aren't just not nice; they're bad and proud of it.
Abusers intend to inflict hurt, not necessarily death. Which is why their victims, contrary to the champions of self-defense, can't fight back. In risking additional injury by resisting, the victims play into the abuser's hands. Ergo, there has to be an intervention by an outside force, a new sheriff in town or even the cavalry as the Hollywood Western tells us, to call a halt and, if necessary, shoot 'em dead.
Despite using such words as "concomitant" and "diaphanous," that's what Keith Olbermann said about the death of Osama Bin Laden on the orders of Barack Hussein Obama, our new sheriff.
P.S. I can't resist a quirky notation that if "Bin" means "from," as it seems to, and "Laden" means "store" in German, as it does, then we might well conclude that Osama came to us from some store -- i.e. he'd been bought and nobody wanted to take him back. Now he's a sunk cost.