Sam Smith - In attempting to understand why the Boston bombing
is such a shock, it is worth considering something that differentiated
it from, say, 9/11, which is that the target was not some iconic tower of power but
our capacity for terror. It was just a place, which meant it could
have been anywhere. And precision was not the goal. Fear was.
Writing in US News about the Boston bombing, Paul Shinkman notes, "Law
enforcement officials believed it was only a matter of time before
the improvised explosive devices that have defined the conflict in
Afghanistan, Iraq and even Northern Ireland would be used against
Americans on their home soil."
A few months ago, I was
talking with a friend who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the
major WWII conflict that killed 19,000 Americans, wounded 47,000 others
and left 23,000 missing or captured. He noted that he felt great
sympathy with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked him to
elaborate and he said that when the soldiers of his era left the
battlefield, they also left the danger for awhile. In Iraq and
Afghanistan there was no such relief. All you had to do was walk down
the block and an IED might explode.
And in most case, you'd never know who had done it or why. Just as we may never know about Boston.
But whoever it was, and for whatever reason, they just narrowed the distance to Iraq and Afghanistan.
