Bombs away

--Paresh Nath, The Khaleej Times, UAE

He has the power to cloud men's minds
--The Shadow (1937)
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We have no need to fear the Shadow any longer -- we live in a perpetual state of willing suspension of disbelief, ushered along by our news outlets.

In all the words Ranger has read about Mumbai, no one has bothered to mention that Mumbai was significant because it showed that "soft targets" can always be exploited. The significance is that although the death count was 172 this event was very much less significant than others, such as the 1972 in Lod, Tel Aviv, Vienna ('85) and Rome ('73 and '85) airports by terrorist hit teams.

The Mumbai gunmen did not have to penetrate outer levels of security to get to their designated objectives. This was a simple raid on soft targets.

This sort of attack is extremely unlikely to occur in the Continental U.S. It would be a meaningless gesture if one understands that the government can not cover every possible target. All it would accomplish is deaths, and that in itself is meaningless (except to the victims.)

Coverage focuses on the ineptitude and faulty reaction of the responders, but this is the wrong way to view the events in Mumbai. Look at the ineptitude of the attackers.

If they were professional, they would have had prepositioned supplies of ammunition and weapons, and they would have maximized their time-on-target. This, however, was not the case.

Contrary to fearmongers like Gerson (In Mumbai This Time) et. al who exploit Mumbai as justification for the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), this episode is not a grand gesture. It is a small, discrete incident of terrorism, crime of the sort which is a fact of life in modern times. Because we have seen it before, there are laws and procedures in place to deal with it.

Petrification and confusion are not helpful responses, if you are not on the perpetrator's side of things.