IF I WERE A TERRORIST� I'm a former New Yorker (and one who watched the first tower collapse in person, not on TV) and a present Washingtonian. So I ought to be as lathered up as the next guy about this terror-funding thing.
But what if DHS is...right? I have sometimes thought, �If I were a terrorist, where would I strike next? What would really mess with the psyches of my hated Great Satanic foes?� And I�m not sure I�d hit New York or Washington. Too obvious. Been done. Besides, both probably are reasonably well fortified.
Therefore, I could easily imagine a scenario in which the next terror attacks occur in, say, Wichita, Des Moines, Memphis, and Omaha. Such a series of coordinated strikes in heartland small cities would be pretty devastating, I�ve always thought, and might well rattle many Americans even more than another attack on Manhattan, which, let�s face it, many Americans think of as a western province of France. And if they happened, everyone would be sitting around saying, �Gee, it never occurred to us they�d strike there."
So maybe it�s actually good that it�s occurring to someone. New York�s still getting a lot of money, as is Washington. I guess if I were an elected official in New York, I�d be grandstanding just like Pete King is. But I�ll go against what history teaches us about this administration (i.e., that everything is political) and assume -- for now -- that there�s an actual substantive reason why DHS did what it did.
--Michael Tomasky
