There are limits to the assumption that terrorists have any sense but I would like to explore them. The first distinction needs be made between foreign and domestic terrorists. The distinctions are such that it is needful to discuss terrorist and terrorism.
A pure terrorist is a person who is seeking to convince the people of a country that their government can not protect them. That is why it has never been effective in any country where people do not consider the government responsible for protecting. That includes most every country in the world. That is why pure terrorism has never succeeded.
The political terrorist is different. That form of terrorism is one part an insurgency movement which has the intention of supplanting the existing government. This kind has succeeded as in Vietnam. The purpose there is to show the people the revolutionaries are more powerful than the government and that joining the revolution can stop the violence against the people.
A popular insurgency does not engage in random acts of violence but only at the mechanisms of government.
Today the pure terrorists are fanatics as from the IRA and the multitude of competing Muslim Fundamentalist movements. Noting the date of this article, it is not possible to tell if the people who bombed the courthouse in Oklahoma City of of this type. They may be motivated by some perverted form of revenge but unless they are shown to be surviving family members of those who died at Waco at the hands of the government, they do not even have revenge as a moral justification.
(Please, before the nasty responses, the condemnation of revenge is a currently popular Christian teaching, not common through the history of Christianity nor shared by all religions.)
Given the terrorist types we have here a group of some as yet undetermined size that is (by analogy) attempting to convince government workers their employer can not protect them. Or we have the group with some idea revenging Waco.
What these folks will learn if they have any sense is that of public response to the media. There is no essential difference between the Oklahoma City bombing and the Waco fire save in the statistics. The difference in public perception is between a fireman carrying out a dead child in his arms and a fire from two miles away.
Is it any wonder the government told the Waco Fire Department not to show up that day, delayed calling them when the fire started and then delayed them from approaching the fire? One shot of one fire fighter carrying out a half burned but alive and screaming child of a Branch Davidian would have carried public sympathy against the government in heartbeat.
You will remember after the Waco fire Attorney General Janet Reno said she had no evidence the children were inside were safe and that it was almost a year later we saw on national TV the tape she had showing they were safe. We found out the government refused to release it solely because it would have given Koresh public sympathy.
And that is what I would hope our terrorists, if they have any sense, will learn. They do not have the power of the government to keep the media away from their actions. The government can do whatever it wants and keep the media away from viewing the results.
What these people should learn is that they do not have a chance in the campaign for public perception. And even if they learn that they have another problem. And this is a more important one to learn.
The United States has a chivalrous attitude toward women and they are in our workforce. Even were they to in some manner direct their efforts solely towards aggrieving agencies, in this case the BATF and the FBI, they can not win.
Consider the following film footage. One man dead. A second man with an arm torn off. A woman with a stiff upper lip fighting back tears from the pain of severe lacerations. Would it matter that the woman was the supervisor of the men? Which would get the most public sympathy?
And in that realization they can not possibly win by attacking simply the agencies they dislike. Even Janet Reno in bandages would get more sympathy than a dead Bill Clinton.
Imagine your reaction to seeing films of a half burned woman with a broken arm in handcuffs being dragged around and screamed at by FBI while she is in agony. But the government did not permit the press to see that at Waco. Imagine your response to films of children burned alive but you were not permitted to see that. Imagine your response to films of people crushed under concrete with the narrator saying the concrete ceiling fell on they because a tank drove over it repeatedly.
But you never saw that. And you never will see that. And that is why no bombing tactics can ever work for terrorists in this country. Let us hope they learn that before they do it again.