Jawohl, mein Herr

The Germans are no longer a threat to anyone; we whupped them good the last two outings. And today, Germans are free and relatively prosperous thanks in large measure to their having abandoned their old warlike ways.

In simple terms, they don’t need to spend huge gobs of money on their national defense: we’ve done it for them. Today, Germany could probably be defeated by any number of Third World nations that may be poor, but they goose-step with the best of them. And have armies hugely disproportionate to their actual needs. Wonder where they learned to goose-step…

So it is with scorn that I read any opinion of our alleged national obsession with security from any German. Sorry, pal. You lack the bona fides to criticize us on that score. But criticize he does, in a piece in today’s WaPo.

A picture accompanying the article in the dead tree edition (not available online) shows the by-now typical Army National Guard (or they could be local police) at some U.S. airport with M-16s. Illustrating our alleged state of fear.

Fear, and preparedness, are two quite different things. Which might share some outward manifestations. We are not fearful of flying. We have learned to be prepared for would-be hijackers and terrorists who have used our airports as their points of departure.

Now, that said, I’d be the first to admit that we attack the terror problem bass-ackwards. We screen everyone, as opposed to the correct and much more effective profiling of likely miscreants.

Our chief problem isn’t fear of terror. It’s fear of being caught offsides in the political correctness game. So far we’ve been able to, in football terms, flood the zone with massive security resources. And, so far, we’ve not had any repeat of 9/11.

Getting back to the self-righteous German, here’s a datum: I was traveling through the Frankfurt (Germany, not Kentucky) airport in the mid-1990s. What caught my eye were roving patrols of German Federal police, armed with the latest in H&K submachine guns. This, at a time well before 9/11, when our airport security was, to say the least, lax.

Why the heavy arms in a civilian airport in Germany in the mid-1990s? Counter-terrorism. Seems they were having a continuing problem with some local baddies.  Perhaps our German author wasn’t awake during that time; perhaps he simply is afraid of guns.  Either way, his opinion of our state of “fear” is not worth reading.