of terrorism, other ways of fighting the war must be found.
The Terrorist Toolkit
If one cannot pursue individual terrorists with a high success rate then one must stifle their resources. One of the reasons that terrorism has always been so pervasive throughout history is that it requires relatively few and low cost resources. These include physical resources, such as weaponry, safe havens, financial support and personnel. However, as the 2001 attacks showed, weaponry and financial support are not required in great quantities to carry our damaging attacks. Box cutters were used by just 19 men and very few co-conspirators to transform commercial airlines into devastating missiles. Pursuing these resources is worthwhile and has prevented attacks, however to focus solely on stifling these physical resources is costly and cannot be 100% effective. Richard Clarke, former White House counter-terrorism expert under President Regan, Clinton and both Bushes believes that this approach and conduct of the subsequent war in Iraq shows that they [The US Government] are really not thinking conceptually about the war on terrorism' (Corera 2004). As well as attacking these physical resources one must consider resources such as opportunity, potential to achieve success, and what fuels the extreme ideology that motivates attackers.
Opportunity
For a terrorism to be successful an attacker needs to have the opportunity to attack. While Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Singapore have been successful in breaking up would-be terrorist groups, the US has not detected a single domestic threat since 2001 and has failed to cooperate multilaterally with other countries on a global scale (Kellner 2002, p.20). Unilateralism and flouting international law in Guantanamo bay and Iraq, and sovereign law in several European countries, has alienated the US from both European and Arab allies (Kellner 2002, p.3) (Brown, S., Stewart, P. 2007, p.1). On the domestic front, financial deregulation and feuds between government departments have hampered efforts to detect terrorism (Kellner 2002, p.21). The 9/11 Commission identified a lack of domestic departmental cooperation as a contributing factor to the failure to prevent the 2001 attacks (9/11 Commission Report 2004, p.408). In order to better protect society against terrorism better international cooperation and indeed domestic integration is required. This would allow better scrutiny of global financial transactions and the sharing of intelligence.
How
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