Why aren't there more "tiny" terrorist acts?

I can’t imagine that I’d be given terrorists any ideas with this thread, but if so, delete it by all means.
Now, while grand scale terrorists acts make big news, they are difficult to get away with and plan. Besides which, at least in my mind, the scale of the devastation tends to make people repress the fear of another attack. Now that may sound a little dumb at first, but imagine if homemade pipebombs starting going off in garbage cans all over manhattan. This would be virtualy impossible to stop and would always make people wonder when the next one would go off. Sure it would have a small lethal effect, but the terror effect would be alot greater than the WTC tragedy.

I put a booger on my bosses chair, does that count

The more crimes you commit, the greater the chances that you will be caught. The tactic has been tried however, as in this case where a lone neo-nazi targeted various minority groups in London and caused a great deal of fear for two weeks or so. He is now in chokey, thank goodness.

Well I suppose the Unabomber might be considered in this category. You never knew where he was going to strike next and most of the bombs were small though lethal to those in the immediate area.

Of course there are “tiny” terrorists acts occurring. Just look at what is happening in Israel right now - suicide bombers versus reprisal attacks almost on a daily basis.

One could be forgiven for being confused as to which side is the terrorist…

Well, when it comes to a big time network like Al Qaeda, they are going to use their reseources for big time terrorism. Why risk cells over small stuff ? Additionally, it is the big stuff that gets attention, and makes an impact, so the mind set is to think big, like taking out the WTC, the Pentagon, using biological weapons and dirty radiation bombs.

They have their own rep to live up to.

Additionally, they are lying in wait while intelligence ops cools off, and do have some reorg to go through before they resume plans for big ops.

I really think that in the case of Al Qaeda, the explanation is that simple.

The whole purpose of terrorism is to generate fear and publicity.

Small acts would generate both but nothing like the scale of large incidents.

Small acts would need to be frequent, but after a while the public becomes somewhat innured to these events, at least the people not likely to be at immediate risk or directly involved.

Look at the IRA in Northern Ireland, when the troubles first began non-fatal shootings were headline news in the UK but as things wore on across nearly thirty years even fatal incidents were relegated to the inside pages of the newspapers.
It got to a point where the public had become accustomed to it and only high profile targets or multiple killings were headline material.

If we were talking of a guerilla war then such killings and intimidation might be seen by some as an effective weapon, but this is quite a differant thing to terrorism were the object is not really the overthrow of the executive.

That’s all good in theory, but how an earth would they top 9/11? Bin Laden himself only thought that the parts of the towers above the impact points would collapse, killing only those trapped in these sections.

Secondly, no more hijacked airliners are going to start crashing in to skysrapers any time soon (I’d like to think passengers will now start jumping any Allah-toting men who jump up in aeroplanes attempting to hijack them).

So what gives?

IMO, if bin Laden wants to continue his Holy War against the “infidels”, he’s going to have to do something totally incomprehendible to top 9/11.

I’d like to think they would jump ANY madmen that who try to hijack planes.

Historically, Osama bin Laden’s strategy (and Al-Qaeda) has been to focus effort on one large attack for maximum effect, then retreat and let our complacency build up while the next attack is planned. That has been the pattern from Somalia to NYC to Kenya to Yemen to 9/11. It works well. A series of small attacks might do more to focus Western resolve on eradicating these folks and provide more opportunities for the network to be dissolved. Even with the wildly successful final attack on America, Western resolve has already begun to waver.

I’ll chew up bandwidth to second what evilhanz has said – if only because I was thinking the exact same thing while driving home today. One attack per year leaves enough time in between for “war fever” to quiet down; a constant state of alert would be counter-productive for terrorists.

George Metetsky (sp?) a/k/a The Mad Bomber got away with it for years.

And what about all the suicide bombers in Israel in the past two weeks?

I think there are plenty of ‘tiny’ terrorist acts going on all the time.