What would happen if tomorrow we all wake up to the news that Mecca was hit
by a nuclear bomb?
Will there be riots on the street? Will there be bloodshed?
Will Israel or the USA be accussed as the culprit behind it?
(the
destruction of Al-Aksari Mosque)
Let's assume that Al-Qaeda is found later as the culprit behind it (after two
months or so)
How would that change the world?
Let me introduce you to Black Swan Event.
"Taleb now focuses on being a researcher in the philosophy of randomness and
the role of uncertainty in science and society [6] ,
with particular emphasis on the philosophy of history and the role of
high-impact random events in determining the course of history, which he calls
"black swans".
It is important to note that "black swans" may also be fortunate rare events
and not just negative or catastrophic events.
Taleb believes that most people ignore "black swans" because we are more
comfortable seeing the world as something structured, ordinary, and
comprehensible. Taleb calls this blindness the Platonic fallacy, and argues that
it leads to three distortions:
- Narrative fallacy. Creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to
have a cause.
- Ludic fallacy. Believing that the structured randomness found in games
resembles the unstructured randomness found in life. Taleb faults random walk
models and other inspirations of modern probability theory for this inadequacy.
- Statistical regress fallacy. Believing that the probability of future events
is predictable by examining occurrences of past events. " (Wikipedia)
Nassim Taleb is a Lebanese philosopher of randomness that introduce this concept of Black Swan as random events that change the course of history. He thinks that 9/11 was a black swan, that all those after the facts of possible preventions would not work anyway because that event was a perfect storm (just like the big bang - on how if a variable was off, the universe would not have existed)
The next Black Swan would be a terorist nuclear strike anywhere - but especially at religious sites- be it Mecca, the Vatican or Jerussalem. The first nuclear strike in this century will have the potential of putting globalization in cardiac arrest, increasing the cost of connection dramatically and change the way we live tremendeously.
Would you support retaliating in nuclear if the terrorist claim their responsibility for the attack? A bomb in Tel-Aviv retaliated with another one or two in Tehran? One in Karachi for one in Bombay?
If Sharm el Shek turns into a parking lot tomorrow, would Egpytian demands the terrorists to be captured/killed or would half of Bedouin in Sinai be slaughtered in revenge?
This is why the power play between Iran and the rest of the International community is extremely dangerous - they heighten the possibilities of a black swan event - it's a gate to "you don't want to think about it" era where personal liberties would be curtailed in the name of security, where human would be abandoned in the name of preventions - to prevent a second attack.
And to achieve this nightmare scenario, all you need is the bomb - the target can be anywhere and we will all live in atmosphere of fear.