MARK STEYN: Jihad undoes gel-filled bras

I was at the airport in Auckland the other day and mooching around the duty free shop. My little girl likes snow globes, so I picked out one showing some charming New Zealand sheep. No snow, technically, but when you shook it, little stars sparkled around the ovine cuties. The Kiwi sales clerk swiped my credit card, wrapped it up, and then said, "Oh, wait. Are you flying to America?" I should have known. She consulted her list of prohibited items and informed me that, in an expansive definition worthy of the Massachusetts Supreme Court constitutional-right-to-same-sex-marriage ruling, the twinkly fluid inside the snow globe had been deemed to count as a liquid. In theory, I could smash the incredibly thick glass, replace the sparkly stuff with something more incendiary, re-glaze it in the airport men's room with help from co-conspirators among the shadowy networks of antipodean jihadist glaziers, and board the plane to explosive effect.
When I scoffed at this thesis, the lady said somewhat petulantly, "Well, it's not my fault you're going to America." Which is hard to argue with.
If I'd wanted to fly a souvenir snow globe to Yemen, Saudi Arabia or Belgium, there'd have been no problem. I could breeze through the metal detector with a pair of snow globes in each hand shaking them like Carmen Miranda. The jihad may never achieve global domination but it has already achieved snow global domination. At Australian airports, they've figured out that these heightened security procedures will be with us for a while, so they've reconfigured the area around the detector, a row of tables with small baskets for keys and coins, a separate row of tables for unloading laptops from cases, plenty of space on the other side for reassembling oneself and one's possessions. Works very smoothly.
None of that when I landed from Auckland at Los Angeles. Five years after 9/11, the line shuffles forward into the kind of chaotic shambles that would pass muster had the procedures been introduced 48 hours ago. Surly security staff yell at passengers "back behind the line! now!" and bins back up on the belt and wheezing geriatrics tip forward trying to re-shoe themselves in mid-hop.
In the later stages of the IRA's long campaign against the British Government, they didn't even have to bother bombing anything. They simply got a man with an Irish accent to place a phone call using the agreed codewords to the appropriate authorities or media outlets.
London's police would shut down Tube lines and bus routes and the city would grind to a halt and millions of pounds would be lost to the economy. That's a lot of bucks for no bang.
The jihad pulled off something similar at Heathrow. It was reported that MI-5 and Scotland Yard had foiled the plot, but millions of people will now be inconvenienced and discomforted at airports and on flights around the world, in perpetuity.
With setbacks like that, who needs victories? Next time round, they'll foil some entirely different scheme - explosive suppositories, dirty-nuke hip replacements - and another avalanche of pitiful constraints will fall upon the hapless traveller.
The British Airports Authority has now banned lipstick, mascara and all other cosmetics, so, even if you fly First Class, by the time you get off you'll look like economy class. Meanwhile, Birmingham Airport in England has banned passengers from boarding with gel-filled bras. People have been demanding for years now that we need to start profiling.
Well, they're profiling in Birmingham: they're profiling women with padded bras, which is one great profile; their highly trained staff can spot gals who really stand out.
I know I feel safer knowing that unusually curvaceous women are being subject to extra security screening. So gel-filled bras are out, and presumably in another year or two we'll be preventing gel-filled breasts from boarding. This is where we came in five years ago. The airline cabin was already the most regulated jurisdiction in America, a kind of way-up-there-in-the-blue state, where Ted Kennedy and Al Gore's fondest desires on gun control, smoking and indeed free speech had all been implemented.
So on September 11, three out of the four planes followed all the 1970s hijack procedures and everybody died. On the fourth, free-born citizens reclaimed their rights, fought back against the terrorists and provided the only good news of the day.
Half a decade on, the regulatory regime is even more coercive. No plastic knives, no tweezers, and, long after Richard Reid has died of old age in prison, we'll still be removing our footwear in eternal homage to the thwarted shoebomber.
The arithmetic is very simple: Can we regulate for all faster than they can adapt for some? Three of the plotters arrested in Britain turned out to be converts or, as Islam calls them, reverts - part of an ever-growing legion of new recruits to Islam.
The jihad evidently took the view that, the US Government's protestations notwithstanding, surely not even the decadent Americans would really be so foolish as to assume the Swedish grandmother was as high-risk as the young Saudi male.
So they shifted their efforts to recruiting men of non-Arab appearance with non-Muslim names and, judging from recent arrests from Toronto to London to Perth, they've had some success. Absent a determination to wage war on the ideology, the question is whether we can adapt as nimbly as they do.
In the time it took to reverse the credit-card transaction at that Auckland airport shop, it would have been possible to establish that I am not a terrorist. Nor are 95 percent of passengers. But we choose not to, preferring to shuffle through the detector, sans shoes, sans gel-filled bras, sans penile piercings, and one day sans everything, cursed for eternity to react defensively to every innovation.
Our enemies think they hold the world in their hands, and I can't even hold a snow globe in mine.
Copyright, Mark Steyn, 2006