"But Richard Clarke was a wimp"

Tom Maguire thinks that Richard Clarke understated the threat to malls. He cites the North Hollywood shootout as an example of the ability of body armor to make shooters invulnerable to civilian handguns.

I'm not certain that his example works. The two robbers in California were not trying to hunt down victims; they were trying to escape. They were invulnerable (for a time) but ineffective.

I don't doubt that terrorists could attack malls, schools or other public spaces. I do think that Clarke (and Maguire) overstate how effective the attacks would be and ignore the cost of pulling off a coordinated series of atrocities.

In a comment at Chicagobyz, Shannon Love identifies a big point that Clarke overlooks: what happens after the attacks:

It is unlikely that terrorist could kill and then escape without living at least one of their number behind. This is a big problem for the terrorist because in developed countries, identifying one member of a network will rapidly lead to the roll up of the entire network.

I suspect this is the major reason we have never seen suicide bombers yet in the West. It is hard to pull off a terror campaign when every time you set off a bomb, it cost you a big chunk of your network.

In Clarke's nightmare, the terrorists strike and then start laying new plans. It seems more likely that a spectacular attack will result in the roll-up of their cells and the loss of much of their domestic infrastructure. That is one of the reasons that Clarke's scenario of escalating assaults seems impossible.

Moreover, the more spectacular the attack, the higher the risk that it will be discovered by law enforcement. Recruiting, training, equipping, and deploying suicide teams is no easy task. There are dozens of opportunities foe LEOs and citizens to become suspicious.

Clarke ignores this factor just as he ignored Diana Dean's role in stopping the LAX bombing. His antipathy to street level policing makes him a suspect guide on this whole question.