Something to consider: it worked. It would still be presumptuous, but at least a little less misdirected, to Monday-morning-quarterback a team that lost the game.
Every particular possible outcome has some set of strategy changes that, in retrospect, would have made apprehension quicker. But this success was reached without the benefit of clairvoyance.
At the point when the lockdown started, the intended outcome was likely to catch the suspect without any more death, injury or destruction. It worked. You can speculate as to whether it would have also worked with a different approach, but you can't say the selected approach didn't work.
Damn right it worked.
INPUT: pressure cookers and gunpowder
OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down
That's pretty damn effective. And it's all thanks to the multiplying effect of hysterical overreaction.
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EDIT: Updated my description of the bomb, in response to comments below.
Actually, I don't keep any gunpowder under my sink. Why are you deliberately mischaracterizing the inciting incident, and omitting the rather significant context that it involved multiple detonations at a public event?
OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down
Front page headlines - so what, we should censor the news now? As for a city shutdown, that could just as easily be interpreted as 'whole city cooperates to catch bombing suspect.'
Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated my description of the bombs.
> ... omitting the rather significant context ...
That's kind of my point. The terrorists chose to plant the bomb at a marathon rather than, say, a deserted wilderness, to maximise the reaction.
Do you think the presence of dozens of video cameras was a factor in the bombers' calculations?
> As for a city shutdown, that could just as easily be interpreted as 'whole city cooperates to catch bombing suspect.'
And this is where I disagree. Much of the shutdown was, in one way or another, directed from the top.
Do you think the presence of dozens of video cameras was a factor in the bombers' calculations?
Of course, but what are we supposed to do - impose a news blackout as China does in Tibet?
directed from the top
I feel fine about that. Coordination isn't the same as coercion, and there was no curfew or mandatory aspect to this.
If the goal of terrorists is to make Americans live in fear every day, it certainly seems to me like they are losing, badly. If the goal is to make Americans uneasy for a day, whatever. I have no problems admitting I am uneasy about a guy roaming the neighborhood, armed and running from the cops. Did the terrorists just win when I admitted that?
Rightly or wrongly, terrorists will view this as a spectacular success, in some ways greater than 9/11 since it only took a couple of kids to pull off.
I don't know if that kid feels victorious but you can be darn sure that his peers are throwing high fives all around.
Sure, but I'm still unsure that anybody would actually care. It seems like a "Guinness Book of World Records" achievement, not a global politics achievement.