How to Defeat Terrorism

We need to try something different. America has waged a full scale war in South Asia for thirty years.  We've waged a sort of Cold War against Islam for decades longer, going all the way back to Mossadegh and Iran. 

All we've managed to do is inflame the situation. Europe has struggled with Islamic extremists for centuries, and while things were quiet for a long time, the beginning of the twentieth century saw Europe interfere yet again in Middle Eastern affairs, igniting old passions and angers.

Thirty years of war (going back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) has done nothing but make more rabid dogs. That's a failed policy. This is not a war against people, it's a war against an ideology -- the ideology of jihad -- and every time we've bombed a country, we created more enemies as we've attempted to wipe out that ideology.

One reason President Obama has been correctly circumspect about mentioning Islam in discussing terrorism isn't that he's afraid to call it that, but that by linking it to the religion and not to the morons committing these crimes, he gives our enemy comfort. 

The comfort of having his words slipped into a recruiting video to prove that "America is at war with Islam". A fine recruiting tool, to be sure. ISIS and Al Qaeda appeal to people who are looking for a scapegoat for their problems, and by isolating Islam as a cause of terror (it's not), we give the poor and tormented in South Asia something to vent their frustrations on. 

(It's the same schematic that the Tea Party uses here, I should point out, just not to such an extreme degree. That's a post for a different, more political day.)

All we've done with our "war on terror" is give potential members reasons to hate us, to join their organizations. We in the west have consistently installed dictators and tyrants over them and while those installations have helped tamp down the some of the international violence, it hasn't stopped the anger, only inflamed it. It's like clamping down a lid on a pressure cooker: you'll stop the steam from parboiling your hand over the pot, but eventually, the pressure will release in an explosion and destroy your hand. 

When we've decided to take out one of those tyrants we've installed, it's the people we claim to want to protect that have suffered the most. A hundred thousand Iraqis died in our wars against Saddam, and that's ignoring the collateral damage of the Iran-Iraq war that we probably ignited by weakening Saddam in the Nineties, too. Or the Kurds we abandoned back then. 

I want to be clear, the West is not the main problem here, but we exacerbate the very real problems of starvation and poverty and joblessness and the concomitant hopelessness all that implies.

It's no coincidence that since President Obama's "apology tour" early on in his administration that there have been no organized terror attacks in the United States. That's not to say that terrorists aren't licking their chops thinking about killing Americans, to be sure, but I'm betting it's been really hard to recruit suicidal terrorists to attack us, Obama is just that popular even in the Middle East and South Asia. 

The takeaway, in my view, is that America and the west must disengage from the region and let things settle themselves down, or we're going to end up in a world war, if accidentally. Already we've had frightening incidents that could easily have triggered nuclear annihilation. 

So how to defeat terrorism? Better minds than mine...yes, there are some...have tossed this problem around and come up with nothing. I'm afraid I've done little better. I can imagine a framework that solution might take, however.

1) Economics -- This facet is the easiest one: stop buying crude oil from the Middle East. We've had thirty years of warnings to prepare for this, from skyrocketing gas prices to global warming's effects. It's about time we made a commitment to stop using fossil fuels, but particularly oil. 

This might seem counterintuitive: if people are poor, buying oil can only help them. Well, no. That enriches the status quo, which means it enriches those who are at the top of the economic chain in the Middle East, like the emirs and kings, at the expense of the people. To give the people freedom, we have to defund those who would take that freedom. Note that this would also directly hurt ISIS, who have taken crude oil fields across Iraq. 

But notice something: global warming also directly impacts the people in the region in another way: the troubles in Syria began with a drought in Syria, which forced farmers to abandon their farms and migrate to the cities where they might try to find gainful employment.

But those jobs were non-existent as the economic meltdown of the late Bush administration worked its way through the global economy. 

We need to establish economies across the region that don't rely on the resources of the rich, but on the labor of the poor. Trade with the governments of the region is counterproductive. Trade with the people of South Asia is imperative. 

Trade what? What can replace oil?

Frankly, anything can. Remember, facet one of this discussion is to stop using oil: no oil, no oil economy, no reinforcing the status quo. 

2) The Marshall Plan -- After World War II, and despite the war's far heavier toll on the West, the United States in its capacity as the last man standing extended an olive branch not only to our allies, but to our enemies. We would commit to help them rebuild. 

Why? We learned the lessons of the interregnum of the two world wars: letting problems fester only made them worse, not go away. 

We do owe it to the people of South Asia, we in the West. We created artificial borders that ignored tribes, rivalries, nationalities and ethnicities in an attempt to be expedient. Literally. The divisions were drawn with a ruler on a map. We reinforced those arbitrary borders with force and armaments, and interfered in internal matters when those matters threatened our interests.

Imagine if the cops taped off your house and prevented you from using the bathroom, then stormed your part of the house if you took a piss in a flower pot. That's what we're doing in the Middle East. 

Some would call this appeasement. Some would call this a waste of resources. I would argue that the trillions the United States alone has spent in the last fifteen years to "defeat terrorism" was a waste of resources and that we have to find a better way. A few billion versus tens of trillions sounds like a bargain to me, even if the outcome might end up being the same (it won't.)

To me, this Marshall Plan redux would involve helping the Middle East and South Asia rebuild their infrastructure. It would bring permanent water to drought-stricken areas. It would rebuild roads that we've bombed to hell and back. It would build better schools and hospitals and it would all be done by paying the local residents to do the work and administer the projects. We'd provide resources. They'd get the credit for the accomplishments. 

And yes, we'd rebuild mosques, too. We have to. 

3) Diplomacy -- To sum this up, we need to get the fuck out of the way. The West has spent the last decade dictating policy to the Middle East and South Asia: you will do this, you won't do that, you'll take this and like it, we'll take that and you'll be quiet. 

What I see happening is a Middle East summit comprised of everyone: the nation-states, the sects of Islam (including the radical Islamists in some capacity), the South Asian states like Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the Turks, the Russians, the Chinese and the West. 

Obviously, we won't just hold one meeting and be done with it. This will take time and energy and focus. It will require reaching out even as we kill terrorists, or finding intermediaries to understand the problems that we can solve with diplomacy and those we'll just have to let them sort out on their own. We can't settle the Shi'a/Sunni divide, for one thing, but if we can persuade the Muslim people that we'll accept any settlement between them that keeps everyone in the region safer, they'll sort it out.

After all, Northern Ireland seems to be working its Troubles out, and surely they've been more peaceful now than twenty years ago. 

Eventually, these disparate talks can be built upon, bringing factions together in the same room, then bringing the agreements made in those rooms to bigger rooms and higher levels. 

If the West gets out of the way and makes the Middle Eastern nations enforce these agreements -- and frankly, without oil and the commitment to rebuilding, why the hell would we even be there anymore? -- they'll eventually work things out. We may not agree with their solutions, but the point is, we won't have to, as we do now.

4) Stealth -- Let's face facts: we're going to have to cripple ISIS and Al Qaeda (again). We don't have to commit to waging a regional war to do so. We have the tools and ability to decapitate the leadership. As we saw with Al Qaeda last decade, that at the very least buys us time. Time can buy us the space to implement the rest of this plan. It lowers the heat under the pressure cooker of recruitment. It buys us the eyeballs and attention span of the people we want to stop from joining these organizations.  

Clearly, this means an unconventional war fought under the radar. We have national policies that prevent us from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, but those were state matters, and this is a criminal enterprise. And besides, since when has the United States paid anything but lip service to any international agreement? If we're going to break one, let's at least break the right ones, and not the Geneva Convention.

5) A Thicker Skin -- This applies to the West more than to the Middle East and South Asia.

Americans and Europeans are going to die. There is no way to prevent that. Whether we declare all out war and our soldiers die by the thousands or we fight this fight the way I outline above, and citizens and soldiers die by the dozens, we're going to have deaths. My argument is that there will be far fewer casualties for a far shorter period of time.

We're going to have to mature a bit and shrug them off. A little. We're going to have to put aside the bloodthirst for revenge and retribution and work to understand that these deaths are martyrs for a greater cause: the safety and security of all citizens of our nations. 

We can rattle sabres, to be sure, just as we did after 9/11 (and failed to defeat even the enemy that attacked us, much less protect ourselves from future threats), but remember that on 9/11, we even had the "Arab Street" on our side. And lost it in our monumental hubris. We had the opportunity to exhibit dignity and grace and would have prevented hundreds of thousands of enlistments against us. 

Today, the day after the Paris attacks, even Iran has expressed condolences and condemned the attacks, as they too are in the fight against ISIS in Iraq. It's a glimmer of hope. We can take them up on that gesture. 

The other facet of that "thicker skin" is the more troubling one: we have to present a unified front on this project. In America, that will be next to impossible and we may have to cede leadership here to China and Russia. The old dictum that politics ends at the border was thrown out the window by the yahoos of the Tea Party and any attempt to implement this program will have to shut them up somehow. They'll need to develop a thicker skin and stop betraying our national interests. That's the only way we can be effective in this construct.

I think this five step program may be the only way to defeat an ideology. A good parallel in American history is the Mob. We didn't beat the Mob on the battlefield, we beat them by starving them of them of members, by giving immigrants better jobs, and better education, by assimilating them into our culture and providing the opportunities to attain the benefits of that culture to them, and finding ways of tying up the resources of the Mob so they could no longer wage an asymmetric war. 

After all, it took an accountant to put Capone in jail and effectively end his reign of terror. We won't defeat ISIS or Al Qaeda in the desert, we'll finally defeat them when we get the people in the region to stop joining them. Suicide bombers and jihadists have a very short shelf life, so the organizations are always desperate for new members.

It took decades, and even today, we still have mobs and gangs and violence, but only to the extent that we can now treat them as criminal organizations and not an armed resistance. We'll always have ISIS and Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas or something like them because there will always be underinformed people who are easily manipulated by charismatic leaders and simplistic solutions. This project will make it harder for them to be effective. 

WIN FOR OBAMA!!!!!

It feels good to write that after hearing about how for eight years, Bush kept us safe from terrorists, and then having it turn out that, welllllll....it was police work that saved the day, even if the threat was hardly credible to begin with:

Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, obtained with the help of an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.

The "informant" in question was a Sunni Muslim who was working with the FBI in exhcange.

I'm betting he was not tortured.

After the Sears Tower plot of 2006 was exposed, we were told time and time again about how effective the Bush administration had been in foiling terror attacks.

This time?

Around 9 p.m., a law enforcement official said an 18-wheel New York Police Department vehicle blocked the suspects’ black sport utility vehicle at 237th Street and Riverdale Avenue. Another armored vehicle arrived and officers from the department’s Emergency Service Unit took the men out of the truck and handcuffed them.

After the plot was broken up, the team of uniformed officers took the suspects away.

So it was good old fashioned police work...none of this military-industrial-covert espionage crap that Bush tried to ram down our throats. Identify a plot and work to uncover the breadth and depth of it, then shut it down and roll up the cells.

Reminds me of the good old safe days of the Clinton administration with Janet Reno!

And should serve as a reminder of the cynical gloating of the Bushies, who treated the most insignificant terror plot revelation as a two-year child who just took a dump would expose it to his mom.

"Lookit! Lookit what I did!"

The Most Laughable Story You'll Read This Week

This is a joke, right?:

MIAMI (Reuters) - Seven men plotted to bring down the U.S. government by poisoning saltshakers and bombing landmark buildings, a prosecutor told Miami jurors as their terrorism conspiracy trial opened on Tuesday.

The "Liberty City Seven" aimed to create chaos as part of a holy war to pave the way for al Qaeda-affiliated guerrillas to take over the United States, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Gregorie said in the prosecution's opening statement.

"We need to make the people go crazy in the streets," Gregorie quoted alleged ringleader Narseal Batiste as saying. "Allah is going to take over through us."

BWAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH!

OK, some background on this: About fifteen months ago, a huge breaking story that ran across the front pages of newspapers all across the country went something like this: "Terror Plot To Blow Sears Tower Busted."

Note the timing: nearly one year after the 7/7/05 terror bombings in London, and just ahead of the Fourth of July holiday.

Homegrown terrorists, ties to Al Qaeda, massive bombing plot...soopersecret stuff, right? Probably busted wide open by an undercover FBI mole who, as his patriotic duty insisted, turned on his friends and narced.

Eh. Not so much:

Rather than trained terrorists for whom stealth and secrecy is the golden rule, these guys seem to have strutted around a poor African-American neighborhood in Miami wearing military-style garb (sometimes also turbans), standing guard and doing exercise drills. You know, like the S1Ws in the old Public Enemy hip-hop shows. And just like the S1Ws, seems like these guys didn’t have any real weapons either. The indictment against them is pretty hilarious, because it makes clear that the only contact these guys had with “al-Qaeda” was through a U.S. government undercover agent posing as a Qaeda operative. So the indictment says they swore oaths to al-Qaeda and sought its assistance in waging a ground war (yes, a ground war!) against the “devils” on U.S. soil. But, of course, any such “oaths” were administered not by al-Qaeda, but by a U.S. government agent posing as al-Qaeda. (I’m sure the lawyers are going to have fun with this one!)

Sure enough, they will:

Defense lawyers said the charges were "nonsense" scripted by the government and orchestrated by paid FBI informants they called Conman No. 1 and Conman No. 2.

They said the defendants, one of whom was devoted mainly to smoking marijuana, had no weapons or intent to do violence and that it was the informants who suggested poisoning restaurant saltshakers and blowing up buildings.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't know too many stoners who would even get up off the couch to blow up a balloon (except for a shotgun hit for someone else) much less a building.

But come on! Think about the implications of this preposterous story: seven men, and only seven men, would poison enough salt shakers and blow up enough buildings to foment panic in the streets sufficient for wave upon wave of Al Qaeda fighters to invade our homeland and overthrow the US government?

Yeeeeeeeeea. Someone's been watching Red Dawn and smoking mesc...

However, it provides a neat segue into something I was thinking about this morning: fear.

I was reading a column by Jeffrey Kluger in Time magazine. He made the following observation:

It's impossible to resist comparing the America of 1957 with the America of 2007-- and finding the modern version wanting. There was a clear-eyed quality to the U.S. commitment to space and a frank understanding of what it would take to get there. This wasn't an effort built on tax credits for willing industries or bipartisan earmarking. It wasn't a program financed by cooked books or off-budget accounting. Most important, it was sustained by appealing not to what scared us but rather to what elevated us. There's no need to invoke WMD when you've got MIT.

In a nativist time like ours, it's hard to imagine a national effort so peopled by foreigners--German expat Wernher von Braun building our rockets, New Zealand immigrant William Pickering heading our unmanned program. In a time of flash-paper attention spans, it's similarly hard to picture any agency surviving the setbacks NASA did. Ranger 7 was the first unmanned U.S. ship to land on the moon--following the sequential failures of Rangers 1 through 6. Think that program would make it as far as Ranger 4 today?

Most remarkable, though, was the odd humility that marked our space enterprise. Yes, in the historical mirror, some of it seems overdone: the astronauts in silver space suits (when military green would have served just as well), shedding names like Virgil and Donald and Gordon for Gus and Deke and Gordo. But that was done with a cultural wink, one that belied the workmanlike ethos beneath the effort.

In that most American of plays, Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman, father of two layabout sons, is stunned to find that his neighbor's boy is arguing a case before the Supreme Court and hasn't mentioned it. "He don't have to," his neighbor answers. "He's gonna do it." A coda to that idea is offered in the elegiac new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. One of the scenes shows the men of Mission Control lighting cigars after the 1969 splashdown of Apollo 11. Behind them, on a control room viewing screen, two words are projected: TASK ACCOMPLISHED. That may be a less triumphal phrasing than "mission," but whatever you call it, Americans knew enough not to boast about a thing until we had done it.

Indeed. The unspoken coda to this article is this photo:

What are our leaders-- and through their reactions and calculated efforts, us-- so afraid of?

What do we have to fear from a terror attack? The best Al Qaeda could do in ten plus years of planning was find a small flaw in our civil defenses and exploit it.

Rather than wasting our energy and more important, squandering our justifiable concern over real terrorist actions over idiotic scams like this Miami plot, we ought to be focusing on finding the people who really want to hurt us and stopping them.

And not making up boogeymen so we can burnish our credentials falsely. During the Clinton administration, the Federal government managed to foil 16 terrorist plots, including the famous plot by Ramsi Yussef to blow up seven transPacific airliners, the precursor to the 9/11 hijackings themselves.

No one talked much about it (mostly because Republicans and the media were focused on a different missile), and things were handled. We need to get back to that, to the attitude that it's not talked about, it's just done.

An Unsubtle Dance

Clearly, this story and this story were timed for simultaneous release:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Terrorists may be conducting "dry runs" at U.S. airports to test security before a possible attack, according to a Transportation Security Administration warning to airport screeners.

In at least four incidents over the past year, security screeners have found items in carry-on luggage -- blocks of cheese taped to electrical components, for example -- that resembled homemade bombs, according to the TSA's July 20 memo.

...and...

Jul 24 - U.S President George W.Bush reiterates the threat posed by al Qaeda in Iraq and warns that an American military withdrawal will only enhance the influence.

(video at link)

You mean to tell me that it took Al Qaeda six years to suddenly start sticking cheese into people's luggage, attached to wires and circuit boards?

Please. Don't make me laugh. This has been going on since 9/11 and probably even earlier than that, especially when you consider this part of the warning:

"Past terrorist attacks and plots show that such testing generally indicates attacks will soon follow," said the internal memo, which was posted on the Internet by NBC News on Tuesday.

None of the passengers in question has been linked with criminal or terrorist organizations so far, the memo said.

Right. How many wired cheeses does it take for the TSA to issue an alert like this? One? Two? Three? A dozen? And yet none of the passengers has been found to have any links to terror organizations?

Who smokes that strong of dope in the White House that thinks we'd buy this story at all? Clearly, this is a made-up alert, designed to reinforce Bush's feeble message of the bogeyman:

Here's the bottom line: Al Qaida in Iraq is run by foreign leaders loyal to Osama bin Laden. Like bin Laden, they are cold-blooded killers who murder the innocent to achieve al Qaida's political objectives. Yet despite all the evidence, some will tell you that al Qaida in Iraq is not really al Qaida – and not really a threat to America. Well, that's like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun, and saying he's probably just there to cash a check.

BoogahBoogah! Gee, Mr. Bush, they weren't there before you got us stuck in the glue over there! One can logically assume that if anyone was a threat to the nation, it's the numbnuts who exaggerated and lied and aggravated a situation such that we're viewed as the bully who needs to be taken down a notch!

Um, that means you're the problem, since your reading comprehension is questionable.

The White House admitted as much that these two stories were timed for release:

Kevin Sullivan, the White House communications director, said the speech was devised as a "surge of facts" meant to rebut critics who say Mr. Bush is trying to rebuild support for the war by linking the Iraq group and the one led by Mr. bin Laden.

See? You see? There over there, and they're trying to follow us over here, but if we stay over there, magically all our cheese will be wire free! HOORAY FOR US!

Yea. Right. Let me have a terrorism expert say it:

"I think what the president is saying is in some sense fundamentally misleading," said Robert Grenier, former head of the counter-terrorism center at the CIA as well as the agency's mission manager for the war in Iraq. "If he means to suggest the invasion of Iraq has not created more jihadists bent on killing Americans, and that if Iraq hadn't been there as a magnet they would have been attracted somewhere else, that's completely disingenuous."

The war "has convinced many Muslims that the United States is the enemy of Islam and is attacking Muslims, and they have become jihadists as a result of their experience in Iraq," Grenier said.

In other words, to quote the immortal wrestler, The Rock...IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER anymore, at any rate. They'll kill us here with exploding cheeses AND fight us in Iraq.

Thanks, man. You really fucked us up, big time, asshole!

I Wonder If They've Herd Of This?

As a subscriber to National Geographic magazine, I get the new issue each month about a week ahead of the newsstand release. I say all this because I can't link to the article I'm going to use today, but as I was reading the news this morning, I came across a story that suddenly made it all very relevant.

You're aware that many animals engage in "swarm mentality." Ants and bees are of course the best known swarming creatures. Ants swarm to find food, bees swarm to find food and new nesting locations. Many small birds flock, small fish school, even larger animals like zebras and wildebeest swarm in order to minimize the ability of predators to attack. Swarms and herds present confusing, swirling targets. Indeed, some animals have taken it to an art form, such that they will have some animals lag a little, like the threads off a worn curtain, then collapse those threads into the herd again, leaving the predator gasping for breath as he can't quite focus his efforts on one beast.

An individual animal is dumb, but collectively, animals can be pretty intelligent, right down to the ants that can create bridges across a chasm in order to attain food.

I could go into the mechanisms behind this but that would be plagiarism and probably boring. Suffice it to say that a man is smart, but people are dumb, and you get a sense of how swarm behavior doesn't really work for people. Let a hungry lion loose in a crowd of humans, and he'll eat his fill.

There was one notable swarm behavior scenario that gets little notice in the media, but was wildly successful when it occured: during the demonstrations at the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle a few years back, a relatively small number of protestors were littered throughout the crowds with walkie-talkies and cell phones, and were able to apprise groups ahead of time of police countermeasures and forces, so that they could disperse and regroup elsehwere.

Swarm mentality relies on reliable communication, you see. Word of mouth, well, you've played the game "Telephone," I'm sure.

There's the backdrop to my morning, and I find this article waiting for me at Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military deployed 10,000 soldiers backed by attack helicopters in a big offensive against al Qaeda north of Baghdad on Tuesday as a truck bomber struck in the capital, killing 75 people near a Shi'ite mosque.

The offensive against al Qaeda around the city of Baquba in Diyala province, a stronghold of the Sunni Islamist group, is partly aimed at taking down car bomb networks that cause carnage in Baghdad and other regions of Iraq. It is one of the biggest military operations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

One witness said a suicide bomber driving a truck rammed his vehicle into the Shi'ite Khilani mosque in Baghdad, destroying one of its walls and badly damaging the rest of the structure.

Send 10,000. Send 100,000. It won't matter, so long as the replacement rate of terrorists exceeds the kill rate.

Using the swarming model, if a school of baitfish senses a shark, say, nearby, it will automatically go into swarming behavior, creating a tight baitball. So long as it is able to maintain the baitball at a critical mass, the school as a whole will survive.

One shark will not succeed in decimating the school, nor two sharks. Add some dolphins, seals, and seagulls to the mix, and you've got a chance, but even then, enough baitfish will get away to propagate their DNA.

Similarly, Al Qaeda and the other terrorist groups in Iraq have been working a similar strategy: make the allies chase them all over Iraq, exhausting supplies, manpower and wasting energy chasing them where they used to be. When the allies move in on one town, the insurgents pack up quickly and scatter, picking yet another place to open up shop.

In other words, this car bomb shop in Baquba is long gone already. The insurgents, no doubt, left enough people behind to fight a rear guard action, and to keep the allied troops engaged long enough for them to resettle someplace else. Meanwhile, hundreds more Iraqis will die, and dozens more American troops.

To be precise about all this, there are only two ways to stop the insurgency. First, we can realize that we're pushing a boulder up an eternal hill, sit down and talk things out with them. Second, find out how they are communicating, and put an end to that.

10,000 troops will never accomplish that. Nor will torturing hundreds of random Iraqis in the hopes you'll find one person with knowledge. And given this administration's blatant incompetence in the intelligence arena, their bumbling, blind mishandling of all things intel, I don't see where they will engage the one tool that will allow them to infiltrate Al Qaeda, or at least its footsoldiers in Iraq.

This will require leadership, and Bush is fighting his own rear guard action.

Way To Go, U.S.A.

Oh brother.

KABUL (Reuters) - At least seven children were killed in a U.S.-led coalition air strike on a religious school in Afghanistan, the coalition said on Monday, amid rising anger over civilian deaths from foreign military operations.

A U.S. military spokesman said some children who survived Sunday's raid said pupils had been forced by insurgents to stay inside the madrasa.

"We are truly sorry for the innocent lives lost in this attack," said Army Major Chris Belcher, a coalition spokesman, in a statement.

"We had surveillance on the compound all day and saw no indications there were children inside the building."

It has been said that air strikes are the first and last weapon in a nation's arsenal: you send in bombers first to soften up the enemy, then send in troops and then as you withdraw (or are defeated), you desperately fire up some missiles and fling them to a) cover your retreat and b) send in an indefensible weapon.

But a school?

If anyone wonders why the sign-up rates for Islamist terrorist groups is far higher than the rate at which we're killing them, well, here's exhibit A.

Let's pull out some caveats here before continuing: This was probably not a school like Columbine is a school in that you had a few bad apples alongside a large majority of sheep-like students who only wanted to finish class and go outside and play. You probably, probably, had a large number of boys being inculcated to hate Americans (as if they really needed help after the past six years). And terrorists do use children as shields, we've learned that from watching the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts of the past decades.

Lastly, Afghanistan is a war that nearly everyone can at least, in theory, get behind (or at least not hate quite so much). It's where Al Qaeda was allowed to foment terror, the Taliban were a really nasty ugly bunch of pricks, and we had little if any idea of what weaponry they had been able to get their hands on--although no one was accusing them of possessing WMD's, you'll notice. Most Americans could understand an escalation in Afghanistan, a "surge," if you will.

Nevertheless, does anyone in their right mind think lobbing a few missiles at a school was a good idea?

This is a circumstance that cried out for boots on the ground, for a strike team or hell, even a frikkin' battalion, to go in and go room to room.

Would children have died? Sure. Some of them with weapons in their hands, likely, and many others as an obstacle to NATO bullets. Would the count be as high as seven? Perhaps; no, probably higher.

The one thing there wouldn't have been, however, is a recruiting poster for thousands more Islamic warriors.

It seems to me that we've probably exhausted the really rigid, dogmatic wings of the Muslim religion. We've probably killed many of them, more likely many of them are still battling in such far-flung battlescapes as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and so on.

Now we're helping to recruit moderate Muslims who see the horrors and tragedies of these senseless attacks, and think we're bent on genocide. And who's to say we aren't? We have CNN, they have Al Jazeera, so one can only imagine what their version of "Fox News" is passing on to the rabid undereducated, just as our own Fox does to feed the red meat morons of our nation.

We've set in motion some horrific and cataclysmic historic cycles for not decades, but centuries to come through our blunders and bluster. Rome had its overexpansion and ultimately cracked from within AND without. We've clearly bitten off more than we can chew.

The Romans, at least, could be excused for ignorance of history. Bush was merely ignorant.

Sure, Let's Fight Them There...

So we doesn't have to, you know, fight them here:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Four people, including a former member of Guyana's parliament, have been charged with planning to blow up New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, U.S. officials said on Saturday.

This was "one of the most chilling plots imaginable," Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at a news conference in New York. "The devastation that would be caused ... is just unthinkable."

The plotters sought to blow up the airport's jet fuel tanks and part of the 40-mile (64-km) pipeline feeding them from New Jersey. Three of the four suspects, who included a former airline cargo handler, have been arrested, federal law enforcement officials said.

In a recorded conversation one suspect predicted there would be few survivors and that the attacks would result in the destruction of "the whole of Kennedy."

That's a pretty dubious claim, of course, but to say a billion dollars in damage and a few hundred lives lost, not to mention disruption of national air travel for several weeks, would not be out of line.

Targets in the airport plot included terminal buildings, aircraft and fuel tanks, as well as the fuel pipeline to the airport. Pipeline operator Buckeye Partners L.P. said it had been cooperating with authorities since the investigation started in January 2006.

Spokesman Roy Haase declined to comment on security measures but said speculation the plotters hoped to destroy large parts of the pipeline were unrealistic, since any damage would be confined to the area where fuel leaked and the pipeline was almost entirely underground.

"There's no oxygen in the pipeline. It's completely full of liquid and you need oxygen for ignition," Haase said.

(Full disclosure: I have certain investments with Buckeye, which is part of the Carlyle Group)

The tanks themselves blowing up would have been the biggest concern, of course, as well as any above ground piping and hoses that lead from them. Since fueling operations are generally done as passengers off-load and re-load, minimal passenger deaths would have resulted if any planes had been affected at all.

This does, however, expose a huge hole in America's philosophy in battling terror crimes: waging a war against whom you believe to be the most likely adversary comes nowhere close to preventing terror attacks, full stop. Moreover, waging a war that can easily be painted as a "Crusade" (and you'd think those master media manipulators would have thought this aspect out a little better) is not going to ensure your adversaries will all gather in one place to battle you.

In fact, if anything, by having such a bloody-minded focus on one place, you allow all sorts of flanking manuevers and indeed, every year since 2002, we've seen more terror attacks in more places killing more people, and that's after factoring out Iraq and Afghanistan from the statistics.

The one-percent theory-- you know, that we have to be right 100% of the time, but if terrorist are right even once out of a hundred, we lose-- is a bit of a farce, as well, when applied here. The Iraq invasion increases the likelihood that we will be wrong, and fairly frequently.

What should have happened after September 11-- find Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, roll them up, bring them to a trial-- would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, made many more friends out of our potential adversaries, prevented any number of plots around the world, and garnered the good will of a world grateful to see that the big bully can keep his gun in his holster.

What I see in the Islamist world is not an organized state of war, but ad hoc cells itching for revenge against us. Those would all have gone away as the cells realized there was no safe haven for them anywhere to operate with the blind eye of local governments.

Would there still be terror attacks? Sure, but fewer and smaller scale, with less financial support and emotional blessings attached, which means more chance of catching them before they strike. And truly, we could have established a coalition of the willing to create strike forces that by treaty could stop terrorist attacks anywhere, because who wants Sharm el-Sheik to happen in their backyard?

Led by America's vast and unnecessary military power, we could easily have signed up countries frm Lebanon to Indonesia to Mexico and Canada in the blink of an eye, anyone of whom could invite us in to deal with terorist cells.

What happened after September 11 has only left America exhausted, vulnerable, and morally bereft at a time we can ill afford to have our flaws examined by the entire world, as our star begins to wane and other stars rise to replace us at the top.

And now we have what we have.

Fighting Them There...

So we don't have to fight them here?:

NEW YORK -- Six men from New Jersey have been arrested in an alleged terror plot against soldiers at Fort Dix, according investigators.

Investigators said the men planned to use automatic weapons to enter Fort Dix and kill as many soldiers as they could at the N.J. base. Fort Dix was just one of several military and security locations allegedly scouted by this group, authorities said.

Investigators told Newschannel 4's Jonathan Dienst that these arrests are the result of a tip to the FBI and use of an informant to track the suspects. The terror suspects traveled over the last several months from New Jersey to the Poconos where they practiced firing automatic weapons, investigators said.

OK, a couple of points here.

1) These men were not Middle Eastern. They are Albanians and "citizens of the former Yugoslavia". You might remember this last group as people that we fought for, to prevent ethnic cleansing under the Clinton administration.

2) No specific threat beyond identifying which target they would attempt to hit had been received. They did train on automatic weapons in the woods of Pennsylvania, but hey, this is America, land of the gun.

3) These men are resident aliens of the United States, and while born in eastern Europe, have spent most of their lives here in America.

4) There was no apparent funding from overseas. These men were pooling their life savings together to commit this heinous act.

So what are we looking at here? We're looking at American residents so frustrated and so angry at the war being waged against people who share a religion with them that they are willing to forget all the goodwill we built up during the Kosovo campaign and target fellow Americans. We're looking at people who aren't "brownskinned," who could easily pass into any facility in America without so much as a second glance for racial profiling.

We're looking, in other words, at home-grown terrorism. Which is the folly of the "Flypaper Theory" in combatting terrorism and terrorists. And we're not looking at Al Qaeda. We're staring the anger that the Bush administration has created right square in the eye.

And that ought to scare us beyond the mouthed platitudes of Osama bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri. And George W. Bush and the right wing pundits who still support his insanity.

Homeland Security

Much has been made of the United States efforts to fight terrorists around the world, the theory being if we fought them there, we wouldn't have to fight them here.

A ludicrous theory on the face, as an organization that can pop up like a Whack-A-Mole is not likely to suddenly freeze in one place and be hammered over the head constantly.

We should expect them here and relatively soon. So how good are our domestic defenses? We do a fairly good job at airport security, even allowing for the massive holes in the screening processes (like airport employees and faulty and inadequate equipment). Our land borders are absolutely porous as evidenced by the great Mexican immigration debate (our Canadian border is even more porous).

Port screenings are still nearly non-existent, relying on the Coast Guard to interdict on the open seas any suspicious ship.

Well...not for very much longer, at this rate:

Although it is busy and obvious and well known, the coastguard has long been a poor sibling to the navy, army and air force. At the same time, its responsibilities have grown. In 2003 it became part of the Department of Homeland Security, with increased emphasis on protecting America's 361 ports and 95,000 miles (153,000km) of coastline from terrorists.

Yet the 40,000-member service has to scratch desperately for money from Congress. Its boats are often in poor shape; some patrol cutters are over 50 years old. In 2005 USA Today ran a story on life aboard a 210-foot (64-metre) cutter, where equipment regularly malfunctioned and raw sewage flooded the sleeping quarters.

In an attempt to remedy all this, and to win back prestige, the coastguard launched “Deepwater” in the 1990s. This was a $24 billion upgrade of its ships and aircraft. The goal was a modernised fleet and air arm with complementary communications and tracking equipment, lower maintenance and better conditions for the crew. Contracts to start building were signed in 2002.

Five years on, Deepwater is plagued by catastrophe. A plan to enlarge the coastguard's 110-foot cutters into more capable 123-foot boats was scrapped last autumn after the first eight refitted boats showed signs of cracking apart. The flagships of Deepwater—eight state-of-the-art 418-foot National Security Cutters, the first of which is nearing completion—have structural flaws that will probably shorten their projected 30-year service life and lead to costly repairs.

Right smack in the middle of the first battles that includes American soil since the Civil War, we're losing the ability to defend our shores. The story includes tales of corruption due to the privatization of the contracts and the hubris and arrogance of an admiralty that finally was garnering the attention it deserved in the 90s (when Bill Clinton was President, efforts to defend this nation from domestic terror attacks were not only in the works, they were being executed and were successful).

This does not bode well for the security of the US coastlines. Ships in dry dock for repairs are ships that are not out patrolling the coastal waters. Ships in danger of sinking or overweighted are ships that cannot keep up with faster, more manueverable ships and boats. It's a little like a fat cat chasing a pack of mice. Maybe he catches one or two, but the other dozen manage to steal all the cheese anyway.

This is a disgraceful situation, made more urgent by the ill-conceived "fight them there" strategy that shifts the focus of homeland security away from the homeland itself. Had Bush instead pursued a strategy of treating the September 11th attacks as a crime as well as an act of war, his focus could have been on fixing the major problems we have in protecting ourselves and not on inciting and inflaming more terrorists and more terror groups than ever before.

When a criminal breaks into a house and kills the family living there, two things occur: the police hunt down and capture the crook, and the remaining family beefs up their home security system.

Right now, we've got the cops out looking (and not very thoroughly), but we've left the doors and windows open.

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An Honest Republican

I realize it's probably asking a bit too much, given the heavy-handed and paranoid fashion that this administration is run, to have an honest Republican speak his mind while he can actually have some influence in governing, but this may be as close as we get in 2007:

WASHINGTON -- New York City's counterterrorism chief said Tuesday he wakes every morning braced for another terrorist attack -- most likely from satchel bombs blown up near-simultaneously in the city's subways.

"The threat to New York City's transit system is not just theoretical," Deputy New York Police Department Commissioner Richard Falkenrath warned House lawmakers in sometimes apocalyptic testimony. "It is real. There have been 22 bomb threats and 31 intelligence leads related to subway attack plots this year."

It's true: the New York City subway, as well as the regional commuter railways, have long been a target for terror attacks and in fact have been subjected to various terrorist-like criminals acts.

One, the result of which saw Nassau County send it's first woman to Congress, Carolyn McCarthy, involved a mass homicide on a Long Island Railroad commuter train. Various plots have been tested, by both the US government and the state and local governments (jointly), which involved attacks using weapons of mass destruction, as well as simultaneous bombings across the system.

And in truth, it's really easy to blow up a subway train. Police presence is keyed to high volume stations on a random basis where a terrorist might blend in carrying an oversized satchel, such as near bus depots, train stations and connections to the two area airports. 468 stations, 26 train lines, and 1.4 billion riders every year, and you can see that this is a tactical response and not a comprehensive one. The allocation of resources determined based on trying to "guess" the possible scenarios.

Commuter trains would be even easier: while subways have at least some nominal police presence, police presence at commuter rail stations is dependent upon the town one would board in, and some towns deploy their officers with other priorities in mind, trying to get the best bang for the buck in fighting crime. Too, while an unwatched satchel on a subway might grab someone's attention (we city folks are trained in hanging on tightly to our bags), on commuter lines, it's not uncommon for someone to leave a bag behind when deboarding, knowing that at Grand Central or some other terminal station, it will be picked up and taken to the lost and found.

What makes Falkenrath's statement even more remarkable is the fact that he is a former White House homeland security official. As he continued his testimony, he gets to the nub of the problem:

Testifying before the House Homeland Security Committee on a bill that would require a national mass transit strategy and would appropriate $4 billion to fortify subway and rail systems -- including $100 million to secure six tunnels in New York's Penn Station -- Falkenrath praised it as "a step in the right direction."

But he was also highly critical of key provisions, such as its call for a national strategy.

"Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the field of homeland security has been gripped by a mania for plans, strategies and other mandatory reports," Falkenrath said. "... They are of almost no value to operating agencies in the field; and they seem to be ignored by virtually everyone except the government contractors paid to verify that the reporting requirements have been met."

(emphasis added) Bingo!

We were attacked by killers and they gave us a rainbow! A Fucking rainbow!!! 184,000 employees, and I'd wager that more than half of them are on some planning committee or other.

The Department of Homeland Security has been dogged by persistent criticism over excessive bureaucracy, waste, and ineffectiveness. In 2003, the department came under fire after the media revealed that Laura Callahan, Deputy Chief Information Officer at DHS with responsibilities for sensitive national security databases, had in fact obtained her advanced computer science degrees through a diploma mill in a small town in Wyoming. The department was blamed for up to $2 billion of waste and fraud after audits by the Government Accountability Office revealed widespread misuse of government credit cards by DHS employees, with purchases including beer brewing kits, $70,000 of plastic dog booties that were later deemed unusable, boats purchased at double the retail price many of which later could not be found, and iPods ostensibly for use in "data storage".

The department's initial response to Hurricane Katrina was castigated by its critics as inadequate, a charge later acknowledged by the Bush administration. Following the discovery by British authorities in August 2006 of a plot to destroy commercial airliners using liquid explosives, it was revealed that DHS had consistently failed to spend research and development money on new airport screening methods, and that funds for explosive detection equipment were re-routed by the Bush Administration to cover budget shortfalls elsewhere. In August 2006, a bipartisan group of Senators on the Appropriations Committee described the Sciences & Technology Directorate, the research arm of DHS, as a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course".

Of course, Falkenrath also attacks the Bush mantra of "accountability":

"This [technology] bias pervades virtually all homeland security grant programs," he said. "It is a reflection of the interests of government vendors, who sell more products, and federal auditors, whose jobs are simplified when grants can be connected to invoices."

He also criticized a proposal that would pay for training for transit workers but not for law enforcement, noting that the NYPD assigns nearly 2,700 officers daily to secure subways.

Here's the kicker for me: I can pretty much picture Falkenrath, like Richard Clarke, raising hell inside the administration and quietly being ignored, then not-so-quietly being ignored and then being told to shut up.

One might think that journalists would do some legwork in agencies like Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA and start finding these people before they have to, out of good conscience, quit a vital post in order to be heard. After all....

Republicans criticized provisions mandating whistleblower protection for those revealing security lapses

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Naked America

One of the underreported side effects of a war in Iraq fought on the cheap is suddenly becoming a grave issue:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon is not adequately equipping the National Guard and has not adapted to the increasingly important security role it plays in the post-September 11 environment, an independent commission said in a report to Congress on Thursday.

The report said the global war on terrorism had placed increased demands for the National Guard to provide forces for both overseas and domestic missions, but added that the Defense Department, or DOD, had been slow to adapt to the change.

"DOD's failure to appropriately consider National Guard needs and funding requirements has produced a National Guard that is not fully ready to meet current and emerging missions," the commission concluded.

Among its findings, the 13-member panel said the Defense Department was not adequately equipping the Guard for its domestic missions.

Pretty scary stuff, but it gets worse:

Nearly 90 percent of Guard units in the United States are rated "not ready," partly because of equipment shortages, according to Guard data and the findings of the Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, The Washington Post reported.

National Guard units deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan have been required to leave large quantities of gear behind when they return home, the newspaper said.

So we're trashing them there so they can trash us here...

The National Guard's function used to be pretty simple: help out in an emergency that overwhelmed local authorities. You know, a tornado hits, you call in the Red Cross and National Guard. Or maybe a big blizzard.

Certainly during and after a terror attack.And while the Guard can be used to protect our land by fighting overseas, that really ought to be a last resort and ought to be in support of regular army and other military branch forces. You should be sending in the first team. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush et al, did not, and there's a price to pay for that.

See, there's a concept in American constitutional law, posse comitatus, which was created in Colonial times, as the British army used to barrack their soldiers in private residences, creating a de facto network of military police. Although the Constitution itself does not create the concept of "posse comitatus", it does contain the Third Amendment, prohibiting the quartering of soldiers in peacetime without the owner's consent. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1875 goes one step further in barring the use of the military in nearly any domestic situation, under Federal authority.

The National Guard is an outgrowth of Article 1 of the Constitution, and so is explicitly designated for domestic use along with the Coast Guard, should it become necessary.

You know, like, in a blizzard. Or tornado. Or terror attack. The governor of the afflicted state (remember, it cannot be the President) can ask for his state's Guard to assist.

We've been fairly lucky in that, since the Iraq invasion began, aside from Katrina, we haven't had a major disaster that required all hands on deck.

And one begins to wonder how much better Katrina would have turned out had the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards been at full complement. As it was, over 58,000 Guard troops from all over the country were called in, and you have to figure that the 30,000 that were serving in Iraq including thousands from Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama could have been there, as the Civil War general used to say, "furstest", saving hours and saving lives.

But no. And it's costing us: lives, money, property. All to fight a war overseas that means nothing at a cheaper cost to the economic royalty.

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The Problem With Crowing About Something...

...is sometimes, you have to eat yourself:

RIYADH (Reuters) - The death toll in a militant attack on French tourists in Saudi Arabia rose to four on Tuesday after a French teenager died from bullet wounds, a hospital doctor said on Tuesday.

The boy's father was among three French expatriates working in Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest oil exporter, who were shot dead during a desert trip on Monday in what appeared to be the first attack by suspected al Qaeda militants on foreigners in three years.

An acquaintance who did not want to be named said the men were machine gunned down in front of the women and children, confirming a report from a security source[...]

They were part of a group of nine French nationals living in Riyadh who had been visiting historic sites and camping in the desert in the scenic western region of the vast desert country.

Islamic militants swearing allegiance to al Qaeda launched a violent campaign to topple the U.S.-allied Saudi monarchy in 2003, with suicide bomb attacks on foreigners and government installations, including the oil industry.

So, Al Qaeda pops its ugly head up in Saudi Arabia after all these drinks. Where else?

KABUL (Reuters) - A Taliban suicide bomber killed up to 12 people at the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday in an attack the rebels said was aimed at Dick Cheney, but the visiting U.S. vice president was not hurt.

An American and South Korea soldier were killed, as well as a U.S. government contractor whose nationality was unknown, NATO and Korean officials said. NATO said 27 people were wounded.

A Reuters photographer at the scene at Bagram Airbase, 60 km (40 miles) north of Kabul, saw eight bodies in addition to NATO's tally of four dead, putting the toll at 12.

Oops! OK, not Al Qaeda, but an incredible facsimile! These were the guys we were supposed to be getting six years ago, right?

Eh....not so much...

ISLAMABAD, Feb 27 (Reuters) - Britain does not foresee any chance of dialogue with Taliban leaders running an insurgency in Afghanistan, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said in Pakistan on Tuesday.

Beckett said she had no inclination to talk to Taliban commanders whose expressed goals were to kill British troops stationed in Afghanistan.

But, she added that talks with former Taliban or sympathisers who were no longer active might be a possibility in the future.

Because, you know, there's been this "spring offensive" in the works since November...

Six years after the declaration of victory in Afghanistan the British government announced the dispatch of 1,400 extra troops yesterday in readiness for an escalation of the violence sweeping the country.

The sending of the troops, along with aircraft, armoured vehicles and artillery, will raise the total force there to 7,700 making it bigger than the one now deployed in Iraq.

...which, if you only watched US network news, you would only have heard about either this weekend, when Dick Cheney finally raised his helmeted head out of his playpen secure bunker to announce with grave alarm:

US Vice President Dick Cheney today sought Pakistan’s help in countering al-Qaida’s efforts to regroup in its remote border region.

He warned that Taliban militants are planning a “spring offensive” in neighbouring Afghanistan, the Pakistani president’s office said.

Now, if you really wanted to flush out the Taliban AND Al Qaeda, wouldn't you go to where the money came from?

No, not Saudi Arabia: Pakistan:

experts say that Pakistan’s military and Interservices Intelligence (ISI) both include personnel who sympathize with—or even assist—Islamist militants. ISI has provided covert but well-documented support to terrorist groups active in Kashmir, including the al-Qaeda affiliate Jaish-e-Mohammed, which investigators linked to the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament and the February 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

*Ahem* But we've made our bed and now must sleep in it. I swear, Musharraf has done such a bang up job of misleading the Bush administration, I'm surprised he hasn't tried to sell them on the idea of a pipeline through his country to the India! For natural gas!

Um. Oops.

So we have terror attacks against Westerners in Saudi Arabia resuming, a Taliban offensive in Afghanistan, assisted by Pakistan's ISI, forming up, and possible Al Qaeda cyberattacks on our banking and other financial institutions.

In effect, they've taken six years to regroup, reform and re-energize the network. Add to that the growing threat of non-Al Qaeda terrorism, and the fact that every year since we've attacked Iraq has seen more deaths from more terrorist attacks in more countries than the previous year.

All while Al Qaeda lay dormant. While some of our *koffkoff* finest minds have said Al Qaeda is on the run...

And Bush thought 2006 was a bad year for him! I expect he'll be crying for his mommy by September.

snarkasm, snarcasm, snarky

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