There were two articles summarized below in yesterday’s Washington Post that focued on al Qaeda’s strategies, but they both stuck to the "War on Terror" metaphor. I would never argue against the need for such a war, at least a war with al Qaeda and the Taliban – the current forces of Islamic/Arab Militant Fundamentlism in the Middle East. But it seems like we ought to consider some other parameters beside the cat and mouse games that we’ve been in for the last decade or so – like what do these people really want? Are they fighting for something legitimate? I admit that it’s hard to know because, at least in Osama bin Laden’s case, there may be no answer to the question. Osama bin Laden may simply be crazy:
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — With a book written by one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, and with news of a daughter sheltering in the Saudi Embassy in Iran, some of the blanks are being filled in on the life of the 9/11 mastermind’s large family, including lurid details of his parenting style. Two weeks ago, the son, Omar bin Laden, revealed that many of the children who had been with their father in Afghanistan escaped to Iran following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion, and were still together in a walled compound under Iranian guard. Confirmation came with the news that a daughter, Eman bin Laden, had taken refuge in the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Saudi officials are negotiating with the Iranians to allow Eman to return to Saudi Arabia, where she was born, and on Tuesday Omar bin Laden told The Associated Press that he, as well as his wife and mother, had applied for visas to go to Tehran and help speed Eman’s case…
Bin Laden’s family was already under the spotlight in "Growing Up Bin Laden," written by Omar and his mother, Najwa bin Laden, and published in late October. The book describes a brood of children – up to 20 from different wives – who were raised from an early age by an authoritarian father who shunned the luxury his inherited wealth could buy. The mother and son write that the kids grew up in Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Afghanistan without laughter or toys, were routinely beaten, and lost their pets to painful death from poison gas experiments by their father’s fighters.
When they became young adults, their father asked them to volunteer for suicide missions. When Omar protested, bin Laden was quoted as replying: "You hold no more a place in my heart than any man or boy in the entire country. This is true for all my sons." It was then, Omar recounted, that he "finally knew exactly where I stood. My father hated his enemies more than he loved his sons."
Speaking to AP, Omar recalled visiting his father’s training camps in Afghanistan and being sent to the front lines of the civil war that tore Afghanistan in the 1990s. "I nearly lost my life so many times," he said. "People may ask why I left my father. I left because I did not want anyone to chose my destiny. … And I believe I chose correctly, for I chose life. I chose peace." Osama bin Laden was 17 when he married his Syrian first cousin, Najwa, then 15. The couple lived in the western port city of Jiddah, where bin Laden took three more wives. In Jiddah’s suffocating heat, the family was denied the use of refrigerators and air conditioners. When Omar’s asthma got bad, his father ordered him to treat it with honeycombs and onions.
In the early 1990s, bin Laden fell out with the Saudi royal family over the presence of U.S.-led troops on Saudi soil and moved his wives and children to Sudan. There he owned farms, grew sunflowers and set up several businesses. On a nighttime camping trip outside Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, bin Laden told his oldest sons to dig ditches in the desert and then ordered his wives and children to each lie in one of them, according to the book. When someone complained of the desert cold, bin Laden said they should cover themselves with dirt or grass. "Do not think about foxes or snakes," the book quoted him as saying. "Challenging trials are coming to us."
In 1994, the Saudi government stripped bin Laden of his citizenship. The next year five Americans were killed by a car bomb outside a U.S. military training center in Riyadh. It was the first attack on Saudi soil that the government blamed on bin Laden followers. Bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan in 1996. He moved his family — minus his second wife and her children, who had left him — to stone huts without electricity or running water high on a mountain in Tora Bora in Afghanistan.
There he took a fifth wife, believed to be a Yemeni; sent his children to the front lines of the Afghan civil war; and made them attend hours of jihadist indoctrination. In the book, Omar described how one day, while sitting with his father on the mountain, bin Laden told him about his plan is to destroy the U.S. from within. "I sat mute, feeling not one jolt of passion for my father’s life," Omar wrote. "I only wanted him to be like other fathers, concerned with his work and his family"…
Like the insane leaders before him, there’s likely little dealing with bin Laden or the top command of al Qaeda. We could never have negotiated with Hitler, or Stalin, or even Hussein – just as it’s unlikely that we can negotiate with Ahmadinejad. But we can understand the conditions that allow such people to rise to power. And that’s the suggestion of Bruce Hoffman in the second article below:
In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, "I’d rather overreact than underreact." This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.
The attempted bombing says more about al-Qaeda’s weakened state than its strength. In the eight years before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was able to launch large-scale terrorist attacks on several continents. It targeted important symbols of American power – embassies in Africa; a naval destroyer, the USS Cole; and, of course, the World Trade Center. The operations were complex – a simultaneous bombing of two embassies in different countries – and involved dozens of people of different nationalities who trained around the world, moved significant sums of money and coordinated their efforts over months, sometimes years.
On Christmas an al-Qaeda affiliate launched an operation using one person, with no special target, and a failed technique tried eight years ago by "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The plot seems to have been an opportunity that the group seized rather than the result of a well-considered strategic plan. A Nigerian fanatic with [what appeared to be] a clean background volunteered for service; he was wired up with a makeshift explosive and put on a plane. His mission failed entirely, killing not a single person. The suicide bomber was not even able to commit suicide. But al-Qaeda succeeded in its real aim, which was to throw the American system into turmoil. That’s why the terror group proudly boasted about the success of its mission…
In contrast to its plan on Sept. 11, which was to deliver a knock-out blow to the United States, al-Qaeda’s leadership has now adopted a "death by a thousand cuts" approach. There are five core elements to this strategy.
—First, al-Qaeda is increasingly focused on overwhelming, distracting and exhausting us. To this end, it seeks to flood our already information-overloaded national intelligence systems with myriad threats and background noise. Al-Qaeda hopes we will be so distracted and consumed by all this data that we will overlook key clues, such as those before Christmas that linked Abdulmutallab to an al-Qaeda airline-bombing plot.
—Second, in the wake of the global financial crisis, al-Qaeda has stepped up a strategy of economic warfare. "We will bury you," Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised Americans 50 years ago. Today, al-Qaeda threatens: "We will bankrupt you." Over the past year, the group has issued statements, videos, audio messages and letters online trumpeting its actions against Western financial systems, even taking credit for the economic crisis. However divorced from reality these claims may be, propaganda doesn’t have to be true to be believed, and the assertions resonate with al-Qaeda’s target audiences.
—Third, al-Qaeda is still trying to create divisions within the global alliance arrayed against it by targeting key coalition partners. Terrorist attacks on mass-transit systems in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 were intended to punish Spain and Britain for participating in the war in Iraq and in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and al-Qaeda continues this approach today. During the past two years, serious terrorist plots orchestrated by al-Qaeda’s allies in Pakistan, meant to punish Spain and the Netherlands for participating in the war on terrorism, were thwarted in Barcelona and Amsterdam.
—Fourth, al-Qaeda is aggressively seeking out, destabilizing and exploiting failed states and other areas of lawlessness. While the United States remains preoccupied with trying to secure yesterday’s failed state – Afghanistan – al-Qaeda is busy staking out new terrain…
—Fifth and finally, al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits from non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the West. The group’s leaders see people like these – especially converts to Islam whose appearances and names would not arouse the same scrutiny that persons from Islamic countries might – as the ultimate fifth column…
Al-Qaeda has become increasingly adept at using the Internet to locate these would-be terrorists and to feed them propaganda… But while al-Qaeda is finding new ways to exploit our weaknesses, we are stuck in a pattern of belated responses, rather than anticipating its moves and developing preemptive strategies. The "systemic failure" of intelligence analysis and airport security that Obama recently described was not just the product of a compartmentalized bureaucracy or analytical inattention, but a failure to recognize al-Qaeda’s new strategy. The national security architecture built in the aftermath of Sept. 11 addresses yesterday’s threats – but not today’s and certainly not tomorrow’s. It is superb at reacting and responding, but not at outsmarting. With our military overcommitted in Iraq and Afghanistan and our intelligence community overstretched by multiplying threats, a new approach to counterterrorism is essential.
"In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary," Obama said Thursday. He spoke of the need for intelligence and airport security reform, but he could have, and should have, been talking about the need for a new strategy to match al-Qaeda’s… This will be accomplished not just by killing and capturing terrorists – as we must continue to do – but by breaking the cycle of radicalization and recruitment that sustains the movement.
Bruce Hoffman is a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center
Some years back, when suicide bombers were young Palestinians blowing themselves up in the streets of Israel, I read several articles in the New Yorker that chronicled the details of the young bombers with case studies [An Arsenal of Believers]. They were treated as royalty with posters and tapes detailing their missions. It was chilling. The movie Syriana showed us the same thing – the recruitment of out of work adolescents into the suicide bomber trade. But in the recent attacks, it appears that the bombers are educated volunteers from a different class of people – Doctor [Major] Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Doctor Humam al-Balawi in Afghanistan, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in Detroit. In each case, a seeming motivator was some version of Islamic piety.
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| Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, reportedly obtained the business cards over the Internet. In addition to listing his profession and contact information, the cards contain a discrete reference to his religion: "SoA[SWT]." Watchdogs say the first letters are shorthand among militant Muslims to "soldier of Allah." The last letters refer to "Subhanahu Wa Ta’all," which means "glory to God." |
But how, one wonders, does Bruce Hoffman suggest we interrupt the "the cycle of radicalization and recruitment that sustains the movement" when the volunteers are educated people who sought out the jihadists themselves? How can we stop recruitment if the recruits actually believe that America is at war with Islam itself and they are doing God’s biding? And how can we convince them that we are not at war with Islam when we actually are – we are at war with two Islamic countries in the Middle East, one of whom did absolutely nothing to us to provoke our invasion.
"One day, while sitting with his father on the mountain, [Osama] bin Laden told him about his plan is to destroy the U.S. from within," said son Omar bin Laden. Thus far, he seems to have succeeded in that plan. When there’s an attack, we blame our Army, or airport security, or Obama. It’s as if we’ve accepted Osama bin Laden as a given. Wonder why? Do we feel guilty?
In my mind, there are some things we can do to deal with our situation with the Terrorists over and above what we are doing. We can resolve that we are not at war with Islam, and prove it by opening an active and intense dialogue with Islamic leaders – not the leaders of Islamic countries, but the religious leaders themselves. Islam is a powerful force to be reckoned with, and we haven’t engaged it. I expect reasonable Muslims are themselves suspicious that we are in fact at war with them. I don’t blame them, because we actually were – at least our last leaders were. We have to show them that isn’t true [anymore]. The second thing we can do is make our goals known. They are: Israel stays, Iran cannot go nuclear, we are still after al Qaeda. That’s it. Otherwise, the fate of the Middle East is in their hands. There’s still nothing right to do.
I personally believe that Bush and Cheney ignored the threats from al Qaeda, thinking there would be an incident like the U.S.S. Cole that they could parlay into a reason to invade Iraq – motivated by the Middle Eastern oil fields. 9/11 was much more than they bargained for. In spite of that, they carried on with their Iraq Plan, which fell apart in front of them [and all of us]. They literally let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora, and I’m more than tempted to think that that was an active decision to keep alive their excuse to invade Iraq. Their calculations never included the Iraq insurgency or the obvious possibility that we wouldn’t be greeted with open arms. Since then we’ve added Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Extraordinary Rendition, and Torture to the evidence that we are "the Great Satan." If we weren’t already there, we became the enemy bin Laden needed us to be…
As the pictures keep coming in from Haiti, the amount of devastation becomes increasingly horrific. Looking on the USGS earthquake site, there were a number of major aftershocks, Richter 5.0 or greater. Those surely had something to do with the collapse of so many buildings. Another complicating factor was that the earthquake hit at 4:53 PM yesterday. Sunset in Haiti yesterday was at 5:32 PM, only half an hour after it all started. So most of those aftershocks [on the right] happened after nightfall when there was no sunlight and the electricity was compromised by the earthquake. What a nightmare [literally]!
Well they sure nailed that one! 
Meanwhile, it emerged this weekend that Iris Robinson also had an affair with 19-year-old Kirk McCambley’s father, a butcher who died from cancer. She had another affair with a fellow DUP member in the 1980s which was witnessed by the security forces.
Wall Street firms aren’t the only banks that had a banner year. The Federal Reserve made record profits in 2009, as its unconventional efforts to prop up the economy created a windfall for the government. 
When Sarah Palin abruptly stepped down as Alaska governor in July before the end of her first term, many questioned how she could maintain a national presence without the platform of elected office.