Tristero

Saturday, August 30, 2003

As Predicted  

It's awful when rank amateurs know better than pros:

Iraqi police have arrested four men in connection with the bombing of Iraq's holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, and all have links to al-Qaida, a senior police official told The Associated Press on Saturday.

The official, who said the death toll in the bombing had risen to 107, said the four arrested men -- two Iraqis and two Saudis -- were caught shortly after the car bombing on Friday...

The police official said the men arrested after the attack claimed the recent bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus attention on the country's porous borders, across which suspected foreign fighters are said to be infiltrating.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:22 AM

Friday, August 29, 2003

Coming Soon To A Wurlitzer Near You  

Josh Marshall explains how Bush will explain the Quagmire II:

To the extent that we're facing reverses in Iraq, we're not facing them because the plan was flawed or incompetently executed. We're facing them because the plan was sabotaged - by its enemies at home.

The saboteurs were the folks at the State Department and the CIA who stymied effective collaboration with the pre-war Iraqi opposition and members of the defeatist press who have a) demoralized Americans by exaggerating the problems with the occupation of Iraq and b)encouraged the mix of jihadists and Baathists, by creating that demoralization, to keep up their resistance and bombing by giving them the hope that America can be run out of the country.

Josh doubts it will work, but they'll try anyway. Me, I'm certain that they'll try. And if there is anything they can twist to reinforce it, they will. I suspect that, given how much the press seems to hate Dean, and are willing to fellate this administration, it just may work.

For my part, I doubt it'll work. But I think that's where we're going."
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:44 PM

Bookmark This Site Now: George W. Bush Scorecard of Evil  

Via Kos comes an absolutely indispensable link that is going in my tool bar: The George W. Bush Scorecard of Evil detailing the numerous evil and eviler acts and lies of the Worst President Ever (tm).
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:23 PM

Janklow Must Resign Now  

There is nothing good that will come out of it. But Janklow cannot properly serve his constituents or his country any longer.

Representative William J. Janklow of South Dakota was charged today with second-degree manslaughter in the death of a motorcyclist who was struck by Mr. Janklow's car on Aug. 16.

The prosecutor in Moody County, S.D., Bill Ellingson, said the manslaughter charge, a felony, implied "more than ordinary negligent conduct" and carried a maximum punishment of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

Mr. Ellingson said he had ruled out an even more serious charge, vehicular homicide, since there was no evidence that Mr. Janklow was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the accident. Witnesses said his car had run a stop sign at a rural intersection and struck the cycle driven by Randolph E. Scott, 55, of Hardwick, Minn.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:55 PM

Flood The Zone Friday: The Environment  

Write a letter to your local media. Notgeniuses has it all laid out for you.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:56 AM

Lie of the Month: Bush Is Underfinanced  

What kind of parents raise their kids to behave like this?

"'Democrats and their allies will have more money to spend attacking the president during the nomination battle than we will have to defend him,' campaign chairman Marc Racicot wrote in the fund-raising e-mail sent Wednesday night."

via Tom Tomorrow
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:24 AM

Why Friedman Gets My Goat  

An Atrios reader finds Quote Zero for those of us who think Friedman is an irredeemably awful writer:

I believe globalization did us all a favor by melting down the economies of Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Brazil in the 1990s, because it laid bare a lot of rotten practices and institutions in countries that had prematurely globalized.

I'm sure all the people who ended up suffering are truly grateful for that favor too, Tom.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:47 AM

Krugman  

How come only one columnist has perceived the Bushites with clear eyes?

...[E]ven the government of a superpower can't simultaneously offer tax cuts equal to 15 percent of revenue, provide all its retirees with prescription drugs and single-handedly take on the world's evildoers — single-handedly because we've alienated our allies. In fact, given the size of our budget deficit, it's not clear that we can afford to do even one of these things. Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they'll have quite a mess to clean up.

They will indeed.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 6:39 AM

Thursday, August 28, 2003

El Sid Tells It: Bush Failed The Country On 9/11  

Via The Horse who has been trotting out better and better stuff, and it was already great before then, comes a link to this blistering attack on Bush in re 9/11 by Sid Blumenthal. Finally, someone takes the mitts completely off:

"September 11th was the biggest security failure in American history and it was George W. Bush who neglected the issue and was the president that failed," Blumenthal told BuzzFlash. "The right is trying to blame President Clinton and Democrats generally for the lapses of the Bush administration. Bush has spent his whole life ducking responsibility, having his father's friends cover up his escapades and advance his career and portfolio, and having a political machine blame others and make excuses for his incompetence while hailing him as a great leader. But it's Bush who bears the responsibility. The buck stops there."

Exactly.

And he would dare to make 9/11 a political issue in 2004.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:33 AM

Boston Globe: US Report Finds No Real Evidence Of Iraq WMD's  

Well, actually, their headline said something different, namely "US says Iraq arms plan relied on deceit" but the article makes it clear that there's no there there:

After more than four months of searching hundreds of sites in Iraq, the team of US military officers and intelligence agents headed by former UN arms inspector David Kay has not produced hard evidence of weapons of mass destruction. US officials have not ruled out that stocks of weapons will still be found or were secreted out of the country before the war.

But the investigators' conclusions, which have emerged from interviews with senior Bush administration officials and multiple intelligence sources with access to the team's findings, make the White House's best case so far that Hussein hid an outlawed weapons program. A primary justification for toppling the regime was the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The sources say Kay -- who has in the past hinted in general terms at Iraq's deception in hiding a weapons program -- will build a strong, but largely circumstantial case that Hussein dispersed his weapons programs.

Translated: they ain't found a thing yet.

Now, as always, one needs to report these things with caveats. The leaked information could be deliberately misleading; the report could be stronger than this implies. And of course, wmd's may be found somewhere in Iraq.

And to repeat, I have no idea if there are any wmds in Iraq. Neither does Bush. The difference is he doesn't care.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:13 AM

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Go Hillary, Go!  

This is exactly right, even brilliant strategy on her part. She takes on a quintessentially New York issue, well within her rights as New York Senator, but it also happens to be a national issue going to heart of the character of the Bush presidency.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton called Tuesday for Senate hearings on a recently released Environmental Protection Agency inspector general's report that says the agency prematurely asserted that the air was safe to breathe after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Clinton, a New York Democrat, said the report, released Friday by the EPA's inspector general, shows the agency was under White House pressure to assure the public, even though it wasn't clear what potential toxins might be in the air.

'I don't think any of us ever expected to find out ... that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe, outdoors and indoors,' she said in a speech on the steps of City Hall.

'They knew and they didn't tell us the truth, and the White House told them not to tell us the truth,' Clinton said, adding that she wants to find out who was responsible for pressuring the EPA.

Hint: His initials are KR or DC.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 12:31 PM

Commandments Display Is Moved at Alabama Courthouse  

Good.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:25 AM

What If Iraq Had Been A Bush Victory?  

This country dodged a bullet, I think. Consider these facts:

1. The protracted fight by the Republicans over gerrymandering in Texas.
2. The California recall effort by Republicans.
3. Efforts now underway by Republicans in Nevada to recall their Democratic governor (see here.)
4. Serious attempts to start a recall effort in Pennsylvania by the Republicans (here).
5. The rumoured retirement of one, if not two, moderate Supreme Court Judges.
6. The draft of Patriot Act II.
7. The Total Information Awareness program instituted at the Pentagon by Iran/Contra felon Poindexter.
8. The increasing prominence of extremist voices on mainstream cable (think Savage).
9. The numerous far right nominations to high positions in the judiciary.
10. The increasing influence of war mongers like John Bolton and the floating of ideas like "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men go to Beirut."
11. A new low-yield nuclear arms testing program.

And so on.

Now, imagine if, upon entering Iraq, the Army had found tons of wmd's as Bush had expected to find, that the Iraqis had paved the way with flowers, and that Chalabi had been installed as was intended.

Bush and Bushism would have been impervious to any criticism. It would have been next to impossible to oppose them on any of the recalls, judicial appointments, military adventures, and many other initiatives, both legal and illegal, that they are pursuing.

In short, the failure of Bush's Iraq war has, at least temporarily, slowed down what can only be characterized, for want of a better phrase, as a coup d'etat* by the far right. It remains to be seen as to whether the slowdown means a defeat for the right, or merely a delay.

A blatant attempt to overturn elections around the country, increase surveillance of dissenters, pack the courts with cronies, and distract the country from domestic crackdowns by endlessly expanding the foreign battlefield into a perpetual world war.

Again, I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. But given all the other attempts to usurp power by the Bush crowd, the numerous recalls, which must have been planned to start after the Bush/Iraq war, could induce paranoia in the most stable of observers. All of it, with overwhelming public approval fueled by an overwhelming victory in Iraq.

And before one characterizes this as a raving fantasy, I should remind you that prominent Bush strategists like Laurie Mylroie, have even stranger ones. See here.

(Thanks to Atrios for the links to the new recall efforts.)

UPDATE: Charles Donefer had similar apocalyptic thoughts, perhaps slightly less alarmist than mine. (via Tom Tomorrow )

*Yes, I know, a government in power can't stage a coup d'etat because they are the state. But I can't think of another word for what the Bushites are up to.


posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:33 AM

Group plans Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn recall effort  

Group plans Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn recall effort
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:33 AM

Don't Forget: Raise Your Hands Before Speaking.  

A new column by Thomas Friedman has become a useful exercise in character building: How long can I keep my anger under control after reading something like this:

...Iraq is not a vase that we broke to remove the rancid water inside, and now we just need to glue it back together. We have to build a whole new vase. We have to dig the clay, mix it, shape it, harden it and paint it. (This is going to cost so much more than President Bush has told us.)

Ok. Three deep breaths. Remember, Tristero, even total idiots have their place in the scheme of things. At least he's no longer talking about lemons and lemonades... Ok, I'm better now.

What is Tom trying to say? Roughtly translated: the situation currently on the ground in Iraq can be described in two words: Hope. Less.

Have any doubts about it? Let "Col. Ralph Baker, commander of the Second Brigade"* explain:

"First we taught them how to run a meeting," he told me in his Baghdad office. "We had to teach them how to have an agenda. So instead of having this sort of group dialogue with no form, which they were used to, you now see them in council meetings raising their hands to speak. They get five minutes per member. It's basic P.T.A. stuff. We've taught them how to motion ideas and vote on them. . . . I have them prioritizing every school in their districts — which they want fixed first. I have to build credibility by making sure that every time they establish a priority, it gets done. That helps them establish credibility with their constituents. . . . There is a big education process going on here that is democratically founded. The faster we get Iraqis taking responsibility, the faster we get out of here."

Basic P.T.A. stuff. BASIC P.T.A. STUFF???

My Grid, what is Colonel Baker thinking? Today, the Iraqis learned to raise their hands in a meeting. And they'll be savvy enough in how freakin' long to run a complex, fractious, unstable country at the center of the most volatile region in the world?

Oh Holy Grid, protect us. The people running the US government, before they started this thing, actually thought it would turn out differently.

UPDATE: For those lacking the patience to struggle through Tom's prose, Atrios summarizes Friedman nicely today.

* Presumably this is what Col. Baker said; some fellow blogospherians, having noticed how often his interviewees sound as ditzy as he does, wonder whether Tom is salting his quotes.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:14 AM

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Murdering A Child To Save Him  

Atrios links to a screed from Interesting Monstah (link was bloggered. Locate "On Little Torrance" from August 26, 2003):

"And where was the secular left? Ah yes, I almost forgot - the secular left was too busy sneering and turning up their noses at the mental-midget Christian Rethuglikkkans to be of any help to these individuals, so obviously, so desperately in need. A missed opportunity to serve turns fatal."

As a card-carrying member of the secular left who spends a good deal of time turning up his nose at the mental-midget Christian Rethuglikans, I'd like to answer the rhetorical question above but in as dispassionate tone as I can muster.

First what happened to that poor boy and the girl that was beaten was unconscionable. If I had known about either, I'm certain I would have instantly reacted either by moving to stop it or calling the police if I couldn't. What makes me think I would do so? My reaction to numerous other emergencies in which my first reaction is to help or get help. You are right that some people do not respond this way when they see or know of others in crisis, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with political philosophy; rather, it seems mostly a matter of temperament. When I respond, I do so on an immediate, instinctive plane. I don't find it particularly praiseworthy, it's just who I am. Most of my friends flee such moments or freeze. Likewise I won't condemn them. Horror affects everyone differently.

What is, however, inexcusable is when a culture sees a clear moral wrong and refuses to address it. Slavery instantly comes to mind as do others. The death of innocents is another. Where were the liberals? Interesting Monstah asks. Heck, where was anyone???

Speaking personally, this liberal is first of all appalled at the ignorance and cruelty shown to that kid. Whatever the intentions, those that participated were walking on the road to hell when they endangered that kid's life.

I have no sympathy for their actions and little but disgust at the conditions that guided them, all of them, to travel that road: the lack of knowledge about science; the "preachers" and fools who encouraged them to pursue this homicidal quackery;the lack of moral character of the participants who stood watching while a child was murdered. Many if not all who were there when the child received his injuries were, whatever their intentions, murderers or accessories to murder. Those that are guilty should serve appropriate sentences.

There is a profound difference between the practice of religion and the actions of these people, as there is a profound difference between religious belief and the use of religion as a cover to promote truly odious political and social policies, as the Robertsons, Scalias, and Falwells of the world do.

This liberal, without hesitation, wishes a pox on all of them, a pox on the perversion of God's mercy that would lead to the willing participation in the gang-murder of an autistic child. A pox on those moral cowards who so misunderstand and corrupt the religious texts they hypocritically claim to revere that it is impossible to recognize the words of Christ in anything that they say.

This liberal sees no contradiction between taking a strong moral stance against ignorance, murder, and hypocrisy that operates under the rubric of a religious authority and taking an equally strong moral stance in support of deep respect for the joy, comfort, and transcendence that worship brings to the majority of the world.

I have known many deeply religious people of all faiths. They are very different in many respects, but they share a few traits in common. First, they are not murderers. Second, they never adopt the holier than thou attitudes of the religious right. Third, they proselytize by setting an example, not by cheap brainwashing stunts or witholding water from thirsty soldiers, as some perverted Army chaplain did during the Bush/Iraq war.

To the best of my knowledge, most liberals would agree with this formulation of liberal attitudes towards religion. It is, quite frankly, rather puzzling that this rather commonsense attitude towards religious belief and practice is the object of such controversy right now.

In any event, this liberal will continue to sneer mightily at power-hungry people who would dare to use their (rather dubious) faith in God to justify cynical grabs for secular power. And this liberal objects just as mightily to anyone who thinks his blanket condemnation of any practice that leads towards abuse, mutilation or murder is somehow a misunderstanding of what religion is all about.

I have not discussed my own faith or absence of faith. I have no intention of doing so. From my refusal, one cannot, and should not, infer anything about my spiritual beliefs or lack of it. In Matthew 6, a very wise person said some very wise words about how to show faith.

Would that his words were heeded more often.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 1:05 PM

Imitation of Christ  

Two kids from MIT tell you how!

Using mathematics, high-speed photography and a variety of flow visualization techniques, Bush, mathematics graduate student David L. Hu and mechanical engineering graduate student Brian Chan uncovered the true way in which water striders walk on water.

As the insect rests on the surface, the tips of its thin legs create miniscule valleys. It sculls the middle set of its three pairs of legs like oars, causing the water behind those legs to propel it forward as the surface of the valley rebounds like a trampoline.

Although the rowing motion does create tiny waves, “the waves do not play a significant role in the momentum transfer necessary for propulsion,” the researchers wrote. “The momentum transfer is primarily in the form of subsurface vortices.”

Seriously, folks, this is the sort of research that leaves one awestruck. Read the article. It's very beautiful and it has some movies to look at it, although I couldn't get through when I tried.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 8:20 AM

Bush Administration Fires Another Expert; Extremist Gains More Influence  

Who says intelligence and experience have any weight?

A top State Department expert on North Korea who advocated a policy of incentives as well as penalties to persuade the nation to abandon its quest for nuclear weapons has resigned, officials said today.

Jack Pritchard, the special envoy for negotiations with North Korea, is departing at a critical moment, days before six-nation talks begin in China to pressure North Korea to drop its efforts to reprocess spent fuel rods for weapons. He was criticized last week by a senator for being out of sync with the administration's policy.

And who won this little battle? John Bolton, of course, one of the most ignorant members of the administration, a man whose views are nearly indistinguishable from those of the John Birch Society.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:48 AM

Krugman On Pollution From 9/11  

This is an outrage. I have friends who live in this area, work in this area, some with kids. I vividly remember the reports in the Times about how safe the air was. I vividly remember them trusting the accuracy of those reports. This deception is literally criminal - not to say that all the others from the Bush administration are any better.

Last week a quietly scathing report by the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed what some have long suspected: in the aftermath of the World Trade Center's collapse, the agency systematically misled New Yorkers about the risks the resulting air pollution posed to their health. And it did so under pressure from the White House...

A draft E.P.A. report released last December conceded that 9/11 had led to huge emissions of pollutants. In particular, releases of dioxins — which are carcinogens and can also damage the nervous system and cause birth defects — created "likely the highest ambient concentrations that have ever been reported," up to 1,500 times normal levels. But the report concluded that because the outdoor air cleared after a couple of months, little harm had been done.

In fact, the main danger comes from toxic dust that seeped into buildings and remains in carpets, furniture and air ducts. According to a recent report in Salon, businesses that did environmental assessments of their own premises found alarming levels not just of dioxins but also of asbestos and other dangerous pollutants. So the most shocking revelation from the new report is that under White House direction, the E.P.A. suppressed warnings about indoor pollution. Scattered evidence suggests that as a result, hundreds of cleaning workers and thousands of residents may be suffering chronic health problems.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 7:33 AM

Monday, August 25, 2003

Friends of Judge Moore  

At a recent rally in support of Judge "Shred the Constitution" Moore, reported on David Neiwert's great blog, the right wing religious slime-balls were out in force, including Jerry Falwell and Mel Gibson's crazy anti-semitic dad. In addition, our dear friends at Focus On The Family have urged their lemmings members to travel to Alabama to show support:

Dr. James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, encouraged his nationwide
radio audience to travel to Montgomery, Alabama, if possible in to order to
participate in nightly rallies and prayer sessions there. The demonstrations
are being organized in support of Judge Roy Moore, the chief justice of the
Alabama Supreme Court, who is resisting a federal order to remove the Ten
Commandments from the state judiciary building.

Now it's time for George Bush to take a side. Hahahahaha!
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:41 PM

From the US Department of Really Really Bad Ideas  

Proof positive that incompetents are the most creative folks of all:

The United States has asked Israel to check the
possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil
refineries in Haifa [Israel]. The request came in a
telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official
to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, back in reality:

This weekend, the International Red Cross announced it's sending many foreigners home [from Iraq]. The group received intelligence that it might be the next terror target, and decided the only way to keep its people safe, is to get them out.

Josh Marshall weighs in on this idiocy and thinks it may be a way for Bush to diss Turkey rather than talk turkey with the leaders. This sounds truly far-fetched, biting off one's nose to spite one's face, but then again anyone who has made the mistake of believing that the Bush administration must be doing something well has ended up backpedaling furiously. (Pardon all the mixed metaphors.)
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 9:09 PM

New Fox Slogan By Joe Conason  

Since Fair And Balanced is more of a sad joke than a reality, Joe Conason suggests an excellent new slogan for the objectivity challenged Fox News. Go over, watch the ad, and read Joe's column (and while you're there, check out Tom Tomorrow's awesome, awesome new cartoon.).

Oh, and while you're at it, buy Joe and Tom's new books: Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth and The Great Big Book of Tomorrow: A Treasury of Cartoons. All the cool kids are reading them. So should you!
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 4:08 PM

Cooking With Marmite  

Yummy! (Yes, I really, really do love the stuff.)
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 3:57 PM

Kennedy  

I don't have a single opinion about the deeply flawed JFK but Christopher Hitchens certainly does: JFK was so sick and doped up, he could hardly function. To which I will respond, if being so out of it means that he didn't follow General Curtis Lemay's advice to start a nuclear war over Cuba, prescribe the same drug regimen for the Bush administration.

As for Hitchens' cheap aside that Kennedy was a moral defective (presumably because JFK had extramarital affairs more regularly than he was capable of performing other bodily functions), he should remember the recent, if unoriginal, words of his new god:

We are all sinners, Mr. Hitchens. I hope no one ever looks as closely at your life as all of us have at Kennedy's. Actually, I do, as it may mute your glibly expressed hypocrisy a tiny bit sooner.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 3:55 PM

American Enterprise Institute Fellow Wins Tinfoil Hat Award  

It is truly hard to believe that anyone sincerely holds such crackpot ideas but Laurie Mylroie, "an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute," is convinced that al Qaeda and bin Laden are Saddam Hussein fronts. This is from a NY Times book review:

[The CIA's] greatest sin, she proposes, is that it mulishly refused to agree that Iraq was behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

If it had, she suggests, then President Bush would have been saved the trouble of worrying about Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. Not that she doubts that the weapons were there. But if Sept. 11 had been recognized as a plot hatched in Baghdad, then there would have been a clear-cut case for war, one not fought pre-emptively but in self-defense. Mylroie complains that the C.I.A. seems to have been duped into believing that Al Qaeda is a loose-knit group of Islamic extremists, and that the agency's analysts have turned a collective blind eye to the evidence suggesting that Al Qaeda could well be a front organization for Iraqi intelligence. She believes that Iraq was behind almost every major terrorist attack of the past decade, dating back to the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

What has the C.I.A. overlooked that she hasn't? Here Mylroie slips, offering speculation in place of solid evidence. She suggests that key Qaeda leaders who have been captured by the United States may only be posing as Qaeda leaders: they could actually be Iraqi intelligence agents who are way, way undercover. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations and the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and who is now in American custody, may not really be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He could be an Iraqi intelligence agent secretly sent to run Al Qaeda by Saddam Hussein. Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a 1995 plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific, who now sits in a federal prison, also may be an Iraqi agent. Both Mohammed and Yousef, who are related, are Kuwaitis originally from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, and their papers and their identities could have been stolen for use by Iraqi intelligence agents during Baghdad's occupation of Kuwait in 1990.

Well, yes, it is possible that the World Trade Center bombers really are Iraqis who stole the identity of transplanted Kuwaitis. About as possible that it is true that there really was a spaceship trailing the Hale-Bopp comet a few years back.
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 2:50 PM

A Very Strange Story  

According to Scott Ritter, the very epitome of a loose cannon who has the distressing habit of being right more often than not, the US did nothing to secure the Iraqi archives that housed information about Iraq's wmd programs.

WTF is that about?
posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:07 AM

Sunday, August 24, 2003

Why I'm Not Too Concerned, Even Now, That Al Qaeda Will Nuke Us Anytime Soon  

Inadvertently, from The NY Times:

Ismail Abu Shanab, the prominent Hamas leader who was killed Thursday by six missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter into his station wagon, was asked in 1999 why so many people were eager to serve as suicide bombers. He said there was only one thing a person needs to qualify: "A moment of courage."

"The person who explodes a bomb does not need a lot of training," Mr. Shanab told Jessica Stern, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill," during a 1999 interview in Gaza.

A person using a knife, Mr. Shanab explained, is usually "nervous." A gun takes intensive training, and too much time. Knife and gun attacks also depend on a degree of luck. Things can go wrong. But a suicide bomber, to be a success, only needs that single moment of courage, Mr. Shanab said, which he found was in abundant supply in Gaza.

Exactly.

Suicide bombs are cheap and, most importantly, easy to build and deploy. Not so for wmd's. While they were more than willing to try, I am sure, it simply strains commonsense to imagine that al Qaeda, pre Iraq War II, had the intellectual capacity to design, build, test, store, distribute, deploy, and initiate an attack using even the simplest biochem weaponry, let alone a nuke. If you spent most of your youth memorizing the Qur'an, you are singularly ill-prepared to understand the technology required to use such ordnance. Now, of course, that Bush has encouraged Middle Eastern youth to become anti-American terrorists by invading their countries, killing their leaders and trying to convert them to Christianity, there is a considerable amount of incentive for radical Islamist madrassahs to add basic physics and biology to their curricula. I suspect that while the West is safe in the short run from wmd Qaeda attacks, around 5 years or so from now, we will start to see at the very least failed, but serious, attempts to deploy wmd's by radical Islamists.

Insert here boilerplate stating that of course al Qaeda is an extremely dangerous organization and movement. However, it is just as dangerous to misconstrue their capabilities as it is to ignore them, as Bush did until September 11, 2001. Based on the public evidence, there is simply no reason to be overly concerned about a Qaeda-based wmd attack; while the spirit and flesh are more than willing, the brains are weak.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:55 AM

 

Ismail Abu Shanab, the prominent Hamas leader who was killed Thursday by six missiles fired from an Israeli helicopter into his station wagon, was asked in 1999 why so many people were eager to serve as suicide bombers. He said there was only one thing a person needs to qualify: "A moment of courage."

"The person who explodes a bomb does not need a lot of training," Mr. Shanab told Jessica Stern, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill," during a 1999 interview in Gaza.

A person using a knife, Mr. Shanab explained, is usually "nervous." A gun takes intensive training, and too much time. Knife and gun attacks also depend on a degree of luck. Things can go wrong. But a suicide bomber, to be a success, only needs that single moment of courage, Mr. Shanab said, which he found was in abundant supply in Gaza.

Exactly.

Suicide bombs are cheap and, most importantly, easy to build and deploy. Not so for wmd's. While they were more than willing to try, I am sure, it simply strains credulity to imagine that al Qaeda, pre Iraq War II, had the intellectual capacity to design, build, test, store, distribute, deploy, and initiate an attack using even the simplest biochem weaponry, let alone a nuke. If you spent most of your youth memorizing the Qur'an, you are singularly ill-prepared to understand the technology required to use such ordnance. Now, of course, that Bush has encouraged Middle Eastern youth to become anti-American terrorists by invading their countries, killing their leaders and trying to convert them to Christianity, there is a considerable amount of incentive for radical Islamist madrassahs to add basic physics and biology to their curricula. I suspect that while the West is safe in the short run from wmd Qaeda attacks, around 5 years or so from now, we will start to see at the very least failed, but serious, attempts to deploy wmd's by radical Islamists.

Insert here boilerplate stating that of course al Qaeda is an extremely dangerous organization and movement. However, it is just as dangerous to misconstrue their capabilities as it is to ignore them, as Bush did until September 11, 2001. Based on the public evidence, there is simply no reason to be overly concerned about a Qaeda-based wmd attack; while the spirit and flesh are more than willing, the brains are weak.

posted by tristero permanent link to this entry 11:54 AM