No quarter taken. No quarter needed.

Neocons love to ask the rhetorical question: Is the fight against al Qaeda and other shadowy terrorist types a war or a police action? Are bin Laden, Zawahiri and shadowy evildoers enemies that need to be hunted down and killed, or criminals that need to be brough to justice. Clinton's mistake, goes the neo-con line, is he saw al Qaeda as a criminal enforcement problem. He was "swatting at flies", as W likes to say, instead of going after the source.



But Fareed Zakaria, in a Newsweek column out this week, argues asks a more pertinent question: Is The War Against Terrorism mainly a battle against states which sponsor terrorist groups, or is the real fight against terrorist organizations without borders, who don't need state sponsors? Zakaria argues persuasively that it's the latter. The money quote:


"Today's terrorists are harbored in countries like Spain and Germany—entirely unintentionally. They draw on support not from states but private individuals—Saudi millionaires, Egyptian radicals, Yemenite preachers."

29.3.04 02:33


Oil Wars


I could never figure out what "elitist" means in the context of a character flaw. If it's having more insight than your average Joe, or having gone to a better school, or having superb access to decision makers and change agents, or being well travelled and speaking more than one language, then the New York Times' Tom Friedman is guilty. This column blasts the lack of imagination shown by US leaders of all stripes in The War Against Terror.


People who say the Iraq War is all about oil only have it part right. I don't believe the US went to war just to bring more foreign oil wells online. But oil does play a huge part in our Middle East foreign policy. I don't think there's any way to deny that. Do you think the US would be cozy with a God-awful regime like the Saudi's if it wasn't for oil? Do you think Qaddafi would reach out to the West if he didn't have a fledgling oil industry to kick start? But Mideast dictators have been yanking our chains for 40 years or more for no other reason than we need their oil and they know it. And the US has obliged all manner of Arab megalomaniacs for fear of having the oil tap turned off. We are oil addicts, no different than crack whores who will screw anyone for a fix. This has led to a very sorry foreign policy that has placed human rights behind the need to appease oil rich dictators.


There is a hidden cost in every gallon of gasoline you buy. It's the cost of cleaning up the human wreckage left behind by our oil-centered foreign policy, and that includes filling in the giant hole in South Manhattan.


That's not the same as saying we had 9/11 coming. I have little patience for anyone who talks like that. But American dependence on oil is the elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one wants to talk about.



29.3.04 16:24


The Worst Form of Government

Why did George Bush wait until after 9/11 to move against al Qaeda and Iraq? The answer is pretty obvous, don't you think? Because he didn't have the backing of the American people, or "political capital" to those in know, to embark on any risky foreign adventures. OK, understandable.



It's the same reason that President Clinton didn't invade Afghanistan, or march on Baghdad, or send Charles Bronson after Osama bin Laden. The American people, and the world, wouldn't have stood for it.



Modern democracies are big, slow, lumbering beasts, and it takes a major shock to their central nervous systems to goad them into action. Case in point: on Saturday, Dec. 6, 1941, most Americans were content to let England and Nazi Germany fight it out among themselves. The following Tuesday, Americans were getting all misty eyed about their English cousins, and ready to hang Old Schickelgruber from a sour apple tree. Why the attitude adjustment? Pearl Harbor. We were attacked. Never mind that the signs were there for a long time that Hitler and Tojo were bad players. The mere prescence of evil in the world does not necessarily rally a democratic people to war.


"



It would be so much easier if the US were a dictatorship. The Saudis are funding radical Islam and encouraging the murder of innocent Americans? Invade Mecca and turned the Kabbala into a drive through burger joint. Syria getting uppity? Send in the 101st Airborne. The problem with that approach is the lack of accountability. Even if invading Saudi Arabia and Syria was warranted (net yet, anyway), what's to stop the dictator from invading Canada for its forest products, or England to take control of the Guiness factory (I could almost get behind that one).



I'll take the big, slow lumbering beast any day, because, like my hero Winston Churchill supposedly said, "Democracy is the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the other governments.
31.3.04 00:42


MacMurder










The arguments about whether terrorists need a state sponsor, or a even a link to al Qaeda, were laid to rest yesterday with the arrest of eight British citizens. The eight were caught with enough ammonium nitrate to either blow up a large building, or create a truly awesome garden. MI5 suspects the suspects, described as radical Islamists, didn't have daffodils on their minds.



From the Guardian:


The suspects had been under surveillance by MI5 and Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch for several weeks. Those arrested were all born and brought up in Britain. Security sources played down suggestions of any direct link between the arrested men and al-Qaida.



Sources referred to groups of young radicalised Muslims who were "difficult to label" but viciously anti-western. Security sources suggested that the motive of the alleged planned attacks was anti-western but not dictated by anyone in the al-Qaida hierarchy.


What we were calling al Qaeda a year or two ago is now a loosely knit franchise of angry, unassimilated Islamofascists bent only on killing as many Westerners as possible. Call it MacMurder. Some of the MacMurderers are bona fide graduates of the Aghan terror training camps, some are only acolytes, jihadist wannabes, who want to avenge 400 years of Western scientific and cultural dominance.


31.3.04 20:37


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