Funmurphys: the Blog

The Triumph of Hope over Experience

Posts Tagged al-Qaida

The Path to 9/11 (2)

Sep 15

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror, TV | 2 Comments

Yes, I actually watched The Path to 9/11, except a chunk in the middle Sunday night. First up, the negatives. I did manage to catch two glaring errors: a couple of times they talked about scrambling F-16s and they showed the same clip of a F-14. I’m sure Lock-Mart would have been happy to provide a clip of a F-16 taking off. And then when they had the Tomahawk missile strike against Afganistan, they showed video of a Harpoon leaving a canister. I suppose the marketing for the land attack capability in the latest version of Harpoon went much better than I realized. Since I worked on Harpoon for a long while, I admit I enjoyed that goof.

Seriously, while I loved the no commercials, the shaky cam started to seriously annoy long before the end. My head isn’t that unsteady, so it just comes across as fake. And I about laughed outloud towards the end when after the attacks Condoleeza Rice told Richarde Clarke, “Yes boss, we sure do need a strong white man to run things around here.” (Or words to that effect.) Perhaps I’m wrong, but it strikes me that in a meeting with Rice and Cheney in it, Clarke is in fact chopped liver. I think Condi had far more to complain about than Maddy Albright, who came across as tougher than the rest of the Clinton cabinet combined and someone who should be negotiating on behalf of our country. Hell, as peaceful as I am I’d be ready to fix bayonet and charge uphill into machine gun fire if the character in the movie were leading the way.

Could they have found an older looking guy to play Cheney? He’s not a bad looking 65 in real life, but in the movies they always have somebody playing him who looks like he hasn’t smiled in 40 years and has one foot in the grave.

Here’s the real problem with the movie, and any such look back – there are nothing but connected dots. The movie spans 8 years in 3 hours, and only included are the events that matter. So when watching the movie, of course its all so obvious. But in real life, there is all kinds of stuff going on, and separating signal from noise is very hard.

The fault for 9/11 lies squarely with al-Qaida, and neither the Clinton or Bush administrations. Yes, had some things been done differently, we might have been able to sniff out and stop the plot. So rather than looking back to point fingers, we should be looking back to figure out what are the things we can do better. And that just isn’t happening.

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Resistance To Change

Sep 10

Posted by Kevin Murphy in Culture, The War on Terror | No Comments

I picked up a book at the library about Venice — yes, inspired by my recent trip there (someday, and soon, I will actually get you there in the European Vacation series) — and I managed to get a good one, Venice: The Hinge of Europe 1081-1797, by history professor William McNeill. Since it was written in 1974, no shadow of current political controversy touches it; yet I can’t help but be struck by certain passages and their application to today:

Widely diverse reactions flow from encounters with new and superior cultural traits: successful borrowing or inventive adaptation within the receiving cultural context are relatively rare but of great historical importance because it is in such circumstances that additions to human skills and capacities are most likely to arise. Far more common, but historically less important, are the instances when men draw back, reaffirm their accustomed patterns of life, and reject the attractive novelty because it seems either unattainable or else threatening and dangerous. In such cases it may become necessary to reinforce accustomed ways in order to withstand the seductions inherent in exposure to what appears to be a superior foreign product. Cultural change, sometimes very far reaching, may thus paradoxically result from especially strenuous efforts to maintain the status quo.

I have to applaud the fact that in 1974 a professor could not just mention that one culture could have traits superior to another, but write a book that looked at such cultural flows.

But more importantly, is this what we are seeing in action today on the part of Islamofascist terrorists? An excessive reinforcement of accustomed ways? Is this why poverty has no correlation to becoming an Islamofascist terrorist, but exposure to the West does? Is it possible that the actual agents of 9/11, the Mohammed Attas and Hani Hanjours, as well as the mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed all of whom spent time living in the United States, only had their murderous intent reinforced, possibly created, by such direct exposure to a different culture.

Of course, the actions of al-Qaida et al. aren’t directly entirely, or even primarily, at the West. Far more Iraqi’s have been killed by al-Qaida operatives than westerners. Are we seeing extra strenuous efforts to maintain a status quo, or at least the illusion of one? While al-Qaida dreams of defeating the west, they also dream of ruling the Islamic world and imposing their brand of Islam on it. And to them, their Islam is the original, pure, untainted by foreigners Islam, the idea being to return to the status quo ante pernicious western influence.

Is then what we are experiencing a fight by a part of the Islamic culture against both the rest of the Islamic culture and the West over how much Islamic culture should be influenced by the West?

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A Metric For Victory?

Apr 27

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror | 1 Comment

Now that’s what I call a provocative headline: Al Qaida Admits Defeat:

Many Moslems still support terrorism, just not in their neighborhood. But after watching what happened in Iraq and Saudi Arabia since 2003, Moslems can no longer be assured that, once unleashed, Islamic terrorism will only be carried out somewhere else. Moreover, years of al Qaeda boasting have failed the reality check. No amount of hot air and spin will change the fact that al Qaeda has accomplished none of its goals, and has gotten lots of Moslems killed in the process.

What Strategy Page is talking about is that the Islamic world as a whole no longer supports terrorism as a solution to their problems, even though some individual Moslems do.

As far as admitting defeat, that doesn’t mean the fightings over though. And looking at WWII, the casualties went up as the war went on. Both the US and Japan took far more casualties after Midway than before, but at that point the handwriting was on the wall for the Japanese.

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My Big Picture

Sep 7

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror | No Comments

Radical Islam is on the move, not just bloodying its borders, but at times fighting with state Islam. Where once state Islam was the agent, now private Islam is the agent of Jihad, except where radical Islam can take over a country, like Afghanistan. Russia is just the most recent target. The impotency of state Islam is the reason it is content to sit on the sidelines and let private Islam do the dirty work, and why the work is so dirty. Asymmetrical warfare is not the first choice, but the only choice for radical Islam, and having made a virtue of necessity radical Islam has embraced terrorism wholeheartedly.

First Armed Liberal posted his thoughts on Beslan and Chechnya and asked a vital question:

“If terrorism is about ‘liberation’ – about birthing new states, like Chechnya or Palestine, or about ‘freeing’ states like Iraq – we have to ask ourselves what kind of states will be born or won through that process.”

Then Dan Darling provided background on Beslan and Chechnya and notes:

This should in no way be seen as an endorsement of Russian policies in Chechnya, which have been worse than brutal – they’re simply ineffective. I’ll conclude with a link to a reputable organization that is seeking to raise money for the victims of this tragic act of barbarism.

Allah wants you to realize that Putin is not our friend. And that’s true. But it wasn’t Putin who was attacked, it was Russia itself. Putin is the current ruler of Russia, and both the enemy of our enemy and a practitioner of a realist and ruthless foreign policy.

You can look around the world and see of lots of separate fights between people who happen to be Islamic radicals and people who aren’t, including one between Osama Bin Laden and the US, or you can take the holistic approach and see a fight between a particular political/religious philosophy and the rest of the world. If your vision is the former, you will have a disconnected, spasmodic response. If your vision is the latter, then you will seek coordination with all the various targets of radical Islam and ultimately the end of radical Islam. One way you fight each head of the hydra separately; the other way you try to kill the body of the hydra. 

So we can be squeamish about our partners, not want to get involved in “their fight”, or we can seek coordinated response, one that perhaps can be less brutal and broad brush than the responses that will surely come from fellow combatants anyway.

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Law or War?

Jun 10

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror | No Comments

Phil Carter does a pretty thorough job of discussing the Padilla case, but I have to agree with JAG Central that the key to the case is whether or not Jose Padilla is an enemy combatant or not.

Since the FBI found Padilla’s application to the al Qaeda training camp in a binder that contained 100 other such applications, type-written each with the title at the top, “Mujahideen Identification Form/New Applicant Form,” I don’t see how you can argue he wasn’t an enemy combatant. And if he’s an enemy combatant, then the whole panoply of American rights goes out the window. Period. End.

It’s important to remember that it was al-Qaida, and not George Bush or the US military that turned our country, along with every other country, into a battlefield. Jose Padilla was an enemy soldier trying to infiltrate our lines to kill civilian non-combatants. Now we can decide that it is better that 99 enemy soldiers go free than a single innocent be wrong classified, but let’s be honest about it. We’re betting lives on our ability to be near omniscient and omnipotent, and I don’t think our track record is that good. If you found an enemy soldier infiltrating your lines, would you prefer to act immediately, or wait until you had enough evidence that you could take to court?

If we adopted the standard that once an al-Qaida operative was in the US, and a US citizen, we had to work through the legal system, what kind of pressure would that place on our defenders? Waiting for a crime of mass murder to be committed while they just watched and waited and hoped they could stop it in time. Wouldn’t it be easier (and better) to just make those people disappear with no accountability? Questioned and then killed? Just how badly do we want to tempt ourselves?

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Extremely. But Still Dangerous

May 12

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror | No Comments

I’m going to take Andrew Sullivan to task, and not because he can fill his blog with letters that are better than what I write, but because he seems to forget something. Andrew asks “How Dumb Is Al Qaeda” regarding how they released their miserable snuff video without waiting for the furor over Abu Ghraib to die down. And then he goes on to point out that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union as another example of the stupidity of evil. 

Well. Let’s remember that killing infidels and thus demonstrating the superiority of Islam is what Al Qaeda is all about. It’s a stupid, vicious, reprehensible program beginning to end. How much strategic sense (or realism) can a movement have that longs for a return of the glories of Andalusia?

And to follow up, Hitler’s goal for WWII was to gain living space in the east, especially the Soviet Union. He wrote about it in Mein Kampf, which he wrote in the days when German authorities had the good sense to put him in jail and long before he came to power. The real example of stupidity was Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US while he was still fighting the USSR and Britain when he had nothing to gain from it.

Both are examples of a person or group staying true to their core values. Al Qaeda will never be anything but an instrument of death and terror. Their only response to any situation is to kill – the only question is one of scale.

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Too Much Information?

Mar 4

Posted by Kevin Murphy in The War on Terror | 3 Comments

I’m glad they caught the Al Qaeda mastermind in Pakistan. What I don’t get is all the information the press is reporting about it — and I assume the info is being provided by our own government. If you honestly think this guy knows who, what, and where, wouldn’t you like to keep his capture quiet until you can pick up the people he knows about? You have to figure the publicity is going to be like turning the lights on cockroaches – there’s a whole lot of scurrying going on right now. And by letting on that computers and documents were also seized, every Al Qaeda operative has to figure they’ve been compromised – they can’t rely on Mr. Mohammed’s not talking. I suppose it could be that the disruption, uncertainty, and fear caused by the announcement outweighed the possibility of capturing more operatives; it could be that our intelligence agencies figured Al Qaeda knew and could inform it’s people anyway even if there were no public report; and maybe it was felt that a public report would cause a burst in bottom up message traffic as operatives checked in with higher ups that would be more enlightening than a burst of top down if the higher ups were informing the troops. And of course, we can’t be told why the info was released or it would defeat the purpose of releasing it.

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