Since the announced killing of Emanuel Goldstein — er, Osama Bin Laden — I’ve seen much speculation on what kind of big terror attack we can expect in retaliation. But if Al Qaeda was capable of a large-scale, spectacular reprisal attack, I think they’d already have done it between 9-11 and now. Their actual pattern since then has been one of poorly organized, penny ante attacks, carried out by poorly trained people — suggesting that they picked the low-hanging fruit on 9-11.
It’s quite plausible that, given enough incompetent attempts, somebody will eventually succeed in detonating a bomb and blowing up a plane in the air. Enough monkeys with enough typewriters and enough time, and all that. But even if it happens, the damage will be limited to the passengers on one plane out of millions of flights in any one year. With hardened cockpits and passengers who understand that the goal of hijacking has changed, it will never be possible to fly a plane into a high-value target again. And it’s unlikely all the TSA security theater in the airports, aimed at preventing the previous attack, is good for anything except satisfying the “Well, we have to do SOMETHING!” idjuts.
The interesting thing, though, is that however poorly planned and executed the attacks have been, they were conducted in accordance with a brilliant strategic vision of maximizing bang for the buck in terms of the U.S. government stupidity they provoke. An attempt to smuggle explosives on a plane doesn’t have to be anything more than crude and ineffectual, because TSA’s knee-jerk overreaction — not blowing up the plane — is the real goal. The goal is to make the passenger screening process, the x-raying of all cargo, etc., so onerous, humiliating, expensive and time-consuming that air traffic shrinks radically and the U.S. economy takes a hit. The goal is for the American people to see their government as intrusive, arbitrary, and callous.
The goal is also for the U.S. government, in response, to stay bogged down in endless wars in the Islamic world, radicalizing people there and causing them to see the U.S. as a crusader army — in the meantime wearying and demoralizing the U.S. population and bankrupting the government. To paraphrase the late Mr. Bin Laden, it’s only necessary for a couple of brothers with “Al Qaeda” written on a piece of cloth to show themselves in Antarctica, and the President will send Marines to fight the penguins there “so we won’t have to fight them here.”
In that vein, prominent libertarian commentator Radley Balko writes at Reason, “Osama Won” (May 2, 2011).
Wow — deja vu, all over again! William Graham Sumner, during the Spanish-American War, gave a speech on “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” His argument was that the United States, a nation formed in reaction against European global empires like Spain’s, had — by adopting expansionism and imperialism — been conquered by Spain in the field of ideas and policies despite defeating her on the battlefield. Despite its ostensible “victory,” the United States experienced a moral defeat by abandoning everything it stood for and becoming what it hated.
Balko, likewise, lists all the changes undergone by America in the past decade. The U.S. has detained people without trial and tortured them at “black sites” overseas, rendered them to other countries to be tortured, claimed a right to detain American citizens without trial, barred those who turned out to be innocent from legal redress in the American courts for their detention and torture, refused compensation to hundreds of innocent people detained at Gitmo, prohibited detainees from talking about their detention and torture, turned the Fourth Amendment’s “search and seizure” provisions into toilet paper with USA PATRIOT and illegal wiretaps, further militarized local police forces, and set up what amounts to a system of internal passport checkpoints in the airports…
Whew.
If, as American presidents have never tired of claiming, Al Qaeda attacked us because “they hate us for our freedoms,” they must like us a whole lot more now. If Al Qaeda is really fighting us because they hate our freedoms, the war is already over.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, We’re No Longer Free; al Qaeda Must Love US Now, Portland, Oregon Skanner, 05/07/11
- Kevin Carson, Come al-Qaeda ha sconfitto gli USA, Effedieffe (Italy), 05/09/11
- Kevin Carson, The Defeat of the United States by Al Qaeda, Islam Daily, 05/09/11
- Kevin Carson, The Defeat of the United States by al-Qaeda, Antiwar.com, 05/07/11
- Kevin Carson, Defeat of the US by al Qaeda, St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph, p. 10, 05/05/11
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Usama would consider the war against the USA won if oil hit prolonged vaules > 100 USD, we spent billions occupying foreign land/quagmire.
he has won. the empire is on it's knees.
It may help to link the first sentence to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein
I read somewhere that “strategic vision” had been confirmed by experts in the Middle East [but I can’t remember where]. After the shoe bomber and the Gatorade bottles and the underwear bomber and so forth, they have figured out that they are waging the most cost effective war in history.
They can do some half-assed plan that costs them $20,000 and costs the U.S. $20,000,000 in new defense measures, thanks to the highly predictable reactionary nature of our government.
Already we hear about Zawahiri taking up Goldstein's mantle. I wonder if the State holds auditions for the role?
Regarding the restrictions on American liberties, it’s not OBL who gained these victories. It’s the persons in positions of power within the US government, those that live for power over others, those who dream of a fed.gov with full control over the plebes, but with amnesty for themselves, those that see the correct order of things as if the people require a nanny, these are the persons who have benefited the most from the OBL bogeyman via their war on terror, by several orders of magnitude moreso than OBL himself.
Like the war on drugs, the war on terror was contrived by persons within the USG and with participation by the majority of persons in the US Congress and WH, and these people are responsible for their own actions. The infringements upon liberty were enacted by the USG itself, not by some bogeyman in a Tora Bora cave or Paki safe house. Don’t think for a second that these persons in the USG have any intention of releasing their grip on their newly acquired power. They aim to have a police-state and they expect to get it.
What the evidence points to is that Bin Laden's already been dead for years and that his recent execution is a propaganda hoax. This is part of a recent article by researcher David Ray Griffin called 'Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive?:
"Objective Evidence that Bin Laden is Dead
The objective evidence includes the following facts:
First, up until mid-December 13, 2001, the CIA had regularly been intercepting messages between bin Laden and his people. At that time, however, the messages suddenly stopped, and the CIA has never again intercepted a message.
Second, on December 26, 2001, a leading Pakistani newspaper published a story reporting that bin Laden had died in mid-December, adding:
“A prominent official in the Afghan Taleban movement . . . stated . . . that he had himself attended the funeral of bin Laden and saw his face prior to burial.”
Third, bin Laden had kidney disease. He had been treated for it in the American Hospital in Dubai in July 2001, at which time he reportedly ordered two dialysis machines to take home. If you have ever wondered what bin Laden was doing the night before the 9/11 attacks, CBS News reported that he was being given kidney dialysis treatment in a hospital in Pakistan. And in January of 2001, Dr. Sanjay Gupta said – based on a video of bin Laden that had been made in either late November or early December of 2001 – that he appeared to be in the last stages of kidney failure.
Fourth, In July of 2002, CNN reported that bin Laden’s bodyguards had been captured in February of that year, adding: “Sources believe that if the bodyguards were captured away from bin Laden, it is likely the most-wanted man in the world is dead.”