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Edited on Mon Sep-18-06 10:51 AM by BurtWorm
I'm in the final pages of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine and the lesson I'm taking from it is that the Bush administration is perhaps *the* major obstacle to "winning" the alleged "war on terror." Big news, right? But the beauty of Suskind's book is it painstakingly shows precisely how this is so by comparing the high-pressure, low-patience approach of the politicoes at the top (the notables, Suskind calls them) with the low-intensity, high-patience approach of the people in the trenches (or "invisibles"). Suskind's heroes are the careerists who have been fighting this "war" for years before the Bushists foisted themselves onto the scene and who have had a handle on it, mostly using tools already in the box on 9/11. The new tools championed by idiots like John Yoo and Dick Cheney are not only threats to American democracy and its constitutional republic (as if that weren't enough of an argument against them) but they simply do not fucking work(, morons!).
Another damning, though less obvious piece of information in the book concerns the tenor of the war the jihadists are trying to wage with the west, as the analysts whom Suskind interviewed have put it together since 9/11. It should be pointed out that it wasn't a war until the Bushists got sucker-punched into it, called it a crusade and gave the jihadists a rallying cry that they still exploit, despite Bush's well-publicized retraction of the term in the early days of the Afghanistan invasion. Suskind shows how the analysts came to realize that, for some reasons that remain mysterious, al Qaeda clearly stopped targeting the US itself before the US changed its focus from Afghanistan to Iraq.
The major piece of evidence for this change in strategy came from someone ID'd only as Ali, a high-level Qaeda member who turned, not because of torture, but because of old-fashioned disillusionment with his own leadership and the promise of getting amply rewarded by the yankees. Ali told the CIA about an operational plot to unleash hydrogen cyanide in the NYC subways using a device called a mubtakkar, which can be made from readily available materials and can mix and release the chemicals remotely using a cell phone. (The instructions for building these devices are also readily available from the Internet.) In any event, by the time the CIA was clued into it, the plot had been called off, and al Qaeda had begun to focus on hitting the Saudi royals.
The upshot of this is that al Qaeda, which was decimated using conventional combat in Afghanistan, doesn't need an army at hand. It is directing its jihad via Internet and underground communication against all of its enemies--the US, Europe, Australia, and governments in the Arab world--by carefully selecting its targets based on predictions (usually pretty accurate ones) of how the governments affected will behave, and leaving it to homegrown jihadists to carry out the dirty work. The Bushists have known for some time that, despite having a temptingly vulnerable target in the US--with its porous borders and impossible-to-patrol ports and power and chemical plants--al Qaeda's attention has shifted elsewhere. But this doesn't keep them from telling the whopper again and again that "we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here."
The fact that should be obvious to anyone who's paying the least bit of attention is that the Iraq war is al Qaeda's dream recruitment poster. It's difficult to see what else the war there is accomplishing. And it then begins to make a lot of sense why al Qaeda wants to keep the Bushists on their string. Because the Bushists are very useful idiots indeed.
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