A few reactions to Topic A from Boston

It's too bad the cable news people (Rachel & Chris & Chris & Lawrence) feel compelled to tell us what the tragedy "means" before they even tell us what happened.  They're in such a rush to package everything, to give everything a logo, that they skip over the factual details that may hold the actual answers they pretend to seek.  However, I have an uneasy feeling that MSNBC and CNN and Fox are not going to be able to give this one a "clothing label" (Shoe Bomber, Underwear Bomber) and be done with it.  This terrorist operation does not have the Keystone Kops kharacteristics of the Times Square terrorist who managed to lock himself out of his own car (bomb), nor is it one of the entrapment scenarios the FBI concocts from time to time where they recruit a bunch of incompetent jihadists to participate in a half-ass, dead-end plot that the FBI rushes in to disrupt at the last second (before the plot was about to fail).

No, what this incident seems most like, what it calls to mind, is an IED set off in Baghdad.  The talking heads seem loath to confront that possibility, and for understandable reasons.  That's not something they want to get into.  They want a corporate "handle" for this incident that makes it titillating and exciting and above all heroic and self-congratulatory, to confine it to the current news cycle, so Americans can pay attention for a couple of days, feel good about themselves, and then move on with their lives.  So Rachel Maddow will talk earnestly to MSNBC's go-to terrorism experts who will discuss in general what motivates people to blow up other people while carefully avoiding any explanation that sounds too serious. Or too likely to provoke any soul searching on our part.

But think about it: if you've read accounts of how improvised explosive devices are used in Iraq and Afghanistan, they seem exactly like what happened yesterday at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  A bomb, maybe in a backpack casually left behind, is planted somewhere (watching the news for several hours last night, I was never able to find out exactly where, but one runner's account reported in the New York Times suggested one of the bombs was in a Starbuck's).  The bomb contains high explosives and a detonating device, maybe a garage door opener which can be signaled with a cell phone.  The bombs detonate a few seconds apart.  This could result from a signal from one cell phone or maybe two, from a lone jihadist or maybe a team.  Logic suggests that more than one person was involved.  One or more operatives to walk along the crowded sidewalks with backpacks, armed and ready to blow, while their co-conspirators wait a safe distance away with cell phones.

It's easy, really, and what's always amazed me is that, given the phenomenon the CIA calls "blowback" (anti-American sentiment from our many wars in Muslim countries), this sort of thing doesn't happen more often, even routinely, the way that mass shootings with automatic weapons have become routine in American life.  In part, it has seemed to me that the fatal flaw for the jihadists is their preference for the spectacular or the unnecessarily difficult: 9/11 illustrates the preference for the Big Score, but the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber demonstrate the fallacy of attempting a terrorist attack in circumstances where (a) the actual detonation process becomes obvious to those around the terrorist and (b) the operative becomes emotionally overwhelmed because he knows he's going down with the plane.

If the hypothesis is correct, that yesterday's tragedy was a jihadist operation involving remote-signaled IED's, then we now have a helluva problem on our hands.  For one thing, the perpetrators are no doubt still at large.  For another, it presents us with the disquieting feeling that the War on Terror (TM) has come home.  Our "liberal" news outlet, MSNBC, doesn't quite know what to do with that. They can "oppose" the Iraq War, for example, once general public opinion has made it safe to do so, but they can't begin talking about logical consequences of having fought the war in the first place. Such as the likelihood that jihadists would come over here and start detonating IED's in Boston and other American cities exactly as they've shown they can do in Muslim war zones.

Instead, Rachel Maddow "interviews" Ron Suskind, who assures everyone that the bombers "cannot win" because of some peerless quality the American people supposedly possess where we cannot be frightened or intimidated, and next year's Boston Marathon will be bigger and better than ever, et cetera.  Just don't start talking about "blowback."  We prefer the "lone American nut" thesis.  We prefer the randomly pathological to the logically political, because that way we're always right, and we don't have to entertain any uneasy thoughts about how maybe we should have seen this coming.

Time will tell.  In the meantime, the MSM will blather on about this incident's "place in history" and the rest of it.  I thought, oddly enough, that the real star of last night's news shows was a young trauma surgeon at Mass General named Peter Fagenholz.  He answered reporters' questions cogently, directly, after a long day in which he had performed six emergency operations on grievously wounded civilians.  No speculation from him.  He was humble and obviously supremely competent. Tellingly, he acknowledged the help he'd gotten from a fellow surgeon who had spent tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and who was familiar with the kinds of injuries the docs dealt with all day yesterday.

Cruising for a bruising

Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to live in an Arab-speaking country when a Democratic President in the United States is having public relations difficulties. The attack by cruise missile becomes the go-to diversion; Bill Clinton, of course, had his "I did not have sex with that woman, that Ms. Lewinsky," followed by a few cruise missiles lobbed into Iraq (it was during the between-wars period of the Iraq Wars, when we would bomb Saddam just to keep our hand in). Now Barack Obama, who's having all kinds of trouble here at home, is taking Rahm Emanuel's Clinton-era advice and giving us, "I did not campaign for President in order to help out a bunch of fat cat bankers."

No one really believed Bill. And guess what, Barack? The only people who seemed to take Obama seriously were Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon (of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, respectively), who didn't show the next day at the White House to receive Obama's apology for having to pretend to be angry at them. ("It's just politics, fellas.") They literally phoned it in. That's a little cheeky; those outfits owe their very existence to government largess, and here they are blowing off an invitation from the White House because of inclement weather. Could they have flown down the day before (Sunday)?

The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate expanded the hot war against al-Qaeda into that small nation down there just south of Saudi Arabia. About 23 million people, presided over by Al Abdullah Saleh, who's been president of at least some part of Yemen since 1978. International observers who monitored the most recent (2006) elections said they were at least "partly free," so the characterization of Saleh as another Arab dictator, such as the guys next door in Saudi Arabia, is maybe a little harsh. Still, that 31-year tenure makes you wonder.

A cruise missile is really something, I imagine. It flies in on its own power at supersonic speeds hugging the terrain below radar detection - more or less like a bat out of hell. Then - there it is. Packed with high explosives, it's all over you before you can do anything. So did we kill any al-Qaeda operatives? It's the usual story. Anti-U.S. sources say the attack killed about 50 civilians, including many women and children, and no al-Qaeda. The U.S. and Saleh say the attack was successful. Saleh was on board with the hit, of course. We had his permission to launch cruise missiles at his country.

One must say that there is an internal consistency to expanding the attack to any country with al-Qaeda personnel hanging around. It does answer, in a way, the question often posed about the selectivity of only bombing and attacking Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, as if the operatives would cooperate by gathering there to be bombed.

There has been surprisingly little coverage about these cruise missile attacks. On one level, that kind of negates their P.R. value - how can the public be diverted from the President's political problems if the media don't write up the latest angle on the war on terror? More ominously, the silence suggests we no longer consider it a big deal when we bomb a brand new country. There used to be a lot of talk about "preemptive war" and the United Nations Charter requirement of imminent danger as a justification for a war of self defense before we gave the Go signal.

But no more. We more or less launch on impulse at any target of opportunity, I guess. It must relate to that Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) back in the fall of 2001, which has been given quite a workout. It's another exception to the War Powers Clause in Article I of the Constitution, which used to confine the right to declare war to Congress. The power has become so attenuated that we can bomb a brand new country and no one even mentions it. Yet if you were on the ground looking up, somewhere in that dusty terrain of Yemen, and saw a cruise missile about to land in your back yard, I imagine it would look a lot like war indeed.

Fort Hood & the War on Definitions

The tragic event at Fort Hood last week appears to have settled down into more of a conventional news story. 12 soldiers and one civilian were murdered by an Army psychiatrist who went berserk. Many others were wounded, some very seriously (well, I suppose any gunshot wound is serious). The story would take its quiet place in the annals of American mass murders, along with disgruntled postal killers, school and college massacres and the rest in the sad litany of carnage in Free Fire Zone America, except for one salient fact: the shooter was a Muslim of Palestinian descent who had been in contact with a radical Muslim imam, who in turn had presided over mosques where three al-Qaeda, 9-11 hijackers had attended, in Virginia and San Diego (including one of the pilots, Hani Hanjour). The two San Diego 9-11 conspirators were the "muscle" hijackers who gave the CIA the slip in Southeast Asia and settled into suburban life in Southern California. You can read all about them in the Report of the 9-11 Commission.

This fact raised the stakes considerably. The forces of Political Correctness were mobilized immediately, of course, so that there were stories about the story almost before there was a story. Although Major Nidal Malik Hasan was himself pretty clear that his attack was motivated by "religionist" thinking (what else do we think it could have been? why was he shooting exclusively soldiers in the Readiness Center who were about to deploy to Iraq & Afghanistan?), it became verboten, in the beginning, to even talk this way. Many other Muslim soldiers in the Army were "consulted" so that a balanced view could be presented. Glenn Greenwald, who's real good on civil liberties and the law but goes a little crazy when anyone utters an anti-Muslim sentiment because of his deep dislike of Israel-U.S. connections, did a kind of Chomsky number where he started talking about Predator drones conducting "terrorist" attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. You know, who you calling a terrorist? I forget exactly how he got there, but I'm sure his logic was impeccable. It's just that it has nothing to do with the real world.

David Brooks went the other way and stated his conclusion that there's just something about Islam which results in its adherents regarding other people as sub-human. Of course, Mr. Brooks first had to begin at the beginning and set the context for this view, which in his case is always to build civilization from the ground up: "Humans breathe air. We all breathe the same air. Yet what we do with that air is different. Different cultures use the air for different things..." Poor David. He knows he's really, really smart. He just can't seem to prove it to anyone else's satisfaction.

After the political correctness wore off, people got down to business and started arguing (a) whether this was a terrorist attack, and if so, (b) who should be blamed. Now we're talkin'.

Was it a terrorist attack? First of all, you can't have a terrorist attack without a terrorist, can you? So was Hasan a terrorist before he shot up Fort Hood, as a result of shooting up Fort Hood, or not at all?

Like David Brooks, of course, we need to back up and lay the groundwork. For about an hour or so. I don't want to use the definition of terrorism currently in vogue, because it's case-specific. It has to do with our ongoing efforts to defeat Radical Islam. So I'll resort to the American Heritage Dictionary: "Terrorism, n. The systematic use of terror, violence, and intimidation to achieve an end."

Interesting. Nothing said there about "asymmetrical" warfare or any of that, which appears to be a definitional gloss on the topic to differentiate anything done by a nation-state from nonstate actors. On the other hand, what the hell does the American Heritage Dictionary know?

Anyway, it seems to me that Hasan gets a free pass from the dictionary, because it's hard to call what he did "systematic." Maybe the important take-away point is that these definitions don't really help much. After you get through defining it, the case remains that of an Army major who decided to shoot a lot of American soldiers for religious reasons of his own. You can't escape that. In psychiatric terms, this psychiatrist was in a state of profound cognitive dissonance over being part of a military which was in turn engaged in fighting countries where his co-religionists are the overwhelming majority, and the internal conflict apparently drove him to murder.

Did he kill all those soldiers as part of his part in worldwide Islamic jihad? We'll never know, I don't think. Was he okay with the West, in general, but this specific conflict overwhelmed his religious conscience and drove him to kill? We'll probably never know that either.

Like most murders, it has the "greater meaning" we assign to it, which we do in order to cope with tragedy. But it remains murder. A lot of dead individuals caught up in one man's internal turmoil. It doesn't tell us anything about the War on Terror, nor much about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It does suggest that a determined individual in the United States who wants to act out on his impulses, religious, ideological or otherwise, can find the means and firepower to do so, apparently even when he's on the FBI's radar because of consorting with suspected Islamic radicals, and there isn't much we can do about it if we want to remain a free society. That's not a popular conclusion in this country, but I think it remains true nonetheless.