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COMMENTARY
September 10, 2011
Who is winning?
The announcement, by U.S. federal authorities, of a "specific, credible, but unconfirmed" threat of car bombs in Washington and New York this weekend, serves only to remind that we have had a decade free of major, successful, Islamist terror strikes - here in North America.The story is quite different elsewhere. In Pakistan, for instance, it is about one blast a day; and there have been huge terror strikes in England, Spain, India, Indonesia, and so forth. Nor can we say nothing was attempted here. We have the "Toronto 18" all safely stitched up; and I daresay our own national history would be unfolding in a different way, had they succeeded in detonating truck bombs, shooting the survivors, storming Parliament, beheading the prime minister, and similar planned acts of public mischief. It helped that they appear to have been complete clowns. Malicious, to be sure, but the first line of defence against psychopaths, in any society, is psychopathic incompetence. I spoke once with an Israeli counter-terrorism expert, who told me he thought Palestinian terrorists had actually killed more of each other, than Israelis had killed. "And we were trying." He gave it as a droll proof that there is a God. Frankly, the thing that surprised me most about the terror strikes of 9/11 (more on this anniversary tomorrow), was not that they were attempted, but that they were pulled off. Putting all morality aside for a moment, and considering the 9/11 attack only as an example of terrorist craft - in the manner of Thomas De Quincey's essay, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" - it was an impressive accomplishment. The American writer, Lee Harris, rightly pointed to the aesthetic motive, behind not only this "composition" of the late Osama bin Laden, but so many other terror hits that bear the "signature" of al-Qaeda, whether genuine or forged: awesome spectacles, the pairing of targets, the manipulation of symbols, the choice of resonant dates, etc. Yet even 9/11 required luck, and extremely unsuspicious Americans, including an entire immigration bureaucracy and flight school instructors. In 20/20 retrospect, Mohamed Atta and company should have been easy to spot. They could not have negotiated airport gates under present security arrangements (enough would be stopped to leave the rest short-handed). Tom Ridge, the former U.S. homeland security chief, speaking with the candour of someone no longer in public office, emphasized "luck" in remarks this week. U.S. and British security agents did legitimately foil a fairly sophisticated plot to blow up 10 airliners in trans-Atlantic flight with liquid explosives, in 2006. There have been other, more modest, successes. But luck alone - taken to include terrorist miscalculations, and passenger intervention at the last minute - has foiled many other plots. Ridge said, "Luck is not a policy." But given the likelihood that luck has a higher score in stopping terror strikes than all the security agencies put together, we might want to be skeptical of policies, too. The possibilities for huge terror strikes, on a scale of killing to eclipse 9/11, are all too apparent. Iraq made us tired of the "ABCs" - atomic, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction. Yet counter-terrorism requires that we never get bored. In particular, remember the mobile bio-weapons labs Saddam Hussein was accused of owning, and which might just have been moved to Syria (so that we might just learn more about them when the Assad regime falls). These terrified even the specialists, who did in fact warn the Bush administration to expect to find them (contrary to the anti-Bush propaganda). The technology for most of this has been around since the First World War. But not even the Kaiser, not even Hitler, would use bioweapons. (Neither scrupled about far less effective poison gas.) Consider: a single small airplane releases 100 kilos of dormant anthrax spores by aerosol, over a major city on a clear calm night. The bacillus comes to life in the human body, producing toxins and terrible haemorrhaging. The death toll from one such strike could approach three million, according to a range of experts interviewed by Uwe Siemon-Netto, a journalist friend, writing in Die Welt. All seemed amazed that the issue could be trivialized in petty partisan bickering. So who is winning the battle with the terrorists? I think the answer is that we are, on points, though still very early in a game from which we are increasingly distracted. The Bush strategy was to try to secure responsible nation states, throughout the Middle East, that would tackle the terror threat at source. The Obama administration does not have a strategy. And the "Arab Spring" has quickly reversed achievements in Afghanistan and Iraq. Terrorists may now enjoy more safe havens than they did in 2001; and we are less eager to go after them. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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