Posted under Foreign affairs & Interventionism & Terrorism
PCR has turn out two blistering commentaries recently. I think advancing age has given PCR license to just let fly without regard for consequences or who he offends. As a result he goes too far and over states things at times, but he also tells truths few other are willing to tell so straight-forwardly. BTW, I don’t know if PCR still considers himself a conservative. His writing increasingly is posted at left-wing sites, and he is merciless in his criticism of conservatives. He is also publicly embracing conspiracy theories.
First here is “Is the War on Terror a Hoax?” Read it.
I would not say that the threat of terrorism is entirely a hoax, because I don’t believe it is, and if you say that many people will just tune out everything you say after that. But I would say that the threat of terrorism has been vastly overblown. PCR makes a point I have made before. If you are a terrorist in America why would you try to blow up the Pentagon with a model airplane? That is just silly. There are many soft targets that could easily be attacked and there is nothing we could do to prevent it short of a completely locked down police state. Why no suicide bombers at the local mall? Why no car bombs outside the local kindergarten? If Muslims are such an unmitigable menace then why aren’t our home grown Muslims not out bombing targets on a routine basis? The sad fact is that modern Western society corrupts Muslims just like it corrupts Christians. The average Westernized Muslim young man is more interested in surfing the net for porn and getting it on with his girlfriend who dresses just as hoochie mama as the neighborhood “Christian” girls than he is committing acts of terror in the name of jihad. That’s not to say that there aren’t radicalized Muslims, but there aren’t as many or they aren’t as radical as the Muslim phobes would have us believe or else things would be blowing up around us all the time. (The Fort Hood shooter is a good example of the havoc that can be wrought by small scale acts of terror.)
Second here is “The Day America Died.”
This article is about the assassination of al-Awlaki. The assassination was illegitimate in the way it was done, although I don’t rule out the possibility of declaring war against Al-Qaeda and then treating people like al-Awlaki as irregular enemy combatants. I concede, however, that there isn’t an entirely clean way to do this since everyone in Al-Qaeda is an irregular combatant by definition. I also would be leery about using a declaration of war against al-Qaeda as an excuse to continue meddling. Any declaration of war should accompany our hasty disengagement from the region.
But PCR makes a point here that I was meaning to make and hadn’t gotten around to. (You’ll have to trust me on that I guess.) Since an executive order by Reagan we are theoretically not supposed to covertly attempt to assassinate anyone. Now whether this was just rhetorical window dressing and assassinations have been sanctioned since I don’t know, but that is our public stance nonetheless. But just for the sake of the argument, theoretically of course, if the US did decide it needed to covertly assassinate someone, then we should KEEP OUR BIG MOUTHS SHUT about it. (Al-Awlaki is dead? Really? I don’t know anything about that.) Calling a press conference and announcing you just assassinated someone is unseemly and couter-productive, and proves that the War on Terror is as much about PR as it is stopping terrorism.
Before some readers write to declare that Awlaki’s murder is no big deal because the US government has always had people murdered, keep in mind that CIA assassinations were of foreign opponents and were not publicly proclaimed events, much less a claim by the president to be above the law. Indeed, such assassinations were denied, not claimed as legitimate actions of the President of the United States.
Matt Weber on 04 Oct 2011 at 6:53 pm #
Well, we can say a few things about terrorism. One, Al Qaeda basically hit their high point on 9/11. That was all they had. They spent years planning their big one, and succeeded in annoying us and doing some damage. And that was it, for the ten years since AQ has been just a boogeyman. Two, no one is really scared about terrorism. The TSA has never prevented a single attack, terrorist ineptitude being the greater factor there, but despite this their presence has never been seriously reviewed. It’s hard to see what purpose airport security has now except to annoy. And yes, if muslims were suicidal maniacs then we’d have chaos everywhere. It’s fair to say that a great many more muslims are generally supportive of terrorism than are willing to actually carry it out, but that tells us that most muslims are sane.
As for the assassination, we pretty much had to claim responsibility, yes? I mean, a predator drone drops a bomb on Yemen, I wonder who’s behind that…
RonL on 04 Oct 2011 at 9:19 pm #
PCR is either a liar or willfully ignorant. We have had shootings, bombings, and arson. Look “sudden Jihad syndrom” to see all the attacks, which range from shoots and bombings, to Muslims committing mass casualty attacks using cars as weapons.
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/AmericanAttacks.htm
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/40-terror-plots-foiled-since-9-11-combating-complacency-in-the-long-war-on-terror
Symbolism matters to terrorists. The Islamists know us and understand that randomly targeting civilians will only piss us off. Targeting the military in the US is less likely to cause us to react harshly. Al Qaeda doctrine promotes symbolic attacks.
RedPhillips on 04 Oct 2011 at 9:39 pm #
Ron, regarding the TROP list, honor killings and such are a different matter and shouldn’t be lumped in with terrorism.
“Symbolism matters to terrorists. The Islamists know us and understand that randomly targeting civilians will only piss us off. Targeting the military in the US is less likely to cause us to react harshly. Al Qaeda doctrine promotes symbolic attacks.”
I actually agree with this and was going to make the same point, but didn’t because my post was running long. The only reason to fly a remote controlled plane into the Pentagon rather than the local mall would be symbolism. But the FBI was behind the plot and coaxed some likely not too bright knucklehead to go along. No FBI, no plot. But then the whole thing is trumpeted for the PR value and to keep everyone fearful and compliant with porno scanners and insane defense spending.
But even if the domestic risks were as high as worst case scenario, I have never understood how attacking countries in the Middle East helps mitigate that.
RedPhillips on 04 Oct 2011 at 9:47 pm #
“As for the assassination, we pretty much had to claim responsibility, yes? I mean, a predator drone drops a bomb on Yemen, I wonder who’s behind that…”
Matt, my point was that if we were going to drone bomb him we should have declared war and done so under that legal structure.
If we were going to covertly assassinate him, which theoretically we aren’t suppose to do, then we should have done so quietly. For the President to claim some extra-legal sanction for killing everyone it deems a terrorist and then call a press conference to beat his chest when the deed is done is a very disturbing precedent.
Sempronius on 04 Oct 2011 at 9:58 pm #
“We have had shootings, bombings, and arson.”
We have also had the Rosenbergs, Jonathan Pollard and the attack on the Liberty.
RonL on 04 Oct 2011 at 10:54 pm #
Red,
Honor killings and such a small part of the list. I didn’t compile it. Perhaps you missed the murders, arson, assaults, and bombings?
Where do you get the idea tah the FBI is behind the RC aircraft plot?
There are two types of threats, “home grown” Islamist and foreign Islamist. Hitting foreign threats abroad is certainly better than waiting here. But even “home-grown” is not so cut and dry. How many of these terrorists adn radicalized Muslims sought guidance from Al-Awlaki or read the Al Qaeda internet magazine?
Sempronius,
The Rosenbergs were Soviet agents. No idea what that has to do with Israel. Zionism was a crime in the USSR for all but 4 years, including 1942, when the Rosenberg’s started to spy for the USSR. These traitors were followers of the antisemitic death cult known as Marxism.
Jonathan Pollard passed information onto an ally. He deserves to be in jail.
As for the USS Liberty, I would love to see members of the NSA jailed for their actions.
RedPhillips on 05 Oct 2011 at 12:08 pm #
Ron, from the PCR article.
“The latest FBI sting ensnared a Boston man, Rezwan Ferdaus, who is accused of planning to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes packed with C-4 explosives. US Attorney Carmen Ortiz assured Americans that they were never in danger, because the FBI’s undercover agents were in control of the plot.
Ferdaus’ FBI-organized plot to blow up the Pentagon and US Capitol with model airplanes has produced charges that he provided “material support to a terrorist organization” and plotted to destroy federal buildings–the most serious charge which carries 20 imprisoned years for each targeted building.”
I was wrong about one thing however. Ferdaus was a physics graduate from Northeastern in Boston, so he was no dummy.
RedPhillips on 05 Oct 2011 at 12:15 pm #
It is well know that the Feds infiltrate organizations, identify the hot heads and loose cannons and then try to get them to plan something illegal. They used this method frequently with militia groups and racialist organizations in the 90s. I’m sure you are aware of the speculation that the Oklahoma City bombing was such an opperation that went bad. I’m not necessarily endorsing that view, just making the point that in order for this to become a widely held suspicion an understanding that this is the Feds’ MO must be widely believed.
Matt Weber on 05 Oct 2011 at 3:19 pm #
We can’t declare war on Al-Qaeda; they aren’t a country and have no standing to either declare war or have war declared upon them. Declarations of war are really an artifact of a more civilized age. I can’t really understand the brouhaha about the Awlaki killing. Why not just say that he was in a foreign country where we have little-to-no presence and therefore no hope of making an arrest and bringing him to trial? So we dropped a bomb on him. Whatever else we can say about Obama, his success rate on the terrorist killing metric is a lot better than Bush’s.
The big fear seems to be that now Obama will drop bombs on us. Today Awlaki in Yemen, tomorrow my mother in Bardstown, KY. I find the proposition ridiculous. The US is not North Korea, even at its worst. Awlaki was about as much an American as OBL. All things considered, dropping a bomb on him is a lot better than yet another police-action war.
RedPhillips on 05 Oct 2011 at 5:26 pm #
Matt, I conceded that declaring war on Al-Qaeda would be messy and breaking new ground, but I don’t see an alternative. I used to agree with Ron Paul that we should have issued letters of marque and reprisal to authorize targeted actions against OBL and AQ, but on further study I don’t think that LOMAR are really germane. (Historian Kevin Gutzman in a private conversation on Facebook agreed with me on this.) Historically, a LOMAR was given to authorize private citizens and vessels to carry out acts on behalf of the government with government sanction, usually on the high seas and usually regarding piracy. Unless we are going to authorize mercenaries to hunt down OBL on our behalf, LOMAR are not really germane. What we should have done is authorize our regular military to carry out targeted strikes that are likely going to involve compromising the sovereignty of some foreign country. How do you do that? I don’t know? It isn’t really covered under a declaration of war or LOMAR. Perhaps Congress could authorize some use of force less than a formal declaration of war but that is very problematic as that is what we have been doing since after WWII and you can see how well that has worked. If we were going to do so the declaration would need to be very specific and authorize a specific legal framework to work under.
I agree with you that “slippery slope” reasoning can paralyze rational policy. Just as thinking that the Bell Curve is sound science does not mean you are about to march people off to concentration camps, so too killing a citizen in a foreign country who is a suspected terrorist during a quasi, ill defined state of war does not mean Obama is about to start bombing cranky Tea Partiers. (I agree with PCR that Congress should have at least stripped him of his citizenship first.)
I also agree that the targeted killing of enemies such as this could actually decrease the need for larger engagements down the line. What would be the risk benefit ratio of a targeted killing vs. sending in a larger force to capture him for trial especially if Yemen isn’t on board? When I argue that terrorism is more of an intel issue than a military issue, I assume that that intel is going to lead to some target actions (shall we say) short of invasion and occupation. The problem I have with the killing of Al-Awlaki is that there doesn’t seem to be a legal framework, and what legal framework there is is allegedly secret. This is highly troubling. Why would legal reasoning ever need to be secret?