AL Qaeda and its affiliates are losing. They'll do their utmost to strike the United States before our elections. But even if they succeed, the effect will be the opposite of what they hope. And it won't change the fact that the terrorist beast is badly wounded. The recent wave of arrests, from Pakistan through the Middle East to Britain, stunned the terrorists and sent them crawling for ever-deeper cover. The blow against terror has been so indisputable that even our embrace-the-terrorists-with-understanding crowd stopped crying that the War on Terror's a failure (note the shift in campaign rhetoric).
But it's also a fact that this struggle is far from over. It will take at least a full generation — perhaps much longer — to rid the world of the demons who have appointed themselves as Allah's executioners. We do have some unexpected allies in this war, though: the terrorists themselves.
Counter to the made-on-campus nonsense that we can't succeed against terror, it's the terrorists who can't win. They can do horrific damage, creating scenes of slaughter among the innocent. But when it comes to employing such mega-violence, the terrorists are damned if they do, and damned if they don't. The terrorists need to stage spectacular events to convince the world of their power, to reassure their supporters of their continued viability and to draw fresh blood to the movement. Few flock to join a fugitive in a basement, but an Osama bin Laden allowed to appear triumphant — the Clinton administration's approach — is a magnet for every psychopath in the Muslim world. Yet when the terrorists do conduct dramatic attacks, they earn brief fame, but unite ever more of the world against them. Had al Qaeda and its surrogates laid low after 9/11, instead of creating strategically random carnage, they'd be in vastly better shape today. More...
#3
But their problem for the WAPO and other Alphabets is that anyone truly interested in following the WOT now only reads them to find out what the spinners find necessary to spin. Tell me, who here among us doesnât pick up one of these papers and think, âletâs see how they are spinning it todayâ.
Oh sure, they reach voters not paying attention, which is their goal. But anyone actually following the war gets their new elsewhere and only considers the NYT and WAPo informative when things have gotten so bad for their side that they are forced to ignore it or lie.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
