WHITE HOUSE: AL QAEDA = MAFIA

If you’re still think­ing about vot­ing for George Bush on November 2, you owe it to your­self to read this arti­cle from today’s Washington Post, in its entirety. Bottom line: the Bush admin­is­tra­tion thinks fight­ing ter­ror­ism is like tak­ing on the Mob; all you have to do is lock up the top bosses, and the gang will fall apart.
What a pleas­ant lit­tle world we’d live in, if that were true. It ain’t. Because Al Qaeda isn’t a mafia, with a small band of non-​​replaceable crim­i­nal chiefs. It’s a can­cer. And, by mis­di­ag­nos­ing the prob­lem, the White House is help­ing it spread.

Bush con­ducts the war on ter­ror­ism above all as a global hunt for a cast of evil men he knows by name and pho­to­graph. He tracks progress in daily half-​​hour meet­ings that Richard A. Falkenrath, who some­times attended them before depart­ing recently as deputy home­land secu­rity adviser, described as “extremely gran­u­lar, about indi­vid­ual guys.” Frances Fragos Townsend, who took the post of White House coun­tert­er­ror­ism and home­land secu­rity adviser in May, said in an inter­view that Bush’s strat­egy — now, as in the war’s first days — is to “decap­i­tate the beast…“
Townsend, the White House ter­ror­ism and home­land secu­rity adviser, gives two framed court­room sketches from a for­mer life a place of honor on her West Wing wall. The color por­traits, from 1990, depict her as lead pros­e­cu­tor in a case against New York’s Gambino crime fam­ily. When she took her White House job in May, she told the Associated Press that the tran­si­tion from orga­nized crime to ter­ror­ism “actu­ally turns out not to be that big a leap.” She added, “Really in many ways you’re talk­ing about a group with a command-​​and-​​control struc­ture…“
Students of al Qaeda used to speak of it as a net­work with “key nodes” that could be attacked. More recently they have described the growth of “fran­chises.” Gordon and Falkenrath pio­neered an anal­ogy, before leav­ing gov­ern­ment, with an even less encour­ag­ing prog­no­sis.
Jihadists “metas­ta­sized into a lot of lit­tle can­cers in a lot of dif­fer­ent coun­tries,” Gordon said recently. They formed “groups, oper­at­ing under the terms of a move­ment, who don’t have to rely on al Qaeda itself for fund­ing, for train­ing or for author­ity. [They oper­ate] at a level that doesn’t require as many peo­ple, doesn’t require them to be as well-​​trained, and it’s going to be damned hard to get in front of that…“
Marc Sageman, a psy­chol­o­gist and for­mer CIA case offi­cer who stud­ies the for­ma­tion of jihadist cells, said the inspi­ra­tional power of the Sept. 11 attacks — and rage in the Islamic world against U.S. steps taken since — has cre­ated a new phe­nom­e­non. Groups of young men gather in com­mon out­rage, he said, and a vio­lent plan takes form with­out the need for an out­side leader to iden­tify, per­suade or train those who carry it out.
The bru­tal chal­lenge for U.S. intel­li­gence, Sageman said, is that “you don’t know who’s going to be a ter­ror­ist” any­more. Citing the 15 men who killed 190 pas­sen­gers on March 11 in syn­chro­nized bomb­ings of the Spanish rail sys­tem, he said “if you had gone to those guys in Madrid six months prior, they’d say ‘We’re not ter­ror­ists,’ and they weren’t. Madrid took like five weeks from incep­tion.“
Much the same pat­tern, offi­cials said, pre­ceded deadly attacks in Indonesia, Turkey, Kenya, Morocco and else­where. There is no rea­son to believe, they said, that the phe­nom­e­non will remain over­seas.
Such attacks do not rely on lead­ers as the Bush admin­is­tra­tion strat­egy has con­ceived them. New jihadists can acquire much of the know-​​how they need, Sageman and his coun­ter­parts still in gov­ern­ment said, in al Qaeda’s Saudi-​​published mag­a­zines, Al Baatar and the Voice of Jihad, avail­able online…
Downing, Bush’s first coun­tert­er­ror­ism adviser after Sept. 11, said in a 2002 inter­view that hunt­ing down al Qaeda lead­ers could do no more than “buy time” for longer-​​term efforts to stem the jihadist tide. This month he said, “Time is not on our side.“
“This is not a war,” he said. “What we’re faced with is an Islamic insur­gency that is spread­ing through­out the world, not just the Islamic world.” Because it is “a polit­i­cal strug­gle,” he said, “the mil­i­tary is not the key fac­tor. The mil­i­tary has to be coor­di­nated with the other ele­ments of national power.“
Many of Downing’s peers — and strong majori­ties of sev­eral dozen offi­cers and offi­cials who were inter­viewed — agree. They cite a long list of pro­pos­als to address ter­ror­ism at its roots that have not been car­ried out. Among them was a plan by Wendy Chamberlin, then ambas­sador to Pakistan, to offer President Pervez Musharraf a sub­sti­tute for Saudi fund­ing of a rad­i­cal net­work of Islamist schools known as madrasas. Downing backed Chamberlin in the inter­a­gency debate, describ­ing edu­ca­tion as “the root of many of the recruits for the Islamist move­ment.” Bush promised such sup­port to Musharraf in a meet­ing soon after Sept. 11, said an offi­cial who accom­pa­nied him, but the $300 mil­lion plan did not sur­vive the White House bud­get request.

THERE’S MORE: Hoo boy, is TM Lutas annoyed by this post.

“Kerry has lit­er­ally, and pub­licly, likened the fight against ter­ror­ism to pros­e­cu­to­r­ial efforts against gam­bling and pros­ti­tu­tion. That’s what the whole thing about “ter­ror­ism as nui­sance” was about. President Bush has per­son­ally and pub­licly derided this idea. The idea that it is Bush that is the ter­ror­ists = mafia can­di­date is so far out there that my only ques­tion is, aren’t you embar­rassed? When you dis­count Bush’s own words and go with a Washington Post arti­cle as being more author­i­ta­tive, you really do need to jus­tify such an odd deci­sion with some sort of evi­dence. And given Kerry’s pub­lic state­ment say­ing he would fight ter­ror­ism as he fought gam­bling and pros­ti­tu­tion when he was a DA, not even men­tion­ing Kerry’s stand just shows how much you’re in the tank for Kerry, no mat­ter what. If you’d have said go third party or stay home, I’d respect that. As is, I’ll just read your actual defense tech­nol­ogy posts where you do a decent job. 

But I’m not “embar­rassed,” and here’s why: Yes, Bush says he’s treat­ing the fight against Islamic extrem­ism like an all-​​out, throw-​​everything-​​you-​​got-​​at-​​em war. But many of his actions — includ­ing tap­ping a for­mer Mob pros­e­cu­tor for anti-​​terror duties, under­valu­ing American finan­cial and media “soft power,” and focus­ing on high-​​level indi­vid­u­als — under­cut those asser­tions.
Now , Lutas is right; Kerry is a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor. But iron­i­cally, he seems less enam­ored of the Mafia model than Bush. And let’s look at that “nui­sance” com­ment again. It seems to me that it’s not a model for fight­ing Islamic extrem­ism. It’s a descrip­tion of what our world would feel like, once that strug­gle has been won.

”We have to get back to the place we were, where ter­ror­ists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nui­sance,” Kerry said. ”As a for­mer law-​​enforcement per­son, I know we’re never going to end pros­ti­tu­tion. We’re never going to end ille­gal gam­bling. But we’re going to reduce it, orga­nized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threat­en­ing people’s lives every day, and fun­da­men­tally, it’s some­thing that you con­tinue to fight, but it’s not threat­en­ing the fab­ric of your life.”
This anal­ogy struck me as remark­able, if only because it seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry’s phi­los­o­phy and the president’s. Kerry, a for­mer pros­e­cu­tor, was sug­gest­ing that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least con­trol­lable. If mob­sters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could ter­ror­ists be sent scur­ry­ing for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn’t harm us. Bush had con­tin­u­ally cast him­self as the opti­mist in the race, assert­ing that he alone saw the lib­er­at­ing poten­tial of American might, and yet his dark vision of unend­ing war sud­denly seemed far less hope­ful than Kerry’s notion that all of this hor­ror — planes fly­ing into build­ings, anx­i­ety about sui­cide bombers and chem­i­cals in the sub­way — could some­how be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts.

October 22nd, 2004 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.