The reaction to the arrest of Taha Abdul Rahman for stealing half a dozen rocket launchers from the Australian Army has been pretty subdued, to be honest. And this despite the reports that the intended target of the launchers, which haven’t yet been located, was the Lucas Heights research reactor.
One thing that seems to have settled the journos down is the realization that, if indeed somebody were to fire them at Lucas Heights, the rockets (which appear to be M72 LAWs) would make a rather noisy explosion but not one that would actually penetrate the reactor’s containment building; indeed, it would probably struggle to penetrate the building’s outer walls. As the Wikipedia article on the LAW notes, it can penetrate in the order of 60 centimetres of reinforced concrete. There’s a lot more concrete and steel between the reactor pool and the outside world than that.
By contrast, there are approximately one million places aspiring terrorists, if they should choose to do so, could fire these rockets and do a great deal of damage. They could fire one at the Spirit of Tasmania (and bring along a rabbit rifle to sink the liferafts if you’re that callous). Or the Melbourne-Sydney XPT. Or a packed city bus. Or John Howard’s Comcar, for that matter. (I point these out only because they are incredibly obvious – it took all of five seconds to think of them). But instead, it seems their plans were to waste them on an impossibly hard target.
It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the average terrorist isn’t particularly bright.
Unfortunately, a PhD in Being Really Evil is not compulsory for killing innocent people. Martin Bryant, whose IQ was reportedly in the 60s, slaughtered 35 men, women and children with a couple of semi-automatic rifles. But it appears that the combination of people with the desire to commit acts of mass slaughter, the ability to maximise the use of resources available to them to do so, and the patience and care to do so without betraying the preparations to the police and intelligence agencies, does not appear to be commonplace. Mohammed Atta and, more to the point, Khalid Sheik Mohammed (the brains behind 9/11) seem to have been rare birds indeed.
What’s the point of this crap, Merkel?
Bali 2002, Mocow 2002, Saudi Arabia 2003, Turkey 2003, Madrid 2004, London 2005, etc.
Do some research, and don’t be an asshole in future.
None of which involved rockets, SJ. Arse-clown.
I’ve been similar thoughts to yours, Robert, reading the unfolding news. Does arson suddenly not work anymore for people who want to destroy things?
SJ (and Liam), please make arguments civilly without resorting to abuse.
From the Age article linked to above:
(My emphasis)
Which indicates that police do not believe the rocket launchers were to be used on Lucas Heights.
In any case, even if they were, think of the effects on public opinion of the headline:
“Terrorist Rocket Fired at Sydney’s Nuclear Reactor”
It wouldn’t have to do any damage at all to get people very nervous indeed.
By and large I don’t think terrorists, particularly the aussie home-grown variety are not so much dumb as sad. However, making the generalisation that “terrorists are dumb/sad/whatever” based on one or two local cases is a bit likingsaying all politicians are liars.. oh, wait..
Liam Says:
Whew! That was lucky. Just think what might have happened if those dumb terrorists had thought of using rockets!
Or acetone peroxide!
Dickhead.
Mark, I note your comment re civility and will comply.
Or matches.
Or wikipedia, the most fearsome weapon known to the fearful.
Thanks, SJ.
Did rather read like how to trivialise terrorism in 400 words or less.
Or perhaps it’s just about getting the problem in its proper proportion.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19657
Interesting article by The Economists’ Middle East correspondent, Max Rodenbeck, in the NYRB.
I’ve long thought the disabling/destruction of just one key railway station in Sydney’s CBD would cause absolute chaos in Sydney for quite a while.
Well, best keep those insights to yerself, Sacha.
I agree Sacha. It wouldn’t even need to be putting a hub station out of action, the attack on what we are lucky enough to be able to regard as safe space – public transport – with one of those missiles, even just on a single commuter train, would change things forever in this country. It’s horrible just thinking about it.
There seems to be an assumption that had the rockets been used against Lucas Heights they would have been aiming at the reactor concrete bubble thingy itself.
Personally I don’t think terrorists are that stupid…a well targeted rocket at a cooling pipe, which I am sure would be more exposed could do as much damage, maybe more, than a direct hit.
Maybe someone knows which is worse, a meltdown because of no cooling or an explosion to the core.
To gauge just how much damage a rocket fired from one of these launchers could do to reinforced concrete it might be instructive having a look at this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–_RGM4Abv8
Youtube says of your link, Christine, that “The url contained a malformed video id.”
Possibly the end of the URL is chopped off.
I wanna see explosions!
I mean, watching that video would no doubt give me a very useful insight into the subject of this thread.
David, try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9cNf73cQ8s
Now that’s what I’m talking about.
If they showed that clip on the news, maybe they could convince people not to worry about Lucas Heights.
Oh for goodness sakes. Non-state terrorists are dumb, and infantile in ambition. Horrible? They’re not even acquaintances of horror, and they’re never likely to make proverbial friends with it. This so-called ‘terrorism’ deserves trivialisation.
I’ve been reliving my childhood on the Saturday Salon thread—those of you with too much time and too little to do may have baffled at the poor taste—a childhood of Palm Sunday marches, Reagan, Andropov, Gorbachev, SALT, Trident, Minuteman, SS-25, mutually assured destruction, missile defence, fallout and chalked-in memorial silhouettes around Church on August 6 every year. The combined bang-and-flash, my physicist friends assured me years later, would have most likely been able to lift most of the crust of our planet, and certainly would have put an end to all life.
That’s terror, and that’s an annihilation worth working into a way of living, and it’s over, gone, never to come again. Proliferation and Russian economic collapse killed it, whether you think it’s a good or a bad thing, proliferation did the business on a quick way out for our species. I thought it was a good thing in 1992 or so, but the nostalgia is creeping back, especially when I regard the craven, speckled cowardice of our newspapers, electronic media and public officials. Lucas Heights? The Tube? Rockets you can hold in your hand? Don’t make me sick.
There’s nothing that any bomb-happy God-bothering nut can possibly do that’s worth the transfer of our nuclear anxieties.
Well said, Liam.
And it doesn’t lead to complacency to get terrorism into its proper proportion. In fact getting it out of proportion possibly produces more of it. I’d recommend again the article in the NYRB I linked to.
Something like the train disaster of 1976 is probably a much higher probability for the Sydney rail network than a terror strike.
Nuclear destruction was the sign under which we all lived til 1989/1991 at the latest. Cold War nostalgists and professional ideologues who want to summon up something as serious as that threat have an awful lot to answer for.
There are more ways than nuclear weapons to kill and terrorise people.
No, it doesn’t.
There’s much more worth reading in Rodenbeck’s article which is all about proportion, risk, threat and response:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19657
I couldn’t get that Youtube link either, and I second DJ’s call for explosions!
I agree with Robert in the lack of intelligence of terrorists, particularly the Islamist variety. You can see this in their failure to establish a political organisation parallel to the military wing.
Any terrorist who has some hope of achieving realistic aims will set up a legal political wing a la Sinn Fein. That way governments have someone to talk to and the organisation has a chance of getting at least partial success, as the IRA has.
But the Islamists seem to have no remotely achievable goals, no way of getting them, and no tactic apart from killing people. The 9/11 plotters came up with a remarkably successful plan for the latter; some other Islamists have had lesser degrees of success at causing mayhem; and many fail totally.
The concept of attacking Lucas Heights is just ridiculous, because of the reactor’s protection, and also because of the tiny quantity of radioactive material it actually holds.
On the comparison with the IRA, I think this from Rodenbeck is relevant:
Do you have any reasons why terrorism should be as glorified as it is, David, or shall we play my favourite game?
Yes, it should. Your move.
Honestly, if you’re a commuter in any Western city’s public transport system, the most dangerous thing you’re likely to face is your job at the end of it.
Or, if you’re Paul Gray, the possibility that someone else on the Manly ferry is actually an ABC employee.
Forgot link:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/12/28/wanker-of-the-day/
“They could fire one at the Spirit of Tasmania (and bring along a rabbit rifle to sink the liferafts if you’re that callous).”
He he he. Spirit of Tasmania has a gross displacement of 29,338 tonnes. That’s around the weight of a WW1 battleship, or in modern terms, 9 times the weight of an ANZAC frigate.
You could probably fire every LAW in the Australian arsenal at the ship without even slowing it down.
I did not say terrorism should be “glorified”, nor do I think it should be overstated.
FWIW, I am tired of chest-thumping by security agencies using terror as an excuse for abusive behaviour, as you can read here in my article “How Pakistan Tortured My Brother”.
However, I disagreed with your clear statement that “[t]his so-called ‘terrorism’ deserves trivialisation.”
We have clear information that people prepared to at least plan terrorist attacks got hold of some weapons that could cause dozens of deaths if used in the right way.
No, they wouldn’t scratch the surface of Lucas Heights. What about all the other potential targets mentioned in the post?
Yes, there is a very low risk of a terrorist attack. But if one happens, the consequences will likely be deadly, not trivial.
And a comfortable assumption that all terrorists are ‘dumb’ makes it harder to investigate when the risk is real.
Arguing that the risk of a terror attack can be trivialised is just as wrong as letting the security agencies overstate the risk to gain as much power as they can.
A lot of whom are isolated and delusional criminal fools like these people. As Robert said in his post.
On David’s last point, I wouldn’t argue for trivialising the threat, but I don’t think Robert was (and perhaps Liam will reconsider his choice of words). What’s essential, as I’m arguing, is to get it into proportion to its importance and to the real risks. It certainly ought not to be blown up into some sort of world-historical existential struggle. Which it is very often.
Steve, give the engineers that designed OPAL a bit more credit. It’s a Pool-type reactor. All the cooling water is already inside the containment building, in a large pool of water, with the reactor sitting right in the middle of it. It cools itself off with natural convection.
David Jackmanson, you don’t need nuclear weapons to kill people. What I am suggesting is that to kill a lot of people, a half-dozen guys with small arms is inadequate for the job.
On this topic I agree with Liam (by the way, Liam, I’ve been meaning to take you up on a comment you made about technological advances favouring “people’s war” – I’d argue it’s not technological but in fact a mindset issue, but we’ll take that up another time…). Compared to what the nuclear arsenals that Russia and the United States still possess, terrorists aren’t even a lame excuse for an existential threat.
Sacha and Laura, you’re not the first to argue that, but I can’t accept it as a terribly logical response. Statistically, you’re at far greater risk of being murdered by a family member than you are by terrorists. I might be run over by a bus tomorrow. But am I going to stop crossing the street because of it? Not bloody likely.
Steve [at 11:01pm]
I agree with you; not all terrorists are as thick as a plank (and they are not supermen either)….. but I am reluctant to mention specific targets and timings where a single disposable weapon would have a political, economic, social, psychological and military impacts far beyond the wildest dreams of the terrorists.
David Jackmanson [at 10:01pm]:
Exactly.
Hmm, the plot thickens.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21029852-5005361,00.html
Bikies linked with rocket ‘plot’ By Natalie O’Brien
January 08, 2007 10:50pm
POLICE investigating an alleged terrorist plot using stolen Australian army rocket launchers are close to arresting more suspects, including a member of Australia’s biggest outlaw motorcycle gang.
The Rebels bikie from Sydney’s southwest is one of several people suspected of playing a part in a stolen weapons trail leading to alleged Sydney arms dealer Taha Abdulrahman
I agree with most of Rodenbeck’s excellent article (which was published in last Friday’s AFR). Except for:
a) The US had to respond in a major symbolic way to the enormity of the 9/11 attack. Yes, this was in a way giving AQ what they wanted, but I can’t imagine any other response, no matter who might have been US President. The “war on terror” — even if it was not consistent with the traditional concept of war being a conflict between states — nevertheless symbolised resolve to mobilise US resources in a coordinated way against a national enemy.
b) “In essence, America’s actions radically upgraded Osama bin Laden’s organization from a ragtag network of plotters to a great enemy worthy of a superpower’s undivided attention.” As many of the Administration’s critics have pointed out, AQ did NOT receive the US’s “undivided attention”. Indeed with the relatively tiny number of troops deployed to Afghanistan (thank you Donald Rumsfeld) and then the diversion of the Iraq campaign, it could well be argued that AQ received nowhere near enough attention.
Robert, I was actually disagreeing with Liam, not you, when I said you don’t need nuclear weapons to kill people, but the way I wrote that comment was very unclear about that.
Paulus, I can’t find any figures for the hull thickness of the SoT (and the route has been closed down anyway), but Wikipedia says that the M72 can get through a foot of steel plate, if that makes a difference. Accuracy (it says) is pretty dodgy above 150-200m though – maximum theoretical range is 1km.
You wouldn’t need to sink it though – a rocket or two aimed at the passenger decks would cause an enormous amount of fear, way out of proportion to the number of people actually killed.
And there are softer targets.
Paulus, I meant to mention that the article was in Friday’s AFR as some may have seen it there.
I agree with you more or less – some more clarification from him about Afghanistan might have improved the argument there.
Agree completely with Robert and Mark about blowing up (if you’ll pardon the expression) terrorism into an existential threat.
I read timblair.net frequently, and I was interested to see a post a while ago linking to an excellent article in the WSJ debunking the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a Russian “suitcase nuke”. Indeed, the article provided good reasons for doubting the very existence of such weapons. And there is definitely no evidence that terrorists have come remotely close to acquiring nukes in any form.
The timblair commentators discussed all this sensibly and with well-informed military knowledge.
Then, within days, they were back to scaremongering about how terrorists with nukes could destroy Western civilisation. As if the WSJ piece had never existed. It was rather spooky in a 1984 kind of way.
Missed that blair post, Paulus. That’s a disconnect and a half!
DJ: sure, a LAW would probably penetrate the hull of the SoT — I doubt it’s thicker than tank armour — but its 2lb warhead would create a relatively tiny hole and the ship’s pumps would have not the slightest difficulty pumping out the water.
What the terrorists would need is something to create a HUGE hole, like an iceberg, or the formidable WW2 Japanese “Long Lance” torpedo (with a 1000lb warhead).
I agree about aiming it at the passenger decks to cause fear, but heck, you could achieve that with an ordinary public bus or the Sydney ferry at peak hour.
Everyone:
I don’t mind robust debates and free-flowing conversations …. but please think before you post. This is a very public forum and it’s possible that not everyone who visits the site has our best interests at heart.
Of course terrorists can dream up all sorts of very nasty ways of using their weapons too but there is no need to help them with unintentional pre-attack market surveys about which targets are better for them to hit than others.
Problem is, how do we keep up our usual lively discussions without imposing self-censorship – which would be, in itself, a win for the terrorists. Sorry, I’m not wise enough to come up with any useful andwers for this dilemma.
Mark: I went back to timblair.net to check. It was from 2005 and my memory had been deceptive in that it was not actually the subject of a post by Blair but something one of his commentators had raised.
The post itself was one of Blair’s typical tributes to Western sensitivity for Muslim values:
http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/comments/hams_slam_pork_talk/
(see from comment 65 onwards)
The WSJ article referred to (“The myth of suitcase nukes”), which I thoroughly recommend, is here:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007478
Thanks, Paulus.
David, Mark, when I said that ‘this so-called ‘terrorism’ deserves trivialisation’ I meant every word. Organised groups plan to use specifically violent means to receive a political response and the powerful oblige by reconfiguring every national political debate around ‘national security’? Madness.
The proper response to politically violent terrorism of this sort is very boring: ASIO’s traditional informers and infiltrators, police databases, and the hard yards of statisticians.
The proper political response to politically violent terrorism is the popular theatre of opposition and spectacle: thousands self-righteously march in the streets, the Prime Minister makes a maudlin speech with the Leader of the Opposition, some charity named after a good-looking victim sells folded ribbons, the Fairfax papers print their front pages in white-on-black text, footballers wear little black PVC tape armbands for the first rounds of the season, and we are treated to anniversary specials on network television for two or three years before everyone forgets about it. Trivia.
As Robert said, you’re far more likely to be killed in your home by someone who loves you than outside it by existential haters of modernity. Why not reconfigure every national debate around domestic violence?
…
I’ve forgotten that comment, Robert. I’m sure I made a lot of sense though.
Well, I’d agree with most of your last post Liam, except that we obviously disagree on the definition of ‘trivialise’.
I think it means ‘to regard as of little or no importance, and encourage others to do the same’, which isn’t the same as keeping things in proportion.
Graham Bell: read this. It’s a piece by Richard Clarke describing, in considerable detail, a number of terrorist attack scenarios of substantial lethality and even greater psychological and political impact.
Liam, with regards to turning every national debate on to the topic of domestic violence, you might be on to something there…
Re. “trivialisation” of terror:
Liam’s phrase may be extreme, but I suspect that his sentiments are on-track.
The main thing is: let’s refuse to exaggerate terror. Even though our government and media want us to do just that.
Something that really pees me off about the current wave of terrorist attacks by jihadists is that the idiotic US Government has decreed that we will all go into hysteria and totalitarian lockdown over this, and its sycophants in the UK and Australian governments and the media all bend over backwards to collude. Thus playing into the hands of terrorists and totalitarians inside and outside of Government.
The success of the establishment line that terror is to be spread can be seen, every time someone freaks about the chaos that could be caused by a single incident (see examples in this thread and elsewhere).
We know that USAians, in general, are very sheltered and hysteria-prone. Aussies have some excuse for over-reaction, being relative innocents in the victims-and-wagers-of-terror game, but are hopefully more amenable to reason. I am appalled by the apparent success of Blair’s fear campaign in the UK.
I lived in the UK for 30 years, and for a lot of that time, the IRA was active on the mainland. Every time I went to London, there was a possibility that I might be in a shop or tube or station that got exploded. Every time anything nasty happened somewhere familar, there was that “there, but for the Grace of Dog…” thought yet again.
While there were some serious miscarriages of justice against some Irish people, the government and the media did not whip up hate against the Irish or Catholics, and in Great Britain, the ongoing threat was not used as an excuse for trimming the liberties of all and sundry (the quasi civil war in Northern Ireland was handled more roughly). The emphasis was on trying to conduct business as normally as possible, while accepting that there was a small but nonzero risk which could be minimised with a few simple precautions. That’s what people did. It’s not that hard. I don’t think that the Brits of the 70′s and 80′s were necessarily any more bravely heroic than, say, the Aussies of the 00′s.
This approach that worked well then could do so now. Unfortunately, Blair, the current British Parliament and media seem to have been off-planet somewhere while the white Christian terrorists were active, think the brown Muslim variety of terror is something new, and refuse to follow the UK’s previously successful strategy. The Australian establishment refuses to learn from it as well, in keeping with their policy of only copying British and American mistakes.
All I can really suggest for us normal folks is to learn from the past, learn the statistics, and keep telling each other and the Powers that Be how it really is. If we let them, there is a risk that said Powers will really get into terrorising us just to make sure that they have an excuse to keep terrorising us in order to stop someone else from terrorising us…
Robert Merkel, I expressed myself poorly – not surprising really since I was just making the banal observation that the point of terrorism is creating terror or finding new places to deploy it. I wholeheartedly agree that the statistical risk of getting blown to bits on a suburban train is nothing compared to getting hit by a hooning driver outside my own house. Terror isn’t rational, though. My mother stopped using Sydney trains after the Madrid attacks.
I didn’t think i’d be reading outrage crap of this sort at LP. When you open a copy of the Australian, you can expect militaristic terror fantasies and big boys wanking on about their big toys, but not on a supposedly rational political discussion site.
What’s all this about targeting Lucas Heights? Because some pig from the political wing of the AFP says so? Like when they said in Nov 2005 that they had foiled an ‘imminent terrorist plot’, and then a group of men get charged with ‘belonging to an unnamed terrorist group’, and left to rot in orange jumpsuits for the next two years?
If you’re really against people owning rocket launchers, don’t pay the taxes that subsidise them, and picket your nearest arms company.
Lourkes-a-lordy, Bilko, you’re right!
Guns are bad, m’kay?
What a frickin’ genius. So next time you see some civilian carrying light artillery from their garage into a minivan, will you
a) Default on your taxes
b) Organise a protest against weaponry per se
or c) Call the fucking police, you retard. Some civilian has a fucking rocket launcher!!!
Fear campaigns are bad. Fear itself though, especially fear of very powerful guns in the hands of members of the public, is sometimes a really good idea. It promotes action.
Laura, I guess I expressed myself poorly as well. What I was trying to say was that I don’t understand (and this is may be a failure of imagination on my part) why the threat of things like the Madrid attacks terrifies people so much.
I feel people like your mother have been poorly served by our politicians, our senior law enforcement officials (Mick Keelty, I’m looking at you), and our media who, for their own interests, have provided a completely unrealistic picture of the actual risk your mother faces when she hops on the train.
ok FDP, i would call the police too. except if the man weilding the rocket launcher was Asian, in which case I would have to ring the terrorist hotline.
what i wouldn’t do is embark on writing some apocalyptic terror confabulation of the sort offered above.
Robert Merkel:
Thanks a lot for that link. Looks very well thought-out so shan’t comment on it until I have read it thoroughly. Nice change from the usual rubbish on the subject that gets into print.
Liam and andyc:
Suggest that instead of the term “trivialization” – because terrorism is never trivial – use terms like “scorn”, “satire”, “ridicule”. Pass on all the jokes about their stuff-ups. Mock their perveted, idiotic misunderstandings and distortions of religion. Alright, grim humour and nasty satire are the weapons of resistance. Holy Fridge-Magnet! Just look at where the majority of our population are right now: living under a nebulous threat of death and ruin – the choices we ordinary citizens have are very limited apart from some sort of conscious Resistance.
Australians, AoTeAroans and British are pretty good at gallows humour and satire, excellent weapons of resistance and defiance; they’re cheap, they can be used in secret, everyone can use them and the terrorists have no effective counter to them so in their frustration and rage they are driven to commit even more outrageous atrocities that further diminish their legitimacy. They worked against the all-powerful Nazi Gestapo, against the “Turnip-Heads”, against the British in various parts of their Empire …. and in 2007, it can work for us.
I mention this sort of resistance here confident that the terrorists know all about what it can do and confident they already know full well that, apart from more murder and mutilation, they are helpless against it.
Yes, and that too.
Liam and Graham:
*claps*
So the first rocket penetrates 60 cm. How far does the second rocket go?
Thordaddy, they’re shaped-charge warheads, which shoot a narrow jet of molten metal out their front. There’s the wall of the reactor, which is a couple of metres thick, as well as the building wall.
The odds of successfully using a sequence of firings as some kind of explosive drill would be pretty unlikely, to say the least.
Andyc: “We know that USAians, in general, are very sheltered and hysteria-prone.”
Funny, we didn’t get the memo on that one. Thanks for catching us up. I’ll begin running through the streets willy-nilly, shrieking in fear, first thing tomorrow morning.
“…the idiotic US Government has decreed that we will all go into hysteria and totalitarian lockdown over this…”
Nothing, er, hysterical about that choice of language. But maybe I just can’t see very clearly, what with this rat-cage locked on my head, due to the uh, totalitarian lockdown.
“…for a lot of that time, the IRA was active on the mainland… [long faulty IRA analogy follows.]”
The IRA want some small bits of a small island to revert politically from one part of said island to another part. What they wanted was and is quite tiny. What Islamist terrorists want is for your entire society and civilization to disintegrate, so that it can come under the domination of Islam. Nor are they vain in their hopes; they are very patient, think long-term, and have over 1,000 years experience at this game, and quite a few stunning successes to show for their efforts.
“…seem to have been off-planet somewhere while the white Christian terrorists were active, think the brown Muslim variety of terror is something new…”
Here you are quite right. The ‘brown Muslim variety of terror’ is not new at all. In fact it goes all the way back to the ‘white’ Arab Muslims and the earliest days of Islam. Predictably, you get tangled up in the hysteria of race; the mark of the clear thinker, as we know.
Your instinct for calm and reason is quite admirable; but your instinct for reason itself (in terms of making accurate observations and distinctions) has quite deserted you, if your analysis of things is this slipshod. If you’re wrong about this sort of stuff, what *else* might you be wrong about? We all have to ask ourselves this question, of course; but you might want to start asking it a bit more often.
Liam — similar thing, but with a lot less snark. Your position has a certain amount of attraction because of course you’re partly right: calm and proportion are vital. But you’re missing a whole dimension of things: the attacks in London and Madrid fit the scale and even the standard m.o. of normative terror activity; but the attacks in New York and Washington were on a different order of magnitude. They were an act of war. Moreover, as a political and symbolic act, in targeting the continental US on such a massive scale (something, I’ll remind you, the USSR never did in 50 years of tense cold war), they upped the ante, set an example internationally, and violated the Monroe Doctrine. For all these reasons, a response far beyond the ‘hard yards of police work’ was in order. As it happens, the Bush response has been a catastrophe six ways to Sunday, but that’s all about morals and competence and technique, not motive.
And again, the motives and historical context of the attackers are simply not comparable to your standard set of terrorists, whether it be the IRA, the ETA, the PLO, or the FALN (who? FA who? Puerto What?) who usually have only petty territorial ambitions. What, for instance, does JI say it ultimately wants? Doesn’t mean similarities in approach can’t be found, but it’s crucial to get your head straight on the basic taxonomy.
There’s more to say about all this, but I’ve gone on too long for the moment. A bientot…
Of course terrorists (ie: those conducting violence who don’t have an air force or a seat at any global standards organisation like the IOC, IATA or the ISO) without any thought through political agenda and a viable and credible political wing are stupid.
Al Qaeda and its ilk can’t produce anything except terror. They can’t build infrastructure, feed people, offer any kind of orderly sucession or any long term goal beyond some ludicrious hashish dream of an Islamic Caliphate or even runite anyone for the long run beyond bitter angry young men – always the fanatical cannon fodder of the ages.
But as Bruce Sterling put it – it’s now the 21st century where it’s not about state-on-state violence any more; it’s about the emergent global order versus failed states. The victory condition for global guerrillas is a failed state where they can prosper as profiteering warlords and gang leaders with delusions of grandeur.
Sure they can still give the civilised, globalised and ordered world a nasty sting from time to time but the world us commenting here live in is not environment in which they can ever establish any kind of serious footprint.
I think the three main issues we to consider about fundie terrorism are:
a) don’t create any more failed states where such a bacillus can thrive through, oh let’s say for fancy’s sake, blundering interventions in distant countries of which we know little, based on bullshitting your own populace, pisspoor planning driven by ideological issues and an clunking inability to get to grips with 4G asymmetrical warfare in an internetted and dirt cheap digital data world;
b) soft/economic power has has taken down far more nasty regimes and movements than military power since WW2. It wasn’t implementing the SIOP that collapsed the Sov Empire and its satrapies like a house of cards. And it’s sexy Western consumer lifestyles and ICT that is whiteanting Red China right now not the USN and SEATO. Or to put it another way, when Al Queda and such like goes recruiting in Iraq, Afghansitan, Pakistan etc, they have to contend with a populace watching pirated DVDs and stolen satillite hook ups of ‘Neighbours’, ‘The Playboy Channel’ and ‘American Pie 5: The Quickening’ and wondering what they have do to enjoy such comfort, wealth, safety and FUN!; and
c) We have nothing to fear but fear itself. As Vladimir Illych Ulyanov once said, “the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize”, a lesson that some of our Western leaders and their cheerleaders seem determined to keep preaching to their consitutents.
Take this take bythis guy who put it in a way I wish I had.
“FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?
CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.”
Or as my Dad, who lived through the Blitz, said ” We had ‘It’s That Man Again’ and the Nazis had Lord Haw Haw. So we just knew we’d win in the end.”
“So the first rocket penetrates 60 cm. How far does the second rocket go?”
And I see yer still digging in hope of hitting a target, any target now, Thordaddy.
Any Australian terrorist wanting to ceate a nuclear kerfuffle could visit Paralana Hot Springs 600 km north of Adelaide with a pump and a tank.
“The Geiger counter is screaming at us. This pond is about 100 times more radioactive than you’d expect anywhere else in Australia.” http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s692473.htm
The radioactive water is unlikely to kill anyone, unless they drink it. But it would sure cause a fright if it was sprinkled about in sensitive places.
I’m surprised the anti-nuke brigades aren’t trying to close this tourist destination down.
j-p-z:
Welcome back. Thought you might have been away sampling some of the traditional liquid handicrafts of those fine hillbilly folk down south ….
Did you follow that link of Robert Merkel at 10:06am 9th January? It was to Richard Clarke’s thought-provoking article “Ten Yers Later” in the Jan/Feb 2005 The Atlantic Monthly.
Not quite post hoc ergo propter hoc but it looks like the November elections are already encouraging your military to get its priorities right. Thought everyone had forgotten all about the bombings of your embassies to Kenya and to Tanzania in all the mass hysteria over America’s worst Born-Loser and his suicidal military escapades …. glad they haven’t and are doing something about those two attacks at long last. By the way, how swiftly can you people get Nancy Pelosi sworn in as President of The United States so we can see some real wins against the terrorists for a change?
If yer really want to terrorise Australia, just leak to the media that some celebrity’s gonna pull a nude stunt on the Sydnety Harbour Bridge. Then when their cameras are in position, blow up a white van halfway across the bridge with just enough force to spread stolen medical isotopes far enough to register on the RAN’s rad sniffers on Goat Island or whatever.
Complete pandemonium and panic gleefully whipped up by ACA and TDT, the Bridge and much of Sydney’s transport systems closed down and all food outlets and courier deliveries in the CDB suspended because of white van panic while geiger counter and dosiemeter vendors make out like bandits.
Al Queda lurkers – please don’t read this.
And Graham, that Richard Clarke piece is thought provoking but rather fails to take into account all those messy human intangibles – like a Las Vegas Al Queda cell squandering its funds at the tables (“My brother in law who is studying mathematics at Agha Khan University in Pakistan emailed me this foolproof method for winning at Blackjack. Just think! We can double our funds in a week!”) while the getway driver decides he’d rather go for a 7-11 franchise instead and the cell leader falls head over heels for a lap top dancer called Tiffany Mae with snow capped Hindu Kushes out to here.
“and have over 1,000 years experience at this game, and quite a few stunning successes to show for their efforts.”
Not really no. Yeah sure the US was painfully and brutally clotheslined on 911 and Bali, Madrid and London were terrible followups but Western Civilisation has been going a lot longer than 1000 years. And everyone who comes into contact with it gets assimulated in one way or another. It’s like the Blob in that it’s very lack of any overall structure or ideology beyond “go to market and have fun when you can” can overcome, absorb, digest and regurgitate anything from religious fundies to political whackos.
Of course this analogy does rather beg the question of whether we are talking about the original ‘Blob’ or the Larry Cohen remake.
Shorter me:
“Islamic Caliphate? This is nothing. Try Hitler, Stalin, MAD and three Italian starlets on Benzedrine…this is a walk in the park…”
Nabakov:
Aah yes, human nature.
Warning: Helmets on, Warries begin: Way back in the olden days, a nearby Viet-Cong unit had a spot of bother with its Political Officer; seems the gentleman went for a stroll with a pack chock-a-block full of genuine U.S. Green as well as a squillion in the capitalist regime’s D-ong/Piastre. Apparently, he wanted to be in the vanguard of occupying the enemy’s cities and of using the enemy’s economic tools to overthrow its evil capitalism. Can’t understand why his fellow VC didn’t accept his explanation; it sounded perfectly logical to me …..
Human nature is the weak link in any revolutionary or terrorist movement. This is why I am frightened of what terrorists can do but I don’t follow the mob and turn terrorists into invincible supermen.
That’s from the Rodenbeck article towards the end. So is this:
Nevertheless, S11 as a single event was stunning and it scared me. 3000 dead is no small number, but the symbolism of the targets was even more important. I expected a follow-up strike deep within the continent, with possibly more deaths, as in an attack on a sporting stadium.
The fact that there has been no such attack in the US and the ‘successful’ terrorist strikes have been so few in number is a tribute to police work, because just about everything else in the so-called ‘war on terror’ has been badly misconceived.
“the probability of an American being killed by terrorists is about the same as of being felled by an allergic reaction to peanuts. Six times more Americans are killed every year by drunk drivers than died in the World Trade Center.”
Brian — Any nation that sets its national security policy according to actuarial tables is being foolish indeed. I can virtually promise you that on Dec. 7, 1941, more Americans died of tobacco-related illnesses than from Japanese shrapnel, but what does that prove? The meaning of these incidents derives not from the body counts (though that lends the meaning gravity) but from the nature of the incidents themselves. We Americans do not wink at foreign attacks upon our soil. Full stop. We are not going to “get used to it” in the sophistimacated European way, a way which gradually (‘and then suddenly,’ in Hemingway’s famous phrase) “got used to” world war, industrialized genocide, a constant of civil chaos, and a near-congenital ethos of resignation, surrender, and dependency upon the resolve of others (for much of the time, ours).
This is not to defend Bush’s foolishness; but as I said to Liam, that foolishness is a matter of arrogance, cloudy thinking, partisanship over patriotism, greed, poor technique, and faulty vision (to say nothing of faulty oversight and incompetent opposition, no small things in the present case), not one of motive or of scale. By hook or by crook (and these days it seems regrettably to be ‘by crook’ as it were), our enemies will have to understand that we do not stand around feeling threatened in our own lands, waiting nervously for their next move. America will not allow itself to become a bombed Tel Aviv discotheque writ large. That is simply not how we do business. Apply to General William Tecumseh Sherman’s writings for a precis of how we DO do business.
That said, I heartily wish that someone much smarter, much more subtle, and much more virtuous and patriotic had been charting the course. Nothing I wrote above should be read as asserting that the current mess isn’t a calamity of the first order. But even if the US has been blundering around blindly in the ME like Godzilla on a tantrum, at least one foreign policy objective has been ass-backwards-ly fulfilled: the ME now knows fer sure that any time it attacks the US, whether overtly or by proxy, it can expect a great deal of blind, Godzilla-like destruction in its home court. And that’s not nothing. Hell, they’re still getting off a whole lot more lightly than Japan did…
“…The fact that there has been no such attack in the US and the ’successful’ terrorist strikes have been so few in number is a tribute to police work…”
Quite so, and yet the police, too, have their human and physical limits. I’ve spoken to plenty of folks in the, er, security community, and while they’re proud of their achievements thus far, they also readily acknowledge that the rapid changes in technology, demographics, and fluidity of population movement renders them very vulnerable. Mostly they believe it’s just a matter of time before some very big fish gets through a hole in the net. Recall the old adage about having to be right every time versus only having to be right once…
Nabakov — your point is well taken, but I think it’s still subject to some important qualifiers, historical and otherwise; my brain is just not un-broken enough right now to provide the required lengthy disquisition demonstrating same, but I hope to get back to it tomorrow, or soon.
Graham Bell: “Thought you might have been away sampling some of the traditional liquid handicrafts of those fine hillbilly folk down south…”
Heh heh. Last time I was down in Texas (jes’ a coupla months ago), I had this rather amusing experience while nussing my bubbon an’ branch…
SCENE: Hotel bar. The only denizens on a hot afternoon are myself and two ancient, unflappable, seen-it-all Texas ladies of the old Ma Ferguson school. The service is, shall we say, not exactly prompt: all our glasses have been empty for some time, yet the barman is not terribly attentive to this matter.
[LOUD, TUMULTOUS DIN OUTSIDE IN THE STREET BELOW]
MYSELF: What the hell is all that noise?
WAITRESS: (looking out window) Oh, there’s this crazy skinhead Nazi march down in the street, and all these anti-Nazi protesters.
OLD TEXAS MATRON: Nazis, eh? (with withering dryness, arching an eyebrow at the bartender) Have we been sitting here *that* long?
j-p-z:
Ha ha, That’s the spirit! Real old-fashioned American humour (nearly said “Yankee” there).
You’ve hit the nail on the head about getting the message through that if you mess with the Americans, they’ll wop you.
That’s what is perplexing for so many non-Americans around the world about the Bush regime’s continual blunders – various American governments in the past have had their share of preventable disasters but what has been going on in the past few years is so unAmerican.
(btw, the bombing of the US Marine barracks in the Lebanon was was a tragedy, not a preventable blunder. Same with the attack on USS Cole. On both occasions, the terrorists were lucky, that’s all. The alternative, having your forces coccooned in cottonwool, was unthinkable).
j_p_z, I wouldn’t expect you to. My purpose was to use a few phrases penned by Americans in an American magazine to reinforce the points being made on the thread. Intellectually we can see that the risks are not high, but emotions are another matter. My emotional reaction to an incident such as September 11 can never be the same as that of Americans. But emotions are tricky things. I would be the last person to say that they should be suppressed or set aside. But you can coach yourself as to how you should feel (doesn’t always work, of course) and you don’t need to go far to find people who will offer to assist you in harmonising intellect, emotions and feelings.
But I don’t want to get into all that beyond stressing that there is always a choice as to what action you take in such situations.
I’m sure Godzilla is front-of-mind to lots of leaders, but the reactions are different as Libya and North Korea exemplify. It is now also clear that Godzilla has limitations, and that any future US Administration is now less likely to set him loose.
I wanted to leave you with the thoughts of two more Americans.
The first is an interview I heard today with New York journalist Ann Jones who took herself off to Afghanistan in 2002 and then wrote the book Kabul in Winter – Life Without Peace in Afghanistan:
The second was Justine Willis Toms’ interview with Deidre Combs on how you can learn from your enemies. (The program was actually better than the outline would suggest.) But of course you have to engage with them in order to learn in the sense she was suggesting. I know the usual response will be that there can be no dialogue with those intending to destroy you, but not all Muslims do, and if there really has been a problem going back 1000 years I’d suggest that guns and bombs won’t fix it.
Just suggestin’
Jones: “address the issues that were grievances to people in less privileged parts of the world …”
Irrelevant to 9/11, since the attackers weren’t from the “less privileged parts of the world” — as informed commentators have pointed out over and over and over again, without the point apparently penetrating into some people’s minds.
And then we get to Combs, oh Lordy. You know, I’ve read much about 9/11 and its aftermath, but I have never before read someone putting forward self-empowerment literature as a guide to what the US foreign policy response should have been. Well, it’s novel, I guess.
“I’d suggest that guns and bombs won’t fix it.” Oh, but guns and bombs could have fixed al-Qaeda’s little red wagon, it’s just that Bush didn’t provide enough of either in Afghanistan.
Brian — thanks for your thoughtful response. It would seem I’ve allowed a bit of room for myself to be misunderstood, so I’d like to clarify: there’s nothing ‘emotional’ in what I wrote above. Quite the contrary. Perhaps I should blame my over-reliance on a slightly high-toned and ponderous prose-style in my previous comment (“Do you think you impress me when you flourish your wooden sword?” — J. Joyce)
People who seek to downplay this business by referencing comparative actuarial stats, or by ‘putting it all in perspective’ or what-have-you, have missed I think an essential point. A massive foreign surprise attack on a nation’s sovereign territory is precisely that, and it should not be compared to other things which it is not. Again, it was not simple ‘terrorism’ strictly speaking; it was an act of war. The scale of the two things is different.
Forgive me for emphasizing the point, but I am not being ‘emotional’ here simply because it happens to be my home-town. Moi-meme, je garde tres bien toujours mon sang-froid. The issue was and is national, and international, not local, though local is where you see clearly what the thing is in itself.
We are not talking about a handful of bombs on buses, as in London recently; nor of a few department-store plate glass windows being blasted out, as in London of the not-so-distant past. It helps to be able to see the colossal ground foot-print of Ground Zero in person, to get the thing in real perspective, but even so that’s nearly beside the point. Consider that each tower was, what?, 110 stories tall. That’s 220 stories total: if we equated this with, say, a more normative neighborhood of 10-story apartment blocks, then we are now talking about a giant smoking crater fully 22 times the size of the already massive existing crater, in the densest part of one of the most valuable cities in the world. Not to mention that it was only one prong of a 3-pronged assault, the other 2 parts of which, happily, largely failed. Still, as they say, do the math.
“But you can coach yourself as to how you should feel (doesn’t always work, of course) and you don’t need to go far to find people who will offer to assist you in harmonising intellect, emotions and feelings.”
Again, the relevant arena for all this is policy, not a support group for post-traumatic stress syndrome. Personally, in my own life, vastly more catastrophic things have happened to me that made much more of a personal impact than 9/11 did. I certainly don’t need it for that use.
And also again, this is not an apologia for the current retarded train-wreck of a policy that my country has been peddling under Mr. Bush. In early 2003, I argued vehemently against the war simply on the grounds that it would cause too great a residual and lasting damage to the US, whereas Iraq would merely be swapping one train-wreck for another.
But when a deliberately-designed attention-getting event like 9/11 occurs, it is a category mistake to chalk it up to garden-variety terrorism and say, ‘oh well.’ There’s too much blood in the water for that, it’s an attractive nuisance that invites too many other dangers. That is what I essentially meant by “we will not get used to…” An effective response has not to date been articulated by the nitwits who purport to lead my country, but still. The correct, efficacious and proper response would have very little to do with sensitivity training or awareness workshops, I promise you.
Now I am going on too long but there is still more to say, so I will break off here, and perhaps resume (or not?? who knows?!) in a separate comment.
Still, thanks for your thoughts, it’s always a pleasure and an education to hear what you have to say.