Bad day

Sometimes, you just gotta let off a little steam.



May I suggest yoga.

Reppin for the homies

Hotair alerts me to this remarkably well-behaved gentleman from my hometown of Wichita, Kansas.

"Via Bill Amos, a symphonie du bleep for lazy Friday afternoon. Interesting case here, actually. The charge was battery stemming from the defendant having spit in the eye of a sheriff’s deputy. The sentence: 13 years in prison, three more than the prosecutor had asked for. Why so long? Because he’s HIV-positive, which makes that loogie a potentially (albeit unlikely) deadly weapon."



This is behavior I see on almost a daily basis at the school where I work. It is refreshingly shocking when I watch someone else withstand it. Cutting through the ego defenses of kids who do this to get to a place of greater responsibility is extremely difficult work. But if we don't do it early, this and worse is the consequence later.

A nice reminder of why I do the work I do, abuse and all.

Nothing in life is anything that I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge as such

The insanity of it all is so aggravating, you can only laugh.



Because shooting yourself in the head only works once.

The fate of al Queda and international terrorism

The Economist features an excellent report on the present fate and ultimate future of al Qaeda and the successes and failures of American and international efforts to challenge its global jihadist aims.

Winning or losing?

"Al-Qaeda has built on decades of Middle Eastern terrorism. Palestinian groups internationalised their violence in the 1970s; Hizbullah used suicide-bombers against the Americans in Lebanon back in 1983; Palestinian suicide-bombers sought to inflict maximum civilian casualties in Israel from 1994; and Algerians who hijacked a French airliner the same year tried to fly it into the Eiffel Tower but were foiled.

In those days, though, attacking Western targets was part of a local nationalist or sectarian fight. Al-Qaeda’s dark genius was to weave these strands together with the tools of globalisation to create a networked movement with a single worldwide cause: jihad against America. Conventional terrorist groups, such as the Basque ETA movement or even Lebanon’s Hizbullah, often keep their violence in bounds to avoid alienating their political supporters. But global jihadists, without a domestic constituency, seek to maximise civilian casualties for spectacular effect. Counting the victims is tricky. Attacks on Western civilians have dropped, but the routine use of suicide-bombings has raised the slaughter, mostly of Muslims, to appalling levels (see chart 1).

Al-Qaeda’s ideology was forged by one big victory and two decades of failures. Disparate Arab fighters who helped Afghan ones evict Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 were initially elated, but became dejected by the ensuing civil war and the failure of violent campaigns in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere. Many extremists decided to end the bloodletting. But a cadre of wandering jihadists gathered in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban and decided to redirect their ire from the 'near' enemy to the 'far' one...

Al-Qaeda’s ideology was forged by one big victory and two decades of failures. Disparate Arab fighters who helped Afghan ones evict Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 were initially elated, but became dejected by the ensuing civil war and the failure of violent campaigns in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere. Many extremists decided to end the bloodletting. But a cadre of wandering jihadists gathered in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban and decided to redirect their ire from the 'near' enemy to the 'far' one...

Seen in this light, one of the objectives of the September 11th attacks was to provoke the Americans into invading Muslim lands. But if al-Qaeda intended to trap America in Afghanistan, its plan went badly awry, at least initially. The Taliban fell quickly in 2001 and al-Qaeda’s followers were forced into hiding.

A hubristic America, however, then walked into a trap of its own making by invading Iraq in 2003. It got rid of a dangerous dictator but gave the jihadists a popular cause against American occupiers in the Muslim heartland. For a while the jihadists thought they could carve out a base in Iraq from which to destabilise the region. That danger may now have been averted. Helped by al-Qaeda’s excesses, a bloodied America seems to be fighting its way out of the worst of the troubles it created for itself.

So terrorism experts are now debating whether al-Qaeda is starting to burn itself out. 'On balance, we are doing pretty well,' Michael Hayden, the director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, told the Washington Post in May. 'Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally—and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’—as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.'

Many thought he was being overly optimistic. Had General Hayden himself not given warning two months earlier that the restoration of an al-Qaeda haven in Pakistan’s tribal belt constituted a 'clear and present danger' to the West?

A related argument has been provoked by 'Leaderless Jihad', a book by Marc Sageman, a counter-terrorism consultant. He argues that al-Qaeda’s core leadership has been 'neutralised operationally'. The bigger danger now comes from loose groups of Muslims in the West who radicalise each other and carry out autonomous, self-financed attacks.

This thesis has come in for strong criticism, particularly from Professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University. He notes that al-Qaeda’s imminent death has often been heralded in the past, only to be contradicted by the sound of new explosions. Many plots in Europe have direct connections back to Pakistan, he notes.

Part of the problem lies in al-Qaeda’s diffuse nature. Its core members may number only hundreds, but it has connections of all kinds to militant groups with thousands or even tens of thousands of fighters. Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation, a militant network and a subculture of rebellion all at the same time.

To explain the movement, many experts draw parallels with globalisation. Some describe it as a venture-capital firm that invests in promising terrorist projects. Others speak of it as a global 'brand' maintained by its leaders through their propaganda, with its growing number of 'franchises' carrying out attacks.

The rise of al-Qaeda’s stateless terrorism does not mean that the old state-sponsored variety has disappeared. Libya, which once supported the IRA and other violent causes, may now be co-operating with the West, but Iran, among others, supports both Palestinian militants and Lebanon’s Hizbullah movement. Should Iran redirect Hizbullah towards a global terrorist campaign against the West—for instance, if the country’s nuclear sites were bombed—the effect might be more devastating than any of al-Qaeda’s works.

For the moment, though, the most immediate global threat comes from the ungoverned, undergoverned and ungovernable areas of the Muslim world. These include the Afghan-Pakistani border, the parts of Iraq still in turmoil, the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and swathes of Yemen, Somalia, the western Sahara desert and the chain of islands between Indonesia and the Philippines (see map)...

This special report will attempt to answer the impossible question posed in 2003 in a leaked memo from Donald Rumsfeld, then America’s defence secretary: 'Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?'"

An interview with Economist defense and security correspondent, Anton LaGuardia, is a very interesting discussion worth your time if you are interested in this question.



If I have learned anything this summer, it is that there is no dearth of valuable expertise and insight on serious questions like international terrorism. That speaks well of what is possible when we have a robust enough marketplace of ideas to support such expertise and thought. The fact of that broad, robust, liberal democratic marketplace of ideas is the West's most important strength and weapon in this battle.

May we use it wisely.