Another set of attacks in London, looked like the explosives didn’t go off, just the detenators. So thankfully no one killed and the British police have already arrested two suspects
The Counterterrorism Blog has good coverage on the events, thanks BillMon. My previous post links to some blog/website/and wiki’s on the last london bombing that have more info.
It’s important for us to understand the enemy. If you simply dismiss them as crazy fanatics how do you create a strategy to defeat or greatly weaken them?
Via BillMon again, John Rob talks about different layers of modern community warfare relating to the london bombings. He talks about how the US and UK have decaptiated a large portion of the Al Queda’s leadership lessing the risk of large scale coordinated actions like 9-11 but there’s still the danger of smaller scale actions. He also discusses Open Source warfare or War 2.0 here. Here is his great analysis on Al Qaeda’s grand strategy: Superpower Baiting.
A different site offering to explain The Logic of Suicide Terrorism It’s the occupation, not the fundamentalism
The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.
Which echo’s what I said previously.
Mohammed Sajid talks about why suicide bombers emerged from within the Muslim community of Yorkshire in northern England.
A good article on the anatomy of Terrorism.
Here’s full transcript of bin Ladin’s speech from last November it explains a lot.
It’s important to understand (or try to) these people, otherwise you’ll have such clueless strategies as this guy.
A Colorado congressman Rep. Tom Tancredo, recently suggested this
Well, what if you said something like(nuclear attack) — if this happens in the United States, and we determine that it is the result of extremist, fundamentalist Muslims, you know, you could take out their holy sites, Tancredo answered.
“You’re talking about bombing Mecca,” Campbell said.
“Yeah,” Tancredo responded.
The congressman later said he was “just throwing out some ideas” and that an “ultimate threat” might have to be met with an “ultimate response.”
Throwing out some ideas? Like you should be locked up? What a clueless moron! The US is running out of recruits and money moving towards bankrupting their country (like the USSR in Afghanistan) by currently occcupying 2 Muslim countries. How about having a billion of them against you?
One reason the US lost the war in Vietnam was because they were too arrogant, and thought everyone else thought like them. So they didn’t bother understanding Vietnamese, culture, history and behavior. Consequently the fought the war like it was WWII or Korea. Problem was it wasn’t. It was a new kind of war. So is this one.
When you look at how militarily and politically clueslessly inept Bush and Co. were at occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems they forgot the lessons of Vietnam. Hopefully the British clue in quicker, looks so far like they are.