A Year of Terror Plots

As terrorist plots against the United States have piled up in recent months, politicians and the news media have sounded the alarm with a riveting message for Americans: Be afraid. Al Qaeda is on the march again, targeting the country from within and without, and your hapless government cannot protect you.
It used to be the commies that we needed to fear, because they were getting closer to our shores every time a domino was predicted to fall.


But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill.

China and the Soviet Union and Viet Nam and all the other commies were lumped into the world-wide Communist conspiracy.

Analysts urge a calmer, more strategic assessment of the recent rash of violent schemes insist that the country is far safer than it was in 2001. They also argue that since the goal of terrorism is to spread terror, hyperbole about threats only does the extremists’ work for them.

 As did talk of the Red terror.


Charles E. Allen, a 40-year C.I.A. veteran served as the top intelligence official at the Department of Homeland Security from 2007 to early last year. Exaggerated news coverage and commentary, he said, “creates an atmosphere of tension and fear, and to me that’s exactly the wrong way to go.” Mr. Allen said the United States needed “resilience” in the face of the terrorist threat. He noted with admiration that public transportation barely paused in London in 2005 when 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers attacking the subway and a bus. “I believe in heightened attention to security; I just don’t believe hysteria is useful,” Mr. Allen said.

Unless used by a politician to score points.


The term “Al Qaeda,” used as a catchall in many of the plots, blurs important distinctions. By most accounts, apart from possibly the Zazi case, none of the 2009 cases appears to be directly tied to “Al Qaeda central,” as experts refer to the Pakistan-based group led by Mr. bin Laden. Others involved ersatz “Qaeda” agents who actually worked for the F.B.I. Still others, including the Christmas Day attempt, had links to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a loosely linked affiliate of Mr. bin Laden’s group in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Blurring  distinctions is important for the right wing crowd.


In 2008, in his book “Leaderless Jihad,” Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist and former C.I.A. officer who has long studied terrorism networks, wrote that Al Qaeda was in decline, to be replaced by dispersed terrorists for whom it provided mostly inspiration. The new generation of extremists, he believed, would be less skilled and would likely pose less of a threat than the network responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Dr. Sageman said he saw no reason to revise that judgment today. The plots of the last year should be carefully analyzed and the findings used to improve counterterrorism, not turned into fuel for thoughtless anti-Muslim panic and discrimination, he said. “If we overreact and upset 1.5 billion Muslims,” Dr. Sageman said, referring to the global total, “then we’ll have a lot bigger problem on our hands.”



A memorial for the 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November. It was the deadliest domestic terrorism attack of the year

Preparing for the wrong war

An editorial in the current issue of Barron's.

THIRTY-THREE YEARS AT LEAST – that's how long the United States military establishment has taken to learn the most important lesson from the Vietnam War. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is not the first Pentagon chief to realize that's too long. Even now, Gates says, the entire military hasn't yet learned the lesson.

The military resists and fights change. Bureaucrats resist and fight change. The military bureaucracy resists and fights change. A terrible combination.

The high-ranking officers who set up the curriculum in the staff college in the 1980s were responsible in large measure for the failure of counterinsurgency in the first phase of the war against the Iraqi insurgency. The difficult lessons of the war against the Viet Cong had "withered on the vine," Gates said, warning that it must not happen again after current wars wind down.

Good enough intentions, but one has to wonder how it'll translate. Colin Powell vowed the lessons, as he put it, learned from the Viet Nam War wouldn't be forgotten; he then counseled Bush 1 not to go to Baghdad, leaving that battle to be fought a decade and a half later.

Gates said that even in the middle of the Iraq and Afghan wars, U.S. military leaders are succumbing to what he called "Next-War-itis," which he defined as "the propensity of much of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future conflict" against North Korea, Iran, China or another large national military with conventional arms and conventional war aims. He was being diplomatic: A better description would be "Last-War-itis," or perhaps, "preparing to fight the war we want to fight instead of the war our enemies will choose."

An excellent point, that of wanting to fight the war we want; same is true in diplomacy and international relations: Bush talks of making Iran conform to our expectations and demands, rather than being creative in his thinking and actions.

But the U.S., as Gates said, already has "ample and untapped combat power in our naval and air forces with the capacity to defeat any, repeat any, adversary who committed an act of aggression, whether in the Persian Gulf, on the Korean Peninsula or in the Straits of Taiwan." What it needs are the tools of counterinsurgency and soldiers who can use them, he said.

This is a fundamental mistake, thinking that the US can defeat any adversary with its hardware. If a war started with Iran, say, clearly (to me) the debacle in Iraq has shown that defeating the adversary with hardware; Iran would fight an insurgency that would make Iraq look to be a skirmish.