STRIKING FEAR

As much as I hate to link to the LA Slimes, the rag has a pretty good piece that tries to make sense of the spate of terrorist bombings in the past month. Essentially, in order to survive the various allied offensives against them, al Qaeda has gone native:

A spate of suicide bombings in several countries illustrates that Al Qaeda has survived by mutating into a more decentralized network relying on local allies to launch more frequent attacks on varied targets, experts say.

In bombings from Turkey to Morocco, experts say, evidence suggests that Al Qaeda provided support through training, financing or ideological inspiration to local extremists. Through an evolving and loose alliance of semiautonomous terrorist cells, the network has been able to export its violence and "brand name" with only limited involvement in the attacks themselves.

So it's al Qaeda the meme now, not necessarily al Qaeda the actual force with camps and leaders and plans. But--those camps and leaders and plans still do play a role:

Al Qaeda allegedly gave the direct order for some of the attacks, investigators say, including one in Indonesia and the May bombing of a residential compound in Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital. But in others, its local affiliates appeared to have operated more independently. The May suicide bombings in Casablanca, Morocco, are seen as a model of the network's emerging strategy.

Here's how the local groups get their skills:

The global threat persists because of the years Al Qaeda spent "training the trainers" — tens of thousands of operatives molded in the movement's camps in Afghanistan. Many have returned to their homelands and are trying to whip local extremists into killing shape, U.S. and European counter-terrorism officials say.

So if we had ripped up those camps in Sudan and later Afghanistan earlier, we could have prevented the current wave of grass-roots terrorism. The kamikaze captains would have never been trained to spread their ideology. We lost roughly three years in this fight, from the time the Clinton administration declared war on terrorism to when the Bush administration actually began to prosecute it--and we're paying for that long delay now.

The question now is, how do we counter and ultimately defeat this threat? A hydra-headed enemy requires a multi-dimensional response, but in what specific forms? The most obvious response is to destroy the base camps where al Qaeda forms its ideology and indoctrinates its operatives--that we have done, in Afghanistan, the Philippines (assisting local forces, for the most part) and Iraq (Ansar al-Islam, a group few dispute is an al Qaeda offshoot). The challenge now is to make sure no similar camps can be established anywhere in the future. Most likely safe havens for future camps would be Iran, where many top al Qaeda officers are said to be either holed up or "in custody" if you believe the mullahs who run the place, and probably Syria and Lebanon, where they can easily blend in with the terror groups already operating there. And you can't rule out the border territory between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban still enjoys some popular support and probably get a hand from elements of the Pakistani ISI.

But what else can we do? Cut off their finances--they have to have cash flow to operate. There's evidence we're having some success there--the Bali bombers were caught in a bank-robbery scheme that was intended to generate cash for future attacks, implying that they had no direct source to tap for funding. But the intifada festivals in Bahrain are evidence that terrorists can find a zillion ways to generate cash, from charities to televised beg-a-thons. We'll never stop the terrorists' cash flow entirely, but we can slow it down and monitor it to pick up the trail of the terrorists themselves. We can also credibly threaten terror-supporting regimes with certain extinction; Saddam and the Taliban are our object lessons. We seem to be having some success in these areas, but that success seems to have slowed down lately. When was the last major terror figure outside of the Iraqi Baath structure captured or killed? I can't remember, it's been so long.

Somehow, we have to counter the terrorists in their air--ideology. Their savagery appeals to a wide swath of the Arab middle class--why? Root cause theory would say that poverty is the cause, and a social worker approach is the answer. But the facts mostly contradict that--most terrorists are educated, upper or middle class, affluent Arabs. The Casablanca bombers were apparently slum residents, but so far they're the exception and not the rule. How do we convince affluent and educated people with everything to live for that they in fact should live for those things instead of vaporizing themselves and taking scores of innocents with them? We have to discredit their ideology.

Our Japan experience is somewhat instructive here. For decades prior to World War II, the Imperial government fed the Japanese people a steady diet of propaganda portraying Americans as barbaric savages who would eat the children and rape the women of any nation or culture that opposed them. This propaganda bore bloody fruit on Okinawa, where advancing US troops witnessed the unthinkable--Japanese women, knowing they stood in the path of the oncoming savages, threw their children off cliffs or into volcanic vents before committing suicide. Japanese soldiers would almost never surrender, preferring to provoke an attack sure to kill them rather than lay down their weapons. Of the more than 20,000 Imperial troops placed to defend Iwo Jima from American invasion, barely a handful survived. Most died down in the island's caves, refusing to surrender even while flamethrowers and bulldozers made quick work of their hideouts.

How did we counter this ghastly ideology? We discredited it. Their Emperor was believed to be divine and infallible, and any course he set the nation on was guaranteed to succeed. He had set in a course for a grand and victorious war; defeat immediately rendered him a mere human and his ideas worse than lies. Further, our behavior as occupiers showed the pre-war propaganda for what it was. We came in and ushered in a true democracy, we respected the rule of law and local customs, and defended a war-weakened Japan both from possible Soviet and later Communist Chinese invasion.

We can do the same for Iraq. We've defeated Saddam Hussein, but until he is captured or verifiably killed, he is not completely discredited. The same goes for Osama bin Laden. I believe he's dead, but we need a body to dangle before his sycophants. The complete, humiliating defeat of these two criminal masterminds would do far more good in the war on terror than most people realize.

It will obviously take much more than the public humiliation of two thug kingpins to win this war, and I certainly don't have all the answers. Problem is, it seems no one else does either.