Gaddafi dead; a victory for Libyan rebels, but also another Obama victory in the War on Terror, and credit to Bush too…

No one is more surprised than me (not that my opinion counts) how well this Libya adventure has turned out. I would have or did predict protracted war turning into a quagmire.

Gaddafi is dead. Caught like the rat he was, hiding in a hole (just like Saddam Hussein), and his corpse apparently messed with something like Mussolini (although no hanging upside down from a street lamp, as far as I know).

So I have to give one to our commander-in-chief, and this follows up on the excellent dispatch of Osama Bin Laden.

Also this was done under the cover of NATO (way to go!).

Of course I may seem like I am slighting the ones who actually bagged him, that is the Libyan rebels, but they have had the support of Obama and NATO in all of this — but way to go guys (but who knows if they might not turn on us some day?).

Now that the world-wide terror supporter is dead, let’s get out while the getting is good and let the Arabs fight one another or hopefully come to a peaceful resolution as to who runs what.

Obama (with the help of others) scores another victory in the war on terror.

And I reluctantly give credit to George W. Bush who sent out the message and set the tone for U.S. policy that says to terrorist leaders: “you can run but you can’t hide (forever)”.

Nine Eleven was not Pearl Harbor; we made some missteps; Bush may have had one thing right, though

Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was not. But it was a tragedy, and I have come to think, maybe just today on its tenth anniversary, that President George W. Bush was at least partially right in his reactions to the event — maybe. But first:

Well 9/11 or 9-11-11 is all but a done deal now and thank goodness, as I write this, nothing yet. (Well actually there was an attack by the Taliban in the ongoing Afghan War over the last 24 hours, with many Americans — at least 77 – injured, but nothing in the homeland, as it has been called, particularly since 9/11 ).

I also want to interject here before I go further that regardless of what I think of the War on Terror I felt sad and outraged when I heard an interview on NPR in which a National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan said he got into a fight in a bar here at home when someone said to him: “your war doesn’t count”. This soldier, according to the interview, had been involved in going out and searching for IEDs and had suffered the shock of blasts from them more than once.

Its kind of chicken…t that we have this all-volunteer military and we can stand by and let them be sent hither and yon and into harm’s way but not even consider the policies that send them there because it does not affect our own life. Besides, the soldier does what he or she is supposed to do and if he or she was not available, each one of us might be subject to the call. And the soldier is separate from the government policy that puts him or her in harm’s way.

(There is the Nuremberg, I was only following orders thing, but I think the guilt rests with the higher ups, generally.)

But back to what I wanted to say on this tenth anniversary before it is over:

There has been a lot of comparison of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor. In fact those neocons who wanted us to go to war in the Middle East (again since Desert Storm) even had the audacity to wish on paper for another Pearl Harbor in their Project for a New American Century treatise.

But while it is spooky and almost a little too convenient that indeed we had a Pearl Harbor-like attack (it did come from the air), there are not really a lot of similarities, except about the same number of lost lives.

Pearl Harbor was an act of war by an identifiable nation — Japan. I don’t know if the Japanese admiral really said it, but in a movie account he is heard saying: “I am afraid we have awakened a sleeping giant”. Indeed the Japanese did. There was a strong isolationist feeling in America, right up until the Japs attacked. At that point the isolationist movement  died.

We had a fairly unified reaction to 9/11 but as the response dragged on and got muddled I think the public turned indifferent for the most part.

On 9/11 we were attacked by a stateless group of folks. It was staged, though, from Afghanistan where the group who would claim responsibility and calls itself Al Qaeda was being harbored along with its then leader Osama Bin Laden by the Taliban who controlled that nation. We demanded they turn over Bin Laden and they refused and we attacked. But as everyone knows, almost inexplicably our former president, George W. Bush, seemed to become half-hearted at that and turned his sights on Iraq, successfully conflating events there with 9/11 (it is well known he wanted an excuse to attack Iraq even before 9/11). While certainly the then leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was probably sympathetic with the aims of Al Qaeda, as far as them being against America, there is no evidence he had anything whatsoever to do with 9/11. Nonetheless we wound up attacking Iraq and making much more of a show of it there than Afghanistan until years later. We are still engaged in hostilities in both nations. And of course President Obama successfully ordered and got the killing of Bin Laden by our special military units, most notably the Navy SEALS.

But while the attack on Pearl Harbor was an act of clear aggression by an identifiable nation, and while Pearl Harbor pushed America into World War II against the Axis powers of Japan and Germany (and for a time Italy), and while congress officially declared war on the Axis powers, and while that war was budgeted and consumer goods became scarce and food was rationed in the war effort — none of those things took place for 9/11. And oh, yes, we, the U.S. and its allies, clearly won WWII. We went for complete victory to include unconditional surrender of the enemy.

Today we have no complete victory and no unconditional surrender and at times we don’t even know who the enemy is. Indeed the presidential authorizations to fight this war or wars seems to be against terrorism in general, as if you could declare war on a tactic or against evil itself.

Our constitution does not really tell us what to do in this instance. I don’t think the framers dreamed that one day we would have a president who would up and decide to wipe out all evil in the world by declaring war on it. And our wars in these modern times, especially since World War II, are just not fought in the same way.

In the end, we actually prospered from WWII and became the world’s leading economic and military power.

Today we are essentially going bankrupt due in large part to the War on Terror.

And we are no safer today, a trillion or more dollars and thousands of casualties later, after a decade, or at least it is hard to think we could be.

One of the more agonizing things about both Pearl Harbor and 9/11 is that in both cases we had warning. Pearl Harbor had actually been predicted back in the 1920s, even though it did not occur until 1941. A 9/11-type attack had also been predicted years ahead of time, despite the erroneous observation by Condoleezza Rice that no one ever thought such a thing might happen. We also had the very culprits who got on the airplanes and carried out the 9/11 attacks on a terrorist watch list, but it all got lost in the bureaucracy and interagency rivalry.

Some have even suggested that there was an inside conspiracy in both cases by people who wanted us to go to war. While I doubt that, I do think that the events handed them their cases on a silver platter and maybe some did look the other way at warnings hoping something might happen.

Twenty-twenty hindsight is easy, I admit. But we do need to reflect on what happened and how we handled it and see if we cannot come up with something better.

While I have always been critical of Bush for his actions, particularly his striking at Iraq, instead of concentrating on Afghanistan or even on just going after the actual perpetrators — the ones besides the ones that died in the attack of course — and their leader Bin Laden (it took another president to get that job done), I think he, Bush, had the right idea after all, maybe, in putting those who would attack America on notice that they could run, but they could not hide — we will get them.

We indeed did get Bin Laden (even if it took a decade), and we have killed scores of Al Qaeda leaders. I mean it has got to make some of these bad guys nervous that an unseen drone flying overhead could send a missile up their rear end at any moment.

I think we may have overdone things militarily, especially since we don’t seem to have the desire or stomach to actually defeat nations, occupy them for a time, and then make sure they fly right. We did so with Germany and Japan, but that was then and this is now.

I’m thinking drones, cloak and dagger, and keeping our mouths shut, and letting our actions speak louder than words, just might be the way to go.

But there still may come a time when it will be necessary to use our military in a more conventional sense. We have to have public support to make that effective. And we should not do so without it.

And although for much of today I was involved with my truck driving work, I did manage to catch some of the comments from folks who suffered on 9/11, who lost loved ones.

I felt terribly sad for them.

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ADD 1:

I just now recall that I heard a story the other day I think on NPR that the ten-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor was not marked in any special way for the most part because we were all into having our former foe Japan be on our side and be an important base for our operations against North Korea at the time, the Korean War being in progress.

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P.s.

Looking back in a more personal way in my own life, I recall that fateful day. My now late wife was in the hospital suffering from a mysterious illness. It was touch and go and I had been up late with her. At the time we were living with my mother. I was on leave (using vacation time) from my work. That morning I was sleeping in, having been up late at the hospital. My mom woke me up and told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. News junkie that I am, normally I would have jumped up. But I was tired. But after I finally did get up, I saw the video of a jet crashing into one of the towers.  And I recall once the second plane hit, we instantly knew this was not a freak accident.

As it turned out, my wife would recover for the most part, but unfortunately she only had about nine years. She died just over a year ago.

Wished I could have made more of those nine years with her.

We should all make the best of things each day. Things like 9/11 happen, and even smaller every day tragedies occur too. None of us knows how long we have and how long we will share things with our loved ones.

Extreme rhetoric, such as “don’t retreat, reload”, leads to violence, the latest being in Norway…

You see, it is the extremists who are the problem. Not the far left or the far right, per se, but the extremists in those camps.

Case in point:

A radical Islamic cleric threatens violent reprisals against Norway if he is deported.

And the Islamic extremists went crazy with rage and threats when a Danish newspaper published a cartoon mocking Osama Bin Laden (the now late Osama Bin Laden).

And now a right-wing home-grown terrorist has killed at least 93 people (a final count is yet to come) and maybe more, apparently first setting off a bombing as a diversion in the Norwegian capital of Oslo and then motor boating out to an island dressed in a police uniform and pretending to be there to help protect people in an apparent ongoing attack, only to then mow down people with a machine gun. The camp was for youth of the ruling left-wing party, which he may have thought too soft on suspected Islamic extremists and not vigilant enough in a perceived threat of a takeover of Europe by Islamic extremists.

The attacker was identified as Anders Breivik, 32 years old, a blond and blue-eyed Norwegian with no criminal record or anything else that caught the attention of authorities. I am not sure how he makes or has made a living, except he reportedly owns an acreage and a small farming enterprise, something that may have been used as a cover to order fertilizer to make a bomb.

When either the right or the left ratchets up the rhetoric there are nuts out there that take it all to heart and take action. These nuts left unchecked would put Hitler to shame.

Our own Sarah Palin, not really a politician, but huckster riding the far-right zeitgeist, urged her followers not to “retreat, but reload”.

People with their marbles have a hard enough time sorting out all the political rhetoric. And people a brick short a load get it all messed up and do terrible things. The Norway culprit is being likened to our (U.S.) own Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for his part in the Oklahoma bombing episode.

Unfortunately in a free society it is difficult to detect and control these nut cases in time.

But thinking people should eschew the extreme rhetoric and hate emanating from both ends of the political spectrum.

Norway is known as a peaceful country. It has not conducted war with anyone in an awful long time (ADD 1: except that Norway has committed troops to the NATO operations in Afghanistan and Libya, and earlier to the NATO operations in Kosovo). But I just read that one of its big defense contractors (arms merchants), Kongsberg, has won a contract to sell weapons to Italy. Weapons are a major industry of the western world. You reap what you sow.

It will be interesting to see how peaceful Norway responds to what has been called their own 9/11 moment.

P.s.

The Norway culprit was reportedly concerned about the threat of an Islamic takeover of western Europe. An Islamic takeover of the whole world is a real threat, I think (not that all Muslims are into that), but killing innocent people, to say the least, is not the way to counter it.

Clandestine raids may be more effective than conventional war…

I understand the Libya War or the effort to oust Gaddafi is stalling because the rebels are disorganized and poorly trained and NATO is not giving enough support.

It occurs to me — why not do to Gaddafi what we (the U.S.) did to Bin laden? In fact, maybe instead of sending so many troops into the Middle East we should be running clandestine operations against all terrorist leaders and supporters (such as Gaddafi).

I have long been a critic of the wars, but at the same time have always suggested that if we are to fight a war or wars, we need to go in no holds barred, with no option except total victory and total surrender of the opposing forces. I still feel that way. War is bad enough, but anything less than all-out war is a criminal waste of lives and money.

But I realize that special ops and cloak and dagger and assassinations might be a more effective, if somewhat less ethical, way to go. And maybe we can do both, regular war and clandestine operations at the same time (well we already do apparently).

The problem is that if we were to get carried away with clandestine operations it could quickly get out of hand.

We need to be selective in all of this. But who should lose sleep, except the terrorists, if we go after known terrorists, such as Bin Laden, who never proclaimed innocence, but instead bragged about his exploits and called for more to come, and Gaddafi who is known to have supported and harbored an airline bomber and other terrorists?

I do not see the sense or efficacy in nation building such as we tried to do in Iraq or we are trying to do in Afghanistan. I mean I understand the idea that if only people there embraced western democracy and created a middle class (something we seem to be losing) there would be less of a seed bed for terrorism. We are kind of hoping that is what the so-called Arab Spring is all about. But such a move has to be from the people there themselves. And there is no guarantee that their culture will fully embrace our ways.

In my opinion we should encourage our form of democracy in the Middle East, but our primary goal should be to protect ourselves from terrorism and realize we cannot and should not even try to remake the world in our image.

What we are trying to do or should be trying to do is go directly after the terrorists who threaten us — that is enough to keep our hands full as it is.

The drones and precision raids seem a good way to do this.

But where we choose the more conventional approach of land war, we should go all out in order to accomplish the mission instead of creating long and drawn out wars of attrition that present stalemates and end up with results we don‘t prefer.

I would like to think that Gaddafi hears that buzzing sound of the unseen drone above him or thinks he does.

It would be better to release Bin Laden death photos…

I’m not going to lose any sleep over it, but I don’t see why the photos of the dead Osama Bin Laden should not be released — President Barack Obama having made the decision not to release them.

Yes, they would not be nice. But you know those videos released by Al Qaeda on the internet of Americans having their heads sawed off were not nice either (although I never saw them myself).

I realize they would not satisfy the skeptics, seeing as we still have people who are sure we never landed on the moon — those photos were shot out in the desert in Arizona or New Mexico, they will tell you.

On the other hand, the swift dumping of the body at sea and the refusal to release photos does seem awful mysterious, even though I myself am 99.9 percent sure it is all on the up and up.

But bottom line, I don’t think it would be a bad idea to release the photos.

On a related matter, I am disgusted, but not surprised that the die-hard Obama haters don’t want to give the man credit for the finally successful end to Bin Laden.

They just can’t stand the fact that their pretend fly boy George W. Bush couldn’t get the job done. Obama never has claimed to have been a military man in any form, but it took Obama to get Osama — and again, way to go Navy SEALs. And even though I am not a big fan of the Middle East war(s), thank you all military for your service and your demonstration to the world that we are not spineless. And thanks of course to the CIA and all others involved.

P.s.

Maybe history will be kinder to George W. than it seems like it will be now. Or not. I’m not sure how much credit Bush deserves for the eventual snuffing out of Bin Laden. I would reluctantly give him credit for at least standing up to terrorists. Bill Clinton, none at all. We are told the Saudis offered him Bin Laden and he declined. I think he was too busy fiddling around with Monica. Why he gets a pass on all that I’ll never know. In fact, Clinton’s inattention to duty makes W. look almost competent.

——————-

Clarification:

In a previous post I wrote Navy Seals, instead of the Acronym, upper case, SEALs (sea, air, and land). At least in blog world you can go back and correct the original, as I did (I think) — but I feel better owning up to my mistakes or goofs. Add to this clarification: I don’t have access at this moment to a real dictionary or style book, but I see Seal written both ways, all upper and upper and lower, on the Web, with both a New York Times story and a Time Magazine story using lower case. Oh well.

Pakistan is our enemy probably;Now that Bin Laden is dead are we to continue to be in the perpetual War on Terror?

ADD 1: I want to add this to my post: A caller into the Ronn Owens Show on KGO Radio, San Francisco, said the fact that Osama Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight of the Pakistanis and the fact that they claim they knew nothing about it either means they are lying and were complicit or that they are terribly inept and if the latter, then we should be concerned whether they can handle being a nuclear power. I would say the Pakistani government has all but proved itself our enemy. I don’t want to us to declare war on them, but neither do I want us to continue to fork over the millions or billions of dollars in aid, military and otherwise, to them. I think it was George W. Bush who basically said that anyone who aids and abets terrorists is our enemy — I hate to say it, but I agree with W. on that one.

———————————

Invading Afghanistan after 9/11 and after the Taliban who ran that nation at the time refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden seemed to make sense. In effect, Afghanistan by aiding and abetting Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had committed an act of war against the United States. We went in with great guns and much public support. But for some inexplicable reason (and I really need to research that recent history) things bogged down after an initial success. And stranger still, President George W. Bush seemed to lose interest in capturing Bin Laden, even saying at one point that he no longer considered his capture a priority.

Bush strayed from the Afghanistan mission — historically a virtually impossible country for outsiders to conquer — and plunged into Iraq on the pretext of  some apparently non-existent weapons of mass destruction (although I could have made a good case for him to do so, but on different grounds, but that’s another subject, really).

There could be a whole host of reasons for Bush’s attitude, but one might be that he considered what we were involved in to be far bigger than a manhunt for one terrorist mastermind. After all it was Bush who called it a “War on Terror”, not a war against Afghanistan or even just Al Qaeda. This was a new concept in what we had known of war. Previously we had thought of war as more of a conflict between nation states, such as the U.S. and its allies versus the Axis powers in World War II.

Even during the Cold War when we were in effect in some kind of ongoing struggle against the forces of communism (most notably the USSR), we did not commit our military to some kind of open-ended war with a concept or an ideology. We fought back the communist North Koreans when they tried to take over South Korea and we fought both North Vietnam and the communist insurgents called the Viet Cong in Vietnam (actually both proxy wars between the real adversaries of the time, the U.S. vs. The Soviet Union).

And it is true, after the last real conventional war, WWII, we had a hard time knowing when something is supposed to be over or what victory looked like. But Bush talked congress into giving him permission to conduct an open-ended war against not a state, not an identifiable force, but what I call a noun (a person, place or thing or concept), that is “terror” (and apparently the war on terror authorization was transferable to Barack Obama, who in effect is using it in Libya, and all future presidents). It seems to me that had Bush stuck with the program in the original Afghanistan invasion, going after Al Qaeda and capturing (or killing) Bin Laden, this all might have been wrapped up nearly a decade ago or a little less.

But even before 9/11 the neo-conservative movement had put out a paper, the thesis of which is that it was necessary for the security of the United States to basically dominate the oil-rich Middle East. In fact, the paper suggested the American public needed a Pearl Harbor event to wake it up to the importance of dominating the area. Some cynical and conspiracy-minded observers have suggested 9/11 was either orchestrated by American neo-cons or allowed to happen even though they were tipped off before hand. And some folks have even suggested Franklin Roosevelt ignored warnings about Pearl Harbor, hoping that an attack by the Japanese would propel an isolationist America into the already ongoing World War II.

But back to Bin Laden. Even had he been captured and/or killed previously, just like the fact that he has been killed now, that would or will not likely stop the forces who claim to be Islamic inspired (some say a perversion of true Islam) from going after the West. To some extent it is a war of cultures, East vs. West, and added to that you have opportunists who see it as a good excuse to gain power.

I have already said more than once now that I am glad that Bin Laden was killed. I will also say I do not give a hang for any discussion on whether the act to kill him by the U.S. was legal or not. Well, I mean in the abstract it makes a good discussion and it would be helpful for deciding future actions, but things like this are situational. In this case, it was the right thing to do.

Also, I see now that the torture fans are claiming vindication and are smirking at we non-torture fans and saying, see, it worked. It led to us getting the info we needed to get Bin Laden — well wait a minute, I am hearing conflicting reports on that. Some among those who supposedly are privy to inside information suggest that water boarding had nothing to do with it and others say it had everything to do with it.

It may well be that desperate times call for desperate measures. And we all know that our government has done bad things in the past for which there is no real defense. We offed a legally-elected communist in Chile years ago, we even gave our approval to the killing of a Vietnamese leader who was supposed to be our ally. The deal here is that things are situational and sometimes when we do things that are technically illegal or immoral we keep it under wraps and do not own up to it, so as to not ruin our credibility and respect for the law. That is becoming harder or nearly impossible to do these days with modern technology where information seems impossible to hide. Witness Wikileaks.

But anyway, we really need to revisit the question as to what our goals are in this War on Terror. I think most reluctantly agree that the killing of Bin Laden does not end it — but what does? Are we to be in a perpetual state of war? While wars do not seem to be as hard on us (except for those who actually have to do the dirty work and their families) as they once were, in the long run I doubt we can continue to afford them.

I know I’ve used this line too much before but I can’t think of anything better: Some say the best defense is a good offense.

But I think our offensive efforts will eventually wear us down. We may have to concentrate more on defense.

A needed victory for U.S. in the long war on terror…

I’m just now catching up on all the Osama Bin Laden death news, having posed my initial blog on it after I heard the news a little over 24 hours ago, so I have not had time to analyze it all as I like to do, but right off the top, besides being elated by the news I have to question how he was allowed to hide, reportedly, in plain sight in a million or multi-million mansion built just for him and not far from the Pakistani capital. It is said he was there for some six years — not in a cave somewhere. With an ally like Pakistan, we certainly don’t need enemies (is that how the saying goes?). And what is so worrisome is that Pakistan is a nuclear power — they have the bomb.

Another nagging question is the decision to dump Bin Laden’s body in the ocean. Initially it was said our government was showing respect for Islamic custom in disposing of the body within 24 hours of death. But I was not aware that Muslims are routinely dumped at sea when they die — I’m being sarcastic. I understand now that the government did not want his burial site on land where it could become some kind of shrine to terrorists and terrorist sympathizers.

I have criticized some of the policies of President Obama, to include his war policies. But I have to give him credit on this one. It took some guts and moxie to make the decision to go in with a surgical commando raid rather than just send in the heavy bombers, the latter which would likely commit overkill and result in the failure to recover proof the terrorist master mind Bin Laden was killed.

I heard someone on the radio say that although we finally cut the head off the snake, Al Qaeda is a hydra head — it has many heads and they may compete with each other to see who can pull of the biggest or best attack of vengeance and become  the new leader (s).

But it does feel good to finally have a clear victory in this war on terror.

I understand it was Navy SEALs who carried out the raid. Hooray for the Navy SEALs! And like I said in my last post, thank you armed forces and others who had a part.

I’m thinking this is quite a feather in the cap for Obama and boosts his re-election chances. It took guts to go with a commando raid that could have turned out like the failed Jimmy Carter hostage rescue raid. This time around we even lost a helicopter (as we did last time), but apparently we had backup plans and resourceful troops. But I still appreciate what the others tried to do all those years ago — I think they suffered from bad weather, bad luck, and maybe even poor leadership, civilian and military.

Maybe this will give us some of our self-confidence back.

Ding Dong the Wicked Osama Bin Laden is dead!

As a former newspaper journalist, I have always noticed that news never comes at a convenient time. It usually comes just after you put out the daily edition or when you want to go home or when you want to go to bed — and so it goes with the joyous news that the evil Osama Bin Laden has been killed by U.S. forces.

I was driving my long haul truck through the night listening to some kind of comedy play on radio and then switched to some music and then decided to switch to KGO Radio out of San Francisco and heard the talk show host saying something about what effect the assassination of this guy in the Middle East would have (he was glad it happened, don’t misunderstand) and I did not immediately know who he was talking about. I thought it might be Gaddafi’s son who I believe was killed in the last day or so. I nearly fell out of my driver’s seat when I heard it was Bin Laden who was killed.

I wanted to blog right now, but my real job demanded I press on. And once I got to my destination for the night, my real need was to jump in the sleeper, but I could not resist doing a post on this, one of the biggest news stories in  a long time.

But all I have time to say now is thank you American armed forces, CIA, and others involved and congratulations President Obama.

Of course my immediate thought was: does this mean our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are over? I mean for the past decade almost it has been we have to go after Osama Bin Laden (well actually the Bush administration gave up on that, publicly at least, some time ago — but he was the symbol of the evil we have been fighting against, with the war efforts continued by Obama (initially to the surprise of many, especially some of his more peace-minded and maybe now former supporters).

Had we been able to Kill Hitler early on we might have taken the steam out of the Nazi move toward world domination, but something tells me Al Qaeda is not just a one-man show. But a statement has been made. You can run but you can’t hide (forever). And the U.S. does not give up.

But I have to go to bed now.

One more thing, though: Did you hear about how some of his henchmen were hiding behind women as shields before they were killed? That certainly shows them for the cowards they are (were).

Ding dong the wicked Osama Bind Laden is dead.

Extreme situations can call for extreme measures, but you still have to be careful not to shoot the innocent…

Terrorism in terribly frustrating, as well as dangerous. Anytime there is a lack of law and order it is frustrating and dangerous.

I bring this up in relation to the latest airport bombing in Moscow where 35 people were killed and 185 injured, and then of course in relation as well to all terrorist acts and all break downs of law and order.

The frustrating thing is that terrorists are hard to catch, especially when they kill themselves in the process of committing their terror. Of course someone usually sets them up, but they usually work in secret. Except sometimes they don’t work in total secrecy. What about the imams or whatever they call themselves who fairly openly preach hatred from their mosques? And I am not picking solely on Muslims or factions of Muslims. There are Christian terrorists and terrorists of all kind of creeds.

But anyway, the quite understandable immediate reaction is that we have to go after someone. If you’re George W. Bush you just wildly flail out at any convenient target, Afghanistan/Iraq, and you send whole armies to look for one man, Osama Bin Laden, and when that doesn’t work, he remains elusive, you just say you weren’t really looking for him anyway and change your rationale every few months as to why you have sent in the armies. You end up killing and wounding thousands upon thousands of more people — most of whom who are totally innocent– than were killed in the original terrorist act.

And let’s don’t pick on George W., because if you are Barack Obama you just keep the whole thing going because, well, you don’t want anyone to think you are a coward and truth be known, unpopular war(s) or not, if you pull out the American public would turn against you because now you made all of them feel like cowards.

But I am getting off the subject I wanted to address here in the beginning, that is dealing with terrorist acts and mass breakdowns of law and order, such as in Oakland, Ca. (and other urban areas).

I was listening to Dr. Bill Wattenburg on KGO Radio last night and he was saying that he would not be surprised if the Russians got tough now and went directly after terrorist leaders (and the news says this morning that is what they are vowing to do). Now Wattenburg usually talks about scientific matters and math puzzles and helpful hints around the home and ranch and logging camp and cowboy camp and claims to be an expert on or have taken part in everything from designing freeway interchanges and rapid transit systems to missiles and nuclear weapons — he’ll also tell you how to get a caterpillar tractor unstuck from the mud. But when he ventures into politics he sometimes is a little reactionary, although to his credit he can also often be fairly moderate in his views and seems to try to come down on the side of the sensible.

But he seemed to be rooting for something like the secret police (and I don’t mean he said it directly) going after the bad people, something police states have always done in the name of law and order but also for the purpose of retaining their own political power. And I read up on him and saw that he had in the past called for sending in the military and going house to house in Oakland in reaction to the ghetto crimes and drive-by shootings and so forth. And I’m just using Oakland as an example. All the big cities and even small cities have gang and violence problems.

But anyway, why should law-abiding citizens have to live in fear?

In extreme circumstances, at some point, extreme tactics are called for.

Now in the case of airport bombings, Wattenberg says that experts have looked at it and agree that one of the big problems is baggage. Apparently there is no fool-proof way of checking baggage without opening it all (and then ka-boom?). He said ultimately the only practical way of forestalling a bomber, such as the one in Moscow who apparently brought a bomb in with him to the International Arrivals section of the airport (I imagine from the outside, not from an airplane), would be to ban individuals from taking baggage directly in with them when they go to the airports (and he claims people don’t need nearly the amount of baggage they think they do).

Now we have not had a spate of airport bombings here in the United States as of yet, but if we did extreme measures would have to be taken — the public would eventually demand it. It’s already getting tougher to board an airplane, what with body scans and in some cases mandatory feelups — but the call for all of that actually came from the government, not the people, at least not directly, but the government feels it must show the people it is doing something.

(I don’t fly much, hardly ever. Most of my flying was done in the late 1960s and early 70s when all you had to do is buy a ticket at the counter and get on the plane as simple as if you were getting on the Greyhound bus.)

Although I do not consider myself as politically reactionary as Wattenburg, I have often thought myself, ever since the urban ghetto riots of the 60s and into the gang violence of today, that in some cases martial law should be declared and the wrongdoers rooted out. Easier said than done I realize. But sometimes you feel enough is enough.

(I recall reading something a few years ago about how the police in one town in, Arkansas I believe, tried to cordon off a bad neighborhood and do random searches, but I think that was eventually prohibited by court order.)

And do we really want things to get as out of hand as they are in Mexico?

In the case of terrorism there is always the problem of doing more harm in the name of good than was inflicted in the first place (ala Bush). The Russians have a recent history of storming into hostage situations and killing everyone, good and bad.

I recall that during the Iranian Hostage Crisis of the late 1970s when Americans were held captive by terrorists backed by the Iranian government that many folks here at home were actually suggesting that we bomb the embassy where they were being held.

Somewhere in all of this there has to be a middle ground between impotence, doing basically nothing but maybe feeling up innocent airplane passengers, and ham-handed foolishness, starting major wars or storming into schools Russian style and killing schoolchildren and their parents in the process.

And I do think that in the case of lawlessness in the urban areas, governors should declare martial law and root out the gangs. It would have to be done selectively and carefully and unfortunately probably would require sophistication we do not have at this time. But to surrender whole communities to lawlessness in unacceptable, or should be.

Possible Pakistan connection in failed car bomb case; could our relative trend of safety be broken?

And the plot thickens in the New York Times Square car bombing case. I was just getting ready to go to bed and heard a news flash that an arrest had been made.

What I heard was that a man described as a naturalized U.S. citizen (reportedly within the past year) originally from Pakistan was arrested at JFK Airport as he was attempting to fly back to Pakistan — okay, now they say he was headed to Dubai.

(And now someone said that he may have been going to Pakistan via Dubai.)

Reports were also indicating that others may have been involved.

There seems to be or have been differing views as to whether this case has links to international terrorism or whether it is a case of a domestic lone wolf. It seems there may be some type of Pakistani connection (at least to the extent the arrested man is reportedly from Pakistan).

Strangely, it seems there are indications that although the failed car bomb attempt had the potential for much damage and loss of life, there are also indications that whoever put the thing together did not do it right or even use the right materials (there is some question about all that, though).

At any rate, I have always been surprised that we have not had more acts of  terrorism within our borders, 9/11 and Timothy McVeigh‘s Oklahoma City bombing, and Ft. Hood, and maybe some other incidents, notwithstanding.

It may be now that our relative safe trend, as compared to the rest of the world, has been broken.

I think I heard on one report this evening that the first car bomb was set off in the U.S. in New York City in the 1920s. Back in the earlier part of the 20^th Century we used to have folks called “anarchists”.

But for some reason, again the big ones, 9/11 and Oklahoma City, Ft. Hood, notwithstanding, we have been spared from so much of the terrorism other nations seem to suffer.

The fact big cities have so many surveillance cameras, public and private, is helping with security and investigations. In this case, an observant street vendor helped thwart the attempt. Surveillance video may or may not have given police a lead and may help them in their investigation (but it apparently does not prevent terrorist acts).

Apparently the police got their break by retracing the plates of the car and finding out about the sale of the car done unofficially in Connecticut.

With instant news and the internet, the crazies have more to excite them and cause them to do things like acts of terrorism.

Also, international terrorists may be at work and they may be taking advantage of the ever-present supply of crazies — I have no idea, really.

But with the concern of late over illegal aliens (which really may have nothing to do with this case or the threat of terrorism in general) and the ongoing threat of terror from groups such as Al Qaeda and the like, and the fact that such a threat has been brought closer to home (whether the New York case is really part of that), there is going to be pressure to increase the powers of law enforcement.

We will have to do what we have to do, but the terrorist acts in the U.S. so far do not have their origins in Mexico. And by saying that I do not mean that we should not control illegal immigration from there. But what occurs to me that other than vigilance, such as that by the street vendor, and the ongoing investigations being done by our law enforcement on terror threats, there’s not much more we can do at this time.

I would hope it never gets to the point where we are forced to move to a police state, because you can hardly save your freedom by removing it.

P.s.

From what I am hearing it still seems the evidence points to the notion that whoever was responsible for the failed car bomb attempt was an amateur. And that would seem to indicate that it was not the work of an organized terror group (although such is not necessarily so). That is little comfort, really.

P.s. P.s.

One commentator said there has been a long list of plots against the U.S. hatched in Pakistan. Pakistan is supposed to be our ally, but it seems to be a sanctuary for terrorists, the commentator said.