Is this the way al Qaeda’s decade or so of terror pre-eminence ends? The details are still coming out but from what I’ve seen so far, the latest attempt to attack an American jetliner was done by a wealthy scion of a Nigerian banker who had explosive underwear that he was unable to detonate.
Now it is impossible (and stupid) to say that terrorism is over, but this sort of pathetic, bumbling attempt on a single jet in the US is a far cry from the massive synchronized assaults that were the trademark of al Qaeda’s perverse spectacles. Part of what makes a terror group successful is the perception of it as fearsome and daring – the sort of appeal that villains like Jesse James have accrued at other times. The pampered son of a banker setting his pants on firing and failing at it is not fearsome and daring, it’s lame. Recruiting disaffected young men in the wake of the 9/11 spectacle was surely easy for al Qaeda, doing so in the wake of this latest clusterfuck is surely a different matter.
I am confident that al Qaeda will continue to attempt to launch attacks and I think it even reasonable to expect some of them to succeed, but I also think this latest incident is indicative of their current capabilities. This will snowball, no one wants to join a group that is a shell of its former self.
I should also like to note that this plot could have been foiled with some good police work and some information, the father of this young man reported his suspicions – no waterboarding was necessary. I eagerly await Cheney calling to invade Nigeria though, perhaps he’s awaiting his large payments from that nice Nigerian general who he met through his email.
Reading about our pathetic show at the climate change conference in Copenhagen it’s hard for me not to conclude that the government we currently have has a clear number one priority: protect the oil extraction industry in Alberta. Once again I put forward my thesis that the current Conservative Party is every bit as regionalist as the Reform Party before it or even the Bloc today – except that they have duped the rest of the country into voting for them. Make no mistake, unless you work in non-renewable energy, the Cons are perfectly willing to sacrifice your industry to keep the dirty oil pumping out of the Athabasca basin.
Standing back and looking at the two big Canadian political stories in the past month – Afghan torture revelations and Copenhagen – I have been struck by how utterly changed we are in Canada. We are now one of the global foot-draggers on climate change and a country that is actively trying to cover up human rights violations (real ones, not ones that are less inconveniencing than the passport office, like Ezra Levant having to answer a couple questions one time) made by its own military. The contrast between this and Chretien’s wise decision to sit out the Gulf War in 2003 could not be greater.
I was pretty skeptical about Obama’s Nobel win, and I maintain that there’s still much more that Obama needs to do, nonetheless I think Maddow makes a good argument in favour of the prize. Good enough at least to post here:
The Peace Prize? The man has done little to draw down troops in Iraq, he’s toying with increasing the troop commitment in Afghanistan, and he’s still moving very, very slowly to shut down Gitmo. Now this is not to say that it’s inconceivable that Obama will merit the Peace Prize at the end of four or eight years – the man moves slowly on everything it seems – but so far the evidence is just not there. It’s also not to say that I would support anything that the party of Beck and Palin would offer up in 2012. Obama is still probably the best choice from among the serious contenders in the 2008 election.
This award for Obama is akin to giving a promising freshman their university degree on account of their potential. Worse, I fear that this takes pressure off of Obama to get serious about shutting down the legal vacuum of Gitmo and deciding how best to extricate his country’s soldier’s from two nasty conflicts where there is little evidence that they can effect much change.
Apparently Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore is trying to bring the UFC to Vancouver. So important is this work that he’s posting Twitter updates on the matter. Wow, well, I guess this is what Canadian “heritage” is for the Cons. What will happen if they get a majority? All of our current cultural activities might have to go in favour of more Ultimate Fighting along with perhaps monster truck races, jello wrestling, and bounty-hunter olympics (okay I made that last one up, but seriously, aside from his murder conviction, I don’t see why it would be hard to get Dog Chapman up here).
This post caught my attention. The argument that Jeffrey Goldberg makes is that Afghanistan isn’t really a “central front” in any kind of war on terror. (An aside, once again, why are we fighting a tactic?Using current nomenclature we should call the Cold War the “War on Missiles, Tanks, and Submarines” or something.) Anyway, my quibbles with Goldberg’s wording aside, I think he raises a salient point: Afghanistan is a place where al Qaeda could train, but most of al Qaeda’s members come from elsewhere.
What this means is that NATO is caught in a place where there was little native impulse to attack NATO countries because the preceding regime had allowed al Qaeda to hide out there. NATO troops may be able to make some temporary improvements in the lives of women, but these seem not to withstand NATO’s withdrawal from any particular area. Reforms do not extend beyond the range of NATO arms.
It should now be readily apparent that all we are doing in Afghanistan is propping up a budding dictator in Hamid Karzai while creating native anger at the West by bombing weddings and destroying the poppy crop that provides a livelihood for many farmers.
Apparently Conservative Heritage Minister James Moore i
