Last two paragraphs have some useful insight. Bruce
http://www.lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=2416&IssueNum=113 The Young and the Dead It took nearly a century for the IRA to renounce violence. But the wait could be longer for the west to resolve the threat of homegrown jihadists ~ By MICK FARREN ~ Photo by Zuma Press http://www.lacitybeat.com/media/113/news_ira_story.gif ~ The good old days: Northern Ireland youth greet the troops in Derry, 1981 ~ ast week, the Irish Republican Army abandoned violence as a political option. In a dramatic declaration designed to revive the Northern Ireland peace process, IRA clandestine units were ordered to "place their weapons in arms dumps and cease all activities, effective at 11 a.m. EDT," but not formally to disband. If this is, in fact, a firm renunciation of violence, it comes a full 89 years after the Easter Rising of 1916, when the IRA first stepped into the spotlight of history, and the British Navy shelled Dublin. Although the announcement is clearly good news in London and Belfast, the timescale hardly bodes well for the War on Terror. If it took almost a century for the IRA to finally put down the guns and the detonators, how long will it take to convince Al Qaeda to do the same? Since 1916, the world has seen trench warfare, the Russian revolution, Nazism, nuclear weapons, the Grateful Dead, and the Manson Family. The last two might appear odd - even frivolous - inclusions in any serious breakdown of 20th-century conflict, but, along with the Branch Davidians and even Klebold and Harris, the shooters in the Columbine High School massacre, they may provide more insight into 21st-century terrorism than most of the models currently embraced by law enforcement and the international media - only, for the Deadheads of the New Jihad, death is a literal absolute. The great temptation, for Cold War-created agencies like the CIA and Cold War nostalgics like the neocons, is to shape the enemy in their own image. While their president - never a fan of lateral thinking - talks simplistically about "evildoers," wishful fantasies are woven of Al Qaeda as a disciplined and hierarchical cell structure controlled from some high-tech Dr. No-style war cave in the foothills of the Himalayas. While the Brit media argues over whether those involved in the London attacks were true suicide bombers or just patsies, clearer and clearer indications emerge that modern Al Qaeda is neither SMERSH nor the Comintern, but a loose franchise, angry groups of young males in immigrant ghettos sharing the perceived aims, but hardly under the direct orders of, either Osama bin Laden or Musab al-Zarqawi. And a combination of Deadheads, Branch Davidians, and terminal Trotskyites - although the concept might seem initially absurd - may be a better analogue of the new generation of jihadists than the monolithic conspiracy of evil that everyone from Rumsfeld on down wants to fight. The struggle is increasingly with Osama's fan-boys, as far from inner-circle Al Qaeda as the kid at the demo in a Che T-shirt is from working for Havana. These are not the Mujahadeen vets of 20 years ago. The new guard started as wannabes. They didn't have to be recruited; they actively sought the way of the Taliban like Deadheads hunt bootleg concert CDs. Most never passed the reading and ranting phase, but a few transcended to the dangerous madness of wanting wholly to emulate their hero, and more will do the same. They hunch in basements - in Birmingham, Brooklyn, or Dusseldorf - painfully torn between traditional Islamic culture and Western consumerism, strange cousins of Klebold and Harris, already bent out of shape by epic sexual repression, and with all their cultural inputs coming through a self-imposed filter of belligerent Islamist extremism. Books, leaflets, inspirational DVDs, and the Internet all feed a high-illusion death-or-glory (becomes just another story). Like most fundamentalists, their religious thinking is anything but fundamental, tending toward labyrinthine paranoia shored up by blind faith, and (even forgetting the 72 virgins of cheap anti-Islamic propaganda) the certainty of afterlife reward. The outer reaches of Wahhabi or Salafi theology are quite as unimaginably convoluted as the revelations of David Koresh or the Kool-Aid creed of Jim Jones's People's Temple. Supposedly, moderate Islamic scholars wrangle over whether Osama and the Taliban are real Wahhabis, or part of the Deobandi cult. The belief system is constantly reinforced, while celibate flesh is also nurtured by, if the Brit tabloids are to be believed, Al Qaeda "cells" taking time out to go whitewater rafting - testosterone bonding while relentless peer pressure drives them deeper into ideological dementia. (It worked for the Nazis.) Not every aspiring jihadist actually flips into the twilight zone of homicide, but all the signs point to dozens, if not hundreds, of sexless, drug-free, and wholly autonomous, self-sustaining, all-male Manson families spreading across the globe, each with the potential for helter-skelter. Since the London attacks were revealed as home-grown, the promoted idea has been of controlling and coordinating super agents who slip into town with the plans, the explosives, and fresh jolts of ideology, but the young jihadist scarcely needs the services of a Master Bomber out of Kandahar. Any teenage boy worth his chemistry set should be able to fabricate an effective explosive, and, if homemade isn't good enough, there are always Pakistani mob connections down at the Mosque. Although their start-up was in the black hash business, the Islamic mafias in Europe long ago diversified into heroin and Allah-knows-what-else, and with military materiel abounding in the Middle East, Russia, and the Balkans, bomb components and other war-surplus nastiness are hardly a stretch. The other major problem with the West's perception of Al Qaeda is its seeming inability to picture the suicide bomber's mindset. Everyone, with the possible exception of the Israelis, still talks in terms of deterrence, and makes the erroneous assumption that fear of capture factors in kamikaze thinking. The perfect example of this was Mayor Michael Bloomberg's insistence on random baggage searches in the New York subway following the London bombings, as though an NYPD presence would stop any suicide bomber in his tracks. Bloomberg seemed unable to grasp that these new terrorists don't see a line of bag-searching cops at folding tables as an impediment. It's merely an alternative target. During my obsessive media monitoring in the wake of the London bombings, most commentators still blindly equated the perpetrators with old-school tacticians like the IRA, whose tightly organized terror campaigns involved advance warnings and the intention of getting away clean (and also came within a whisker of killing Margaret Thatcher). Only one "security consultant" was able to make succinctly clear the grim reality. As a cable-news talking hairstyle babbled about terrorist escape routes, the consultant smiled grimly: "Suicide bombers don't book return tickets." We might also have a better chance of understanding the threat of this new generation if understanding itself weren't so maligned. Bush has to be the perpetual tough guy, and maybe Blair listened to too much Elvis Costello in his youth. "Understanding" comes irrevocably bracketed with "peace, love, and" and seems somehow equated with coddling the evildoers. Those in power seem to have forgotten even basic Sun Tzu. Understanding is the cornerstone of victory: "Know your enemy as you know yourself." The enemy has changed the rules, and if we don't quickly figure out the new ones, we will only pour more gasoline on even more fires. If our leaders fail to accept that, they are still as ludicrous as the recently deceased General William Westmoreland, who, during bloody Vietnam, complained bitterly of the cowardice of Vietcong soldiers, who wouldn't "come out and fight like men." For centuries, we have fought wars predicated on the idea that, if you killed enough of the enemy, they would either surrender or run away. The jihad homies aren't playing that. As Bo Diddley put it, they're "just 21, and they don't mind dying." ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12h3mj94q/M=362329.6886306.7839369.3040540/D=groups/S=1705323667:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1123682724/A=2894321/R=0/SIG=11dvsfulr/*http://youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=1992 ">Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back!</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. OSINT, as a part of The Intelligence Network, is making it available without profit to OSINT YahooGroups members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of intelligence and law enforcement organizations, their activities, methods, techniques, human rights, civil liberties, social justice and other intelligence related issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/osint/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
