Is The War Against Terrorism Already Lost?

Great Debates
1

Recent events convince me that America’s future is suddenly bleak and that our war against terrorism is destined to horrific failure. Please convince me I am mistaken.

In one fell swoop, terrorists have demonstrated they can strike at America with inpugnity, killing thousands of our citizens, paralyzing our transportation system, destabilizing the financial markets, causing widespread panic, possibly throwing us into recession, etc. News reports now say that Osama bin Laden is now feverishly trying to procure nuclear/chemical/biological warfare agents and, when he succeeds, his shocktroops will attack U.S. cities with them, resulting in catastrophic death and terror.

This weekend, we find the U.S. (and possibly NATO) prepared to launch a sustained military campaign against terrorist targets. Instead of eradicating Islamic radicalism, however, I fear this military response will only intensify and unify the terrorist elements who will them attempt to destroy our country by any means possible. I also believe that if we do not act and choose appeasement, these radical elements will still attack us–and spread their terror to other western nations as well. America is a rich, open target and weapons of mass destruction can be delivered by even the simplest means–by a Cessna or truck, for instance. Last, I would conclude that we cannot cleanse the world of extremists and, by trying, we will only strengthen them.

Would you conclude that we are faced with a “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” proposition? What do you envision our future to be in the next 5-10 years? What gives you hope or encouragement?

2

What gives me hope is the lack of successful terrorist attacks by foreign terrorists over the past several years. U.S. security must be pretty damned good to have prevented a disaster from occuring for so long. Of course, it is tremendously difficult to anticipate the methods of an intelligent and depraved adversary; however, I believe that the international support this past terrible act has generated will make it far easier to intercept would-be terrorists before they arrive in the U.S.

3

… The problem is, we are confronted with a fanatic enemy, which is to say that no matter how many times we stop their attempts, no matter how many people we catch, try and convict, they’ll keep coming.

And what’s more, they’re designed to operate in independent cells, requiring no communication with other cells or with any leadership. If Bin Laden was in fact behind 9/11, his last contact with the actual 19+ terrorists involved was probably consummated before they even came to this country.

The only way to truly fight terrorism in terms of absolutely eliminating the threat, is to summarily execute every terrorist we find, before their act is committed. But that’s an idealistic approach and is problematic for oh so many reasons.

The only thing left to us is vigilance, and increased security. Hopefully, with international support, we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on.

  • Jon
4

I share your pessimism. On another forum I wrote a few weeks ago that I expected mass terrorism would possibly destroy civilization in the next few decades. I expected the first attack to come via C/B/N weapons though and the toll to be even higher than Tuesday.

However if the reports of Laden trying now to stock on weapons of mass destruction is correct there may be some hope. It will be pretty difficult for him to smuggle them into the US now. I would have expected him to have smuggled them already over the last few years so that his agents in the US are armed and ready to wreak havoc whenever he orders.

Needless to say I sincerely hope that the terrorists are defeated. To the extent that states are involved it will be certainly be possible to put huge military pressure on any state that helps them. But it is certainly not necessary that terrorism requires state support. This operation may have been carried out by less than a 100 people will a few million dollars or so. This can be carried out by small groups without state support. They just need the determination and brains to do it.

In the long run I am even more scared of what religous cults and even lone nut-cases like Timothy McVeigh can do when they get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. Of course the government can do a lot in making such weapons as hard to get as it can and also spy on such groups but I fear that this is a bit like dodging bullets and that eventually some groups will be able to pull of a series of massive strikes which will cripple the modern world. My only hope is that the government can keep dodging bullets for sufficiently long so that some kind of wonder technology along new forms of social organization might solve the problem or at least limit the damage. It is a slim and vague hope.
I don’t want to suggest that we be fatalistic and stop fighting terrorism. I think that there is a decent chance of stopping the immediate menace of radical Islamic terrorism in the short and medium run. And there is something to be said for civilization going down fighting even if it is doomed. But I think we should be prepared to accept that we may have seen the high point of civilization and that those of us who survive will face a long and dark road to barbarism…

5

I see some faint glimmers of hope. I don’t see someone like Osama wanting to use nuclear weapons against the U.S. even if he could get his hands on them because of their potential to even wipe himself out. The man isn’t an apocalyptic type. He does want something and that is to see Islam be restored to what he believes is its rightful place in the world’s pecking order.

A nuclear attack would result in a nuclear response from the US and probably Russia.

If Osama procures nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, I think he would be using them in some weird form of deterrence. A very mad form of MAD he would be trying to attain.

The world has a lot of problems that can send us to hell in a handbasket. Terrorism is just one of them. Don’t forget about our environmental problems and our fecundity which is making the planet a very crowded place.

But the human species has proven itself to be pretty resilient and somehow has survived World Wars I and II, both of which had many single days more horiffic than September 11.

6

Euh, what do you mean he’s not the apocalyptic type?

The sort of folk that made the headlines on 9/11 thought, even in their last moments, that they were achieving martyrdom through such honorable death, and they believe they will enter the garden of paradise for it. They are heroes to those [not sure how many] who are dancing in the streets. Saddam Hussein says the US is reaping the fruits of its evil labor. Many share this position.

These same people have sworn to bring down this country. I do not expect fundamentalists sworn to our destruction to show any rational restraint.

After all, being in Manhattan on Tuesday gave me a pretty good glimpse of the apocalyptic.

  • Jon
7

Lost? As a student of political and military history, I keep thinking back to Pearl Harbor. There are obvious differences, we have no obvious country as an enemy and the enemy attacks primarily civilians. but Japan was a country with a huge military machine, well financed and run on a scale that terrorists cannot ever hope to match. They had us on our heels before we knew that battles on the open ocean didn’t require battleships. We took a three carriers and a bunch of destroyers to protect them against subs and lay in wait for them in ambush at Midway, on a tip. We committed the rest of our fleet in a daring risk. The result was that a far less experienced force with the element of surprise (like Pearl) annhilated a vastly superior enemy. Along with the Great Armada battle, this was the most amazing upset in naval history. Japan after this was doomed to lose the war sooner or later. Having been treated with justice, our most bitter enemy is now an extraordinarily responsible world citizen and becoming more admirable with each passing decade. And remember, the U.S. was not a military power at the start of WWII (naval yes, but not in land forces). We fought the two most efficient military empires in world history at the same time. God bless the memory of General George C. Marshall!

Our present enemy presents some difficulties, and we cannot see to the end of the war now, but if we fight this war correctly and on all fronts, abiding by the rules of international law, seeking justice and not vengence we must prevail.

To that end, our enemy is not merely Osama Bin Laden, but all terrorism.

We will need to spend 100 billion a year on this war, which will easily stretch 5 to 10 years. But as wars go, we already have the upper hand.

  1. We organize openly, our enemies cannot organize openly. Advantage: USA.
  2. All nations but two, Afghanistan and Iraq, have lined up behind us or will. To the extent some nations are lying, they cannot act openly, and are limited internally by wanna be dictators seeing on opportunity to seize power by ratting out their bosses. Afghanistan is not a nation unified in any sense, and is not a serious military opponent. Iraq is a serious terrorist opponent as they are aggressively seeking nuclear weapons with a terror aim of slipping them in suitcases into the cities of enemies, notably Israel and the United States. I’ve complained for 10 years how leaving Hussein in charge after the Gulf War was a huge mistake, hopefully we will have an opportunity to change this. Advantage USA.
  3. All wars require financing on an enormous scale. We and our allies can out-finance our enemies by an unlimited ratio. Moreover, our money is safe. If the money of our opponents is located, it will be “frozen” or in the venacular, stolen. Our enemies cannot even keep their money in a bank account. A box full of gold, greenbacks and jewels in Afghanistan is several orders of magnitude less liquid than a bank account. They have to transport money personally to pay for their activities. We can wire it. That makes them very vulnerable. This alone dooms their effort. Advantage: USA.
  4. Military capability. If our opponents are foolish enough to remain gathered in one location for more than a few hours and we learn of it, we have the military capability to attack effectively within the hour or hours, I hope with conventional weapons. Our enemies must plan each attack with six months notice. Advantage: USA.
  5. Our military attacks, when we have the opportunity, will not face any militarily effective defenses. Our opponents, because of their long planning time, face a much higher chance of discovery, such as their various thwarted terror attempts udring the millenium celebrations. We will not be able to stop every terror attempt, and they have made clear that they will kill civilians wherever we gather in the largest number. Studies of civilian bombing occurring during WWII showed the occasional militarily significant target hit, but bombing civilians itself doesn’t hurt military morale among civilians, although it hurts our sense of safeness greatly. In fact, it improves the military morale of civilians. We are now more united as a people than at any time since the end of WWII, maybe even more. Advantage: USA.
  6. Intelligence capabilities. Our spies in other people’s organizations could in all likelihood be substantially increased. This means paying money to traitors, or blackmailing them. We have put out the word for the past 25 years that we do very little of this anymore. That is probably disinformation. But we can certainly increase it. We have great electronic capabilities. While encryption is probably unbreakable, it must still be read at either end. Our enemies face a lack of trust among themselves as they must agonize over every new recruit and wonder if formerly trusted members have been turned. Our enemies here are very unlikely to even attempt to gain inside human intelligence due to the enormous cost and high risk of losing valuable operatives in the attempt. Advantage: USA.
  7. Numbers. We are 280 million. They are several thousand at most. Most of them are not willing to be suicide squads, or we would have seen more suicide bombers. While the Japanese fielded thousands of suicide pilots, their country and culture supported it in defense of the homeland against military targets only, not in prosecution of a war on the other side of the globe against civilian targets. Even among those indigenous people who support terror attacks against Israeli civilians, attacking all Western nations, particularly the US at the WTC, is highly unpopular. Ignore the exuberant children in Gaza and look at the disgusted mature people in the background. Advantage: USA.

I am not saying that we will not face further losses, we undoubtedly will. Be we will be victorious.

8

I’m referring to apocalyptic as “complete end of the world as we know it.” This would be along the lines of the group that used Sarin in the Tokyo subway.

9

I believe that what Bob T meant about Laden not being apocalyptic is that the end of the world is not his goal. He wants to see the Islamic world united under his interpretation of Islam.

However I don’t think that he is worried about his personal safety so I don’t think that his own destruction is much of a deterrent.

I don’t think that the destruction of Afghanistan will be much of a deterrent either; it’s not as if the Islamic extremists give much of a damn for the welfare of the average Afghan.

The only thing that might deter him is rather horrible to contemplate: massive nuclear retaliation against entire Islamic world which will kill hundreds of millions of completely innocent people.

I don’t think the US is contemplating this even as an option but I wonder: if Laden threatens to order his agents to blow up half a dozen cities with WMD how will the US respond? Suppose he is able to carry out the threat how will the US respond?

If this strikes you as frightening think of what will happen if in the next few decades an apocalyptic religious cult whose goal is the destruction of the whole world including themselves. By definition no deterrence is possible.

And of course there is no requirement that these cultists be Islamic or from the middle-east. They could equally well be American Christians or members of virtually any nationality or religion. There is no requirement that these people be “harboured” by a state. It’s perfectly possible that a cult can acquire members and resources without the support of the government particularly in a free country like the US. In fact there may be a such a cult at the very moment gradually accumulating WMD on US soil. Intelligence can great reduce their ability to do this but sooner or later some cult will find a way of eluding the government unless it is a police state and perhaps even then. Then all bets are off.

I did not speak lightly when I said that the prospects for civilization are grim. I have thought about this on and off for several years and have yet to find any particularly reassuring counter-argument.Fundamentally I believe that an era where small groups of people can cause mass-destruction is an era where civilized existence with freedom is fragile and perhaps impossible.

10

One clue here as to what he’s been doing: Doesn’t anyone else think it’s strange that so much evidence was uncovered so quickly after the attacks? I mean, cars with flight manuals in arabic in them? Baggage containing fuel calculators, flight manuals, and a Koran? How pat is that?

And has anyone noticed that so far every terrorist identified seems to have a Saudi Arabian passport or ID?

I think part of this was to try to damage the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden hates the Saudis because he sees them as going against their own religion and embracing western materialism. So if he can drive a wedge between the Saudis and the west, he will have achieved part of his goals.

Anyway, I think it’s a near certainty that there are already other cells in place, with other plans of destruction ready to be carried out. Some signal will be given through an innocuous-looking news report, or through HF radio, which will trigger the next attack. That’s what scares me - if he has multiple attacks planned, then what we saw already was probably the SMALLEST one. He’s saving the big weapons for the war he knew would inevitably follow.

I hope I’m wrong, but it makes sense. This attack has been in the planning stage for years - I find it almost impossible to believe that this is ALL that has been planned over that time period. And Bin Laden had to know that smuggling weapons into the U.S. would become much, much harder after Sept. 11, so he probably made sure his entire battle plan was in place before the first shot was fired.

But maybe I’m giving him too much credit. Maybe this attack used up every resource he had. I sure hope so. But I’m not optimistic.

11

I’m going to take this quote point-by-point

Point 1: The very nature of their warfare does not require them to organize openly. The very nature of their warfare does not require them to even pick strategically significant targets. We do not know what targets they will hit. Meanwhile, if you want to know where Bush is, or Powell, or Rumsfeld, or even the Baldwins, just watch CNN.

Point 2: This is true. However, the very nature of their warfare does not require them to organize openly, like I said. Rather, it requires them to be able to do so completely under the noses of whatever country they are operating in. To this end, even if every nation helps the US combat terrorism in good faith, there are no absolutes in terms of safety. Also, there can be money in terrorism just as there can be in drugs. Maybe after the shock of 9/11 wears off a little, the help of these other countries will fade just a little, vigilance will drop just a little and BOOM.

Point 3: So far, your first three points accomplish nothing unless you assume a 100% success rate at finding the enemy. It remains to be seen how effective new levels of vigilance shall be. Money is laundered all the time and will continue to be laundered. And we cannot fight terrorists with all our expensive war-toys either. Not so much with the fighterplanes, tanks, cruisers, stealth bombers,… not when they’re hanging out in places like New York and Boston.

Point 4: Yet again, this is only a theoretical advantage. They clearly have the means to plan and carry out acts of terrorism without prior knowledge by our intelligence apparatus. We have yet to see how long we can prevent more attacks, even in a world with paranoid eyes. After all, that paranoia is their goal.

Point 5: So they’ve inspired everyone to blindly hate a faceless enemy without a flag or uniform. Our government and our media provide the picture and name of one person, Osama Bin Laden. So we as a nation tend to support a strong military response now… so what? We don’t even have a target. And if it’s Bin Laden, and we bomb him to hell, what does Afghanistan do? Think they’ll send out uniformed soldiers against us or do you think they’ll bankroll some more crowd-pleasing building-topples?

Point 6: Crypto is very dangerous. Your average citizen doesn’t take it seriously but they do. Hell, they could be signing someone’s Guestbook somewhere out on the internet, and their buddies just have to log on and wait for specific coded phrases to pop up. Intelligence works… but only to a certain extent.

Point 7: That we are hundreds of millions means we are exceedingly difficult to defend against this kind of combat. That they are very small and their organization is unknown to us is distinctly to their advantage.

So, we have advantages in your standard military conflict. But no one has successfully fought terror before. It remains to be seen how well our new vigilance will keep us safe.

Sam Stone: I too think that a lot of the evidence they’re turning up is kind of frightening. Practically before California had even woken up to find out what happened, Bush was on TV calling it war. Bin Laden’s face was already all over the news. Why didn’t the fool just claim responsibility and disappear? What’s going on here? Our m ilitary buildup on the Turkish border with Iraq, we’ve leaned on Pakistan for, and received full acquiescence with regards to our intentions in Afghanistan, before a body of evidence is collected… a cabinet staff that’s a blast-from-the-past from the administrations responsible for the single largest peace-time military buildup in our history…

  • Jon
12

I don’t profess to be an expert and this thread has brought about some profound depression.

I thought this article was interesting however.

http://salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/terrorists/index.html

FYI

13

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Abundibot *
**I’m going to take this quote point-by-point

14

sorry about my editing for the quote part, I didn’t quote myself above.

15

DP White,
Like I said I believe that there is a good chance of winning the immediate battle, but you are underestimating the possible cost.

If Laden has been energetic in accumulating WMD his agents could easily kill 1-2 million people in the US before he got caught and his organization destroyed. If they have acquired suitcase nukes and they place them at the right spots in DC they could destroy the Federal government in one stroke. Similar attacks in about half a dozen other cities using other WMD would cripple the American economy. The US would “win” but not before having its way of life destroyed for many years.

Now all this is by no means certain and Bin Laden may not have such capabilities. But on the other hand no can say for sure that he hasn’t.

There seems to be an assumption that Bin Laden must not have WMD because otherwise he would have used them instead of the planes. There are any number of reasons why this logic might not be valid; for instance perhaps Bin Laden might have wanted to test the American reaction with a somewhat smaller attack before making his next move with his biggest weapons.
So while you are right that America has huge advantages I think you are ignoring the “assymetric” nature of this war and underestimating the havoc that Bin Laden could wreak before he gets caught.
Bob T,
Thanks for the article.Hopefully they are right that a WMD attack will be difficult. One sentence was rather chilling. They said that the Aum Shin Kyo (sp?) people didn’t launch an effective sarin attack because they diluted it since they were afraid it could kill them. I don’t think Laden’s agents are going to be much worried about their own lives…

16

The destruction of just one large city would economically cripple the U.S. for years.

17

However, cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco are vulnerable to suffering massive devastation in earthquakes. The 1989 and 1994 quakes were mere rattles compared to what a Magnitude 8 quake could do to either of those cities.
I’ve read disaster planning scenarios for such events and they are even more likely to make you not want to wake up than the events of September 11.

18

I don’t mean to sound flippant, but what you are describing does not exist outside of Hollywood thrillers and Clive Cussler novels. They’ve already found a connection between one of the hijackers and a guy suspected in the USS Cole bombing; some of the hijackers the night before the attacks were getting piss drunk at a strip club and making veiled promises of destruction to the bartender. I believe that it is completely and utterly impossible for these attacks to have been carried out with the astonishing level of independence and lack of leadership you describe. For one thing, how the heck did they all get airplanes leaving at the same time? They don’t make up flight schedules four years in advances.

Sam Stone:

First of all, you’re assuming the reports are accurate. The story about the Koran being in the car, I can’t help but notice, comes and goes. Given the other phony stories the media has reported over the last five days I am personally quite skeptical that they’re getting all these details right.

Secondly, specific details aside, the fact that they’re finding evidence isn’t the slightest bit remarkable. Nineteen guys pulled this off, and they’re all dead so theycan’t cover their tracks, and might well have not bothered to do so beforehand. You can’t have 19 people in on this and NOT leave a trail. They had to get to the airport somehow. They had to live somewhere. They had to buy their underwear in one store or another.

I do not believe that is correct; I know at least one or two have been identified as being from the United Arab Emirates.