Al Qaeda's Seven Phase Strategy

Through analysis of an interview in Der Spiegel
Bill Roggio reviews the grand seven stages of Al Qaeda’s plan to bring
the whole world under a new caliphate.

The big question is how seriously we should take it. So a rich kid holed
out in Afghanistan has formulated a grand plan to take over the world. So
he has staged a spectacular attack on the icons of the great world hegemon. So
he predicted that the US would attack Iraq in response. So he got a bunch
of young hotheads fighting the Great Satan in Iraq.

So what?

The two competing western responses to the outrages of 9/11, 3/11, and 7/7
both assume that Al Qaeda is a major movement that requires western response.
The Bush strategy is to move militarily and culturally into the Middle East against
the regimes that condone or encourage terrorism. The left’s strategy is to blame
the west for its hegemonic oppression of the Middle East and to demand
withdrawal from the West Bank and Iraq.

In evaluating these two strategies we must confess that we do not really
know if Al Qaeda is a real mass movement with the power to inspire millions
of young men to join up (e.g. another Nazi movement) or whether it is little more than a rich kids’ talking
shop spiced with a bit of mayhem (e.g. another Baader-Meinhof gang). But
we can figure out how this uncertainty meshes with the two strategies, Bush’s
and the left’s. In Bush’s strategy we are taking no chances; we are treating
the terrorists as a serious enemy that may turn out to be very powerful. The
left’s approach is a good way to encourage Al Qaeda to become in fact
a militant mass movement by giving it effortless
victories (unilateral withdrawal from Iraq and the West Bank) that would encourage it to believe that it was
a powerful movement on the march.

Coming up soon, of course, is the question of Iran.

Liberals Said It Couldn't Be Done

Remember the Carter malaise? Remember 10 percent inflation and 10 percent unemployment?
Remember crime in New York City? How long ago it all seems. Even the crack epidemic has subsided.

And the liberals said there was nothing we could do about it. America had become ungovernable.

In a remarkable piece in the London Times that could never have appeared in The New
York Times
Andrew Sullivan
reminds the Brits just how much things have turned around in America in the last 25 years since the nadir
of inflation, unemployment, and gas lines in 1979-80.

He is writing all this not to sneer at the Brits but to cheer them up. He is telling them not
to worry about lager louts, rampant crime, lone parents, and bombers from Leeds, but to realize that things don’t have to stay in the
toilet. America went through a phase like that and then things started to get better.

But the liberals said it couldn’t be done.

Liberals have not just said it couldn’t be done. They have done more. They have
said, and they continue to say, that it never happened. And that is the striking take-away from Sullivan’s article. When
you read about how everything has gotten better all across the fruited plain, from the economy to crime to drugs to divorce, you
think to yourself: “Why do I never seem to read about this in the MSM? Why do I get to read nothing
but sulphurous rage against George W. Bush? Why do we still hear Democratic politicians claiming that
the 1980s were a lost decade of greed and homelessness?”

Sullivan is right, of course, to credit all the improvement to

civil society — that hard-to-define Burkean mélange of families,
friends, small organisations, volunteers, churches and PTAs.

But it is important to remember why Burke was rambling on about the “little platoons” back
in 1790 at the height of the French Revolution. He was proposing the virtue of bottom-up civil society against the top-down oppression of know-it-all elites.
He was proposing that one of the most important jobs of an elite was to stop meddling and let people
get on with their lives.

That is what the conservative movement has been all about. It wants to set the overall parameters
and let ordinary people get on with it. Because then, in the words of the American philosopher
Rush Limbaugh, ordinary people will do extraordinary things.

The French people still, two hundred years later, remain unable to escape from under the
yoke of an overweening, meddling elite.

The liberals said it couldn’t be done.

Many Muslims are on Our Side

On the “just how big are they anyway” front, the incomparable Mark Steyn clears the bases in the Spectator this week. Warming up with the story of the Innu people of Davis Inlet in Labrador, Canada, and their culture of “snorting drugs, glue, petrol and pretty much anything else,” and how the “impeccably progressive soft-lefties” in the Canadian government actually managed to make things worse, he then turns to the Islamicist terrorists.

The fact is, he shows, the Arab chaps are losers. And not just in the terror cells.

Even in corners of the Arab world that have the veneer of modernity, people say nutty stuff to you all the time. Not misfit weirdsmobiles in loser jobs, but fellows at the very heart of the community. To pluck at random, take Abd Al-Sabour Shahin, respected Egyptian professor, lecturer at Cairo University and head of the Sharia faculty at Al-Azhar university, the Harvard of Sunni Islam.

Who hit the twin towers? “‘I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act.’” Oh yeah.

People that lie to themselves in this way are not guys that are going to succeed in demolishing the western world. The Islamists, like the glue-sniffing Innu, are

a dysfunctional amalgam of traditional and Western culture, fundamentalist Islam filtered through an old-school European fascist movement. Like the Innu, they’re hooked on welfare and the glorification of self-destruction.

Michael J. Totten agrees. It’s not about us. It’s about them. And there are plenty of Muslims who are not just “moderate” but pro-American.

Take Iran, for instance. The regime is Islamist. "Death to America" is one of its rallying cries. But the Iranian "street" prefers "Death to the Ayatollahs." Few people in the world are as pro-American as the average Iranian.

Here’s the end game, according to Totten. “Empowered liberal-democratic Muslims with guns will defeat the Islamists in the end. We can’t do it without them.”

Last Union Breakup Led to More Organizing

Will the breakup make a difference to the union movement? That
the question as the Change To Win faction led by SEUI president Andy Stern
splits off from the AFL-CIO.

The last time the unions broke up was in the 1930s when the breakaway group, then as now, wanted to crank up organizing, according to
Carl F. Horowitz.

In 1935, a group of unions, led by Mine Workers President
John L. Lewis, formed a dissident faction within the American Federation
of Labor. The unions in this new Congress of Industrial Organizations
not returning to the fold were expelled a couple of years later.
The CIO, free to pursue its preferred strategy of direct confrontation,
changed the course of labor history. Using the sit-down strike, they organized large numbers of workers in the rubber,
steel, auto and other mass-production industries.

By the time the CIO had returned to the fold in 1955 they had changed the face of the US
labor union movement.

Now, of course, the labor leaders want to organize headline companies like
“Wal-Mart, Comcast, Clear Channel and Toyota,” as AFL-CIO president John Sweeney
told the AFL-CIO convention. They question is: Can the AFL-CIO or Change to Win
deliver?

Coverup! Clinton Administration Knew of 9/11 Plot!

Our objective friends at the MSM are very busy trumpeting the left-wing fantasies of a gold star mother
down in Texas this month. So they really don’t have the time to report the story that the Clinton Administration
knew of the Atta terror cell in 2000, according to evil
Fox News and NY Post columnist
Deborah Orin.

But according to rules set up by 9/11 commission member Jamie Gorelick while serving in the
Clinton Justice Department, the elite military
unit Able Danger, which found the Atta terror cell, couldn’t tell the FBI about it.

A year later the members of the Atta terror cell were driving airplanes into tall buildings.

Er, just what was a Clinton administration official doing on the 9/11 commission anyway? Oh, I see.
Democrats are altruistic and committed, so the usual rules about conflict of interest don’t apply.

And now commission staffers are doing a coverup to deny that they were ever briefed about the
Able Danger intelligence unit and its report.

Thank goodness that there is far more important news for the MSM to cover: the broken-hearted
left-wing mother down in Texas who only wants to be able to tell her story to President Bush.

What If They Are Stumble-Bums?

What is the difference between a bunch of would-be world conquerors who can talk
a good line and the ones who can deliver world domination?

It is hard to tell because anyone that can do a stand-up in front of a video camera. And it
is not too hard to stage a terrorist bombing and
fill a camera frame with mayhem and destruction.

Our friends in the international MSM can make these chaps look pretty imposing. But to Amir Taheri they
don’t look to great. His analysis of the video statement of mullah al-Zawahiri indicates that things
are not going too well.

For the past three years, al-Zawahiri had advocated a policy of focusing
the terrorists’ efforts on winning power in "vulnerable" Muslim countries — Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt. Yet his latest message shows that he is now persuaded
that such a strategy has little chance of success. All the countries targeted are doing well
in their war on terror;
Afghanistan and Pakistan may have already turned the tide.

The world is full of would-be world conquering world movements and voluble
spokesmen with their demands and their threats. The question is not whether you can summon
spirits from the vasty deep, as Harry Hotspur noted four hundred years ago.

The question is: Will they come?

Global Warming Convergence

Is global warming real? Up to now there had been a difference between surface temperature measurements
and satellite temperature measurements with surface temperature measurements coming in at 0.2 degrees
per decade and satellite temperature measurements showing 0.09 degrees per decade.

But now Roy Spencer reports that anomalies in the measurements from satellites
indicate that the satellite temperature series comes in much closer to the surface series.

Which indicates that “global warming is real.” So now the question is:

"how much has it warmed, and how much will it warm in the future?".
(Equally valid questions to debate are "how much of the warmth is man-made?",
"is warming necessarily a bad thing?",
and "what can we do about it anyway?").