Mark Byron

The Terrorist Next Door

I'm out of commission with a virus; it isn't H1N1 (thank you, Lord) but I was ordered home to bed today and tomorrow. As I write, a nice Muslim Indonesian guy is subbing in my ECON 510 class tonight; Muhammad is our main Econ prof, so the class will be in good hands (possibly better hands since he's ABD in Econ from the University of Kentucky and knows more economics than I).

I've run into plenty of Muslim academics over the years as fellow grad students at Kent State and teaching at Sullivan U, where we have about a 8% or so Islamic population in our MBA program; it's rare to have a Muslim-free MBA class.

That brings a lot of diversity; with our MBA program about 25% foreign, roughly equally Asian, African and Arab, it makes for interesting conversations in class. When we talked about discrimination in my MGT 499 classes, I had some real life confirmation of Flying While Muslim from a US-born Iraqi-American.

So, this story about a junior-high math teacher getting busted for allegedly plotting bad things to non-Muslim Americans rings home. The purported terrorist wannabe, Tarek Mehanna, is stated to be "a sweet guy and loved by his students."

You were expecting Achmed the Not-Yet-Dead Terrorist? You can be very devout in one's faith and be sweet and lovable. On the Christian side of the aisle, most devout folks are very nice; it's the occasional jerk that thinks standing on the quad in front of the college library and calling everyone damnable sinners on the highway to Hell to be a effective witness that gives the brand a bad name.

On the Muslim side of the aisle, the devout ones I've seen have been very gentle; it's the less devout ones that tend to be problematic. However, there are schools of Islamic thought that want to take jihad into their own hands and have a lot of Koranic rhetoric to back it up. It often can be those thoughtful, otherwise gentle folks that want to follow God so seriously, that they can turn to violence, especially if you get a twisted heurmanutic that praises martyrdom and violence against the infidel, even if the infidel is just a batch of ordinary people in an office building or mall.

I don't know Mr. Mehanna, but I've met quite a few intelligent good-citizen nice Muslims over my years. Could one of them have gone over the edge to become a terrorist? Possibly, but I'm not in the mood to strip-search my Muslim students or give my collegue Muhammad a wide bearth just because he's a practicing Muslim who can laugh when I joke about our box lunches after our in-service meeting included a kosher and halal pickle.

US Muslims, Half Empty or Half Full?

This Pew poll of Muslims in the US is interesting; I'll give a hat tip to the Detroit News for hosting a full copy of the poll rather than just give a quick summary.

The section on politics is interesting (page 7 of the report); Muslims are moral conservatives but are big government fans, not unlike blacks. Just as blacks have both economics and "civil rights" issues that lean them into the Democratic camp when they'd be more at home with Republicans on moral issues.

Prior to 9/11, Muslims were becoming a swing group, but have become more Democratic post-9/11; Muslims have the Republican emphasis on fighting militant Islam making life tougher for them since then.

One bullet point that got a lot of play is the small but significant number of al Qaeda sympathizers in the American Muslim community, especially among younger Muslims. 15% of  young adults (18-29) approved of suicide bombers and 7% had a favorable view of al Qaeda. How much of that is tweaking the nose of the canvasser and how much is honest support of Osama is a good question, but there is a non-trivial block of potential jihadi fifth columnists.

One of the more encouraging stats is that quite a few US Muslims are integrating well. They're only a tad poorer than the general population and roughly half think of themselves as Americans first and Muslims second.

They're not all that happy with our current foreign policy, but if American foreign policy was centered around tamping down evangelical growth in Latin America and Africa and giving evangelical-Americans a hard time, quite a few in the Peanut Gallery would be ornery about Washington. There's cause to worry some, but there's also quite a few assimilated Muslims who are fitting in nicely who are becoming the norm, even though that's not as sexy a story as the few Osama-backers among us.

Between Iraq and a Hard Place

The President seems to be rather flustered about what to do in Iraq; the HTML tag to the CNN piece has stay.course in it, which is a phrase that has been phased out as of late at the White House. The course that the administration wants to stay on is to keep trying; it doesn't mean that they keep doing the same things.

I don't agree with Harry Reid often when he's making a partisan point, but he may well be right here-"It is increasingly clear that the president does not know what to do to stop the escalating violence in Iraq[.]" The problem is that Dirty Harry doesn't have much of a clue, either. There are no really good solutions.

The best analogy I can think of to get my mind around the Sunni-Shia issues is to use Northern Ireland as a template. Cast the Sunnis as the Catholics and the Shia as the Protestants; al Qaeda becomes the IRA and Sadr becomes Ian Paisley on acid.

To be honest, both the IRA and Paisley deserve better than that metaphor, since all the players in The Troubles had (for better or worse) a half-millennium of English sensibility and a Christian sense of fair play that kept the mayhem down quite a bit. Iraq is a different culture where warfare takes on a spiritual dimension that it lacks in a European context, as well as a cultural setting where settling scores via violence is still alive and kicking.

What needs to be done to get rid of the large amount of violence is to get the militias to stand down. Getting the IRA and Unionist goon squads to stand down was hard in NI; getting the Sadr boys and their Sunni analogs to do so will be well neigh impossible.

We may be in a situation in Iraq where the center will not hold. I'm not talking as much about a unified Iraq but a civilized Iraq which is ruled by something other than the guy with the biggest, baddest set of fighters. I'd settle for a three-way partition where the Sunnis, Shia and Kurds can have their own separate areas and not shoot at each other.

However, we're looking at the strong likelihood of warlordism getting going in Iraq. Left to their own devices, we'd likely wind up with a Shia area being run by Sadr's goons (with a strong influence from Iran), a Sunni area as the next al Qaeda enclave, and a civilized Kurdistan. Batting 0.333 is great in baseball, but it doesn't hunt here.

If the US and their allies bugs out in short order, we're likely going to see that warlordism kick in. The result would have the mullahs in Iran having sway over not only their oil but most of Iraq's oil. Even if the Iraqi Shia aren't puppets of Iran, a Sadrite South Iraq will have a lot of oil money to make mischief with in Lebanon and elsewhere.

Even worse would be what a Sunni-hard-case West Iraq would look like; the junta that would take over their would likely be in al Qaeda's pocket, with easy access to Syria, Jordan and thence to Lebanon, Israel and the west.

Bugging out isn't an option. It's bloody, but the factions are fighting each other and don't have free reign to plot against outsiders as of yet. Making the current Iraqi government reign in the militias is the one thing that needs to be done. In my Troubles analogy above, I had Sadr as Paisley. One can hope that he takes a page from Gerry Adams and decide that politics is a better route to power than the gun.

If so, we can have a civilized Iraq. It might not be a small-l liberal mecca, but at least it wouldn't be a safe haven for terror. That's worth giving it more time.

Might we have to pull the plug down the line? Possibly. However, there's far more downside to pulling out now.

Outlaws

Here's my solution to al Qaeda interrogations; name Tom Delay as the warden of Club Gitmo. That way, the critics of the administration's policies can plead "Please, Hammer, don't hurt 'em." It would also close a circle, bringing both just-win-baby schools of conservative thought under one roof; the K Street money machine that DeLay championed and the outlaw treatment of detainees.

I'm using the word outlaw in the sense it was used in mideval England. An outlaw was literally outside of English law; people could do whatever they wanted with them, including torturing and killing them. While the Bush team isn't dispatching its prisoners without trial, they would like to be able to treat the detainees as outlaws, not giving them any formal protections; they don't want them to have American due process rights and are fighting to not have the anti-torture and anti-degradation sections of the Geneva Convention from applying.

The White House and renegade Republicans came to an agreement yesterday on how to treat prisoners; they're going to apply the Geneva Convention's restrictions on "humiliating treatment and outrages upon personal dignity" but give the President authority on how to apply that. It's a huge loophole, especially when they have striven to keep that outlaw status; the tendency will be to say that something isn't really humiliating or outrageous.

It isn't often where I'll be siding with McCain and Warner against the administration, but this is one of them. Our foes won't be giving our soldiers that level of goodwill, but no one said that this war was fair; we are restrained by our nature from stooping to routine torture and want to treat our foes fairly, even if the favor isn't returned.

One thought that went through my mind; would we sanction water-boarding the reporters who refused to testify in the Barry Bonds/BALCO case? I don't think so, Tim. "But they only feel like they're drowning, it isn't really torture." Tell that to the Marines. Or the CIA.

If "cruel and unusual" is good enough a standard for our street perps, it's good enough for jihadis. Truth, justice and the American Way, not the CIA way, thank you. We need to treat them not as outlaws but as in-laws, with respect, even if we don't like them much.

The Narrow Path

I didn't get to see the whole first night of The Path to 9/11; I only picked it up at about 8:30 and was on the phone for about a half hour. However, what I saw was well done; not unlike a good Tom Clancy movie, except the script was based on reality. There were even some comic elements, like William Hung's Filipino half-brother doing karaoke Whoop, There it Is as Ramsey Yusef is fleeing an Manilla apartment file and forgetting a laptop with a lot of crunchy intel goodness.

I can see why the Clinton team didn't care for it. The scene that had Sandy Berger hanging up on the team seems to have been deleted, but you saw a team of administrators too interested in keeping good diplomatic relations with Pakistan that in getting Osama. The Bush team for the first nine months of 2001 probably won't look that good, either; however, tonight's episode ends in the wee hours of 1/1/00, after the Millennium plot had been blown.

One damning line came when they were waiting for the go-ahead to do a raid on Osama; a Afghani working with the US said something to the effect of "Do you have any men in Washington, or are they all cowards?" No, they were all diplomats and lawyers that didn't quite have a handle on things.

However, in their defense, the rest of us didn't have a handle, either. I'm not sure I could have pulled Bin Laden's name out of a line-up on 9/10/01 or called al Qaeda by name then, either.

There were missed opportunities, because we needed more cojones and less diplomacy to get that job done in 20/20 hindsight. However, I'm not sure if a Bush 41 or Dole administration would have done things much differently. That doesn't make it right, but Washington didn't get the magnitude of the problems five year ago to the day.

Sadrsippi Squirrel Revival

I went off on a job-hunting trip right after this happened 8/4, and I'm just now getting around to writing on this item.

Crowds of al-Sadr supporters from across Iraq’s Shiite heartland converged on the capital’s Sadr City district, chanting “Death to Israel, Death to America” in the biggest pro-Hezbollah rally since the conflict began July 12.

Demonstrators, wearing white shrouds symbolizing willingness to die for Hezbollah, waved the guerrillas’ banner and chanted slogans in support of their leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah.

I saw that story on one of the news channels that Friday. The fact that it was Friday is important, since that's mosque day in Islam. If Sadrite mullahs were giving stem-winder sermons against Israel and for their fellow Shiites, you'll likely have charged up youth after the service willing to go to Lebanon and be jihadis, at least in theory.

Those white jihadi shrouds struck me. When you get a moving sermon in an evangelical church, you can often see a big altar call with people coming forward for prayer or to dedicate themselves. Here's the humorous description of a killer alter call from Ray Stevens' Mississippi Squirrel Revival

Well seven deacons and the pastor got saved,
Twenty-five thousand dollars was raised
and fifty volunteered For missions in the Congo on the spot.
Even without an invitation, there were at least five hundred rededications and we all got baptized whether we needed it or not.

An evangelical altar call can get people to make salvation decisions, decisions to become missionaries and make decisions to change other aspects of their lives. What it doesn't do is create evangelical jihadis going out to kill off the unsaved infidels.

However, I used the phrase "killer alter call" figuratively. While you'll see the occasional  anti-abortion zealot go jihadi, holy war isn't part of evangelical preaching; any warfare preached is of a spiritual nature, not that of guns or bombs.

When a mullah of a certain stripe makes a killer altar call, it's really a killer altar call, raising up a pack of jihadis willing to kill the infidel for Allah. Chances are that all the youth dressed in jihadi white in Baghdad a week and a half ago haven't made their way to the Bekaa Valley, but some of them may well do so, or become part of a local militia to go after Sunnis or westerners.

That sizes up what we are facing with radical Islam. An effective series of sermons laying out an agenda of a "lesser jihad" can radicalize the parishioners, even if the overall Islamic culture of an area isn't militant. It only takes a small percentage of radicals to make life miserable for the remainder.

It isn't "Islamic Fascism" as the president mistakenly referred to it; the Baathist movements that gave us Saddam and the Assads had intellectual roots in European Fascism, but the jihadis that we're dealing with are mosque-centered, not state-centered like Fascism. The president fell into the trap of calling anything authoritarian Fascist.

However, that radical Islam seems to flow from almost any mosque if you have leadership who wants to pursue the lesser jihad of warfare against the infidel. Thus, we'll have to keep Islam in general at arm's length, since radical Islam will flow from it in most cases; some breeds are worse than others, but all can produce radicals.

That Sadrite killer altar call of 8/4 was a wake-up call; we are truly at war with a subset of Islam, but it can't be wiped out, only contained. Wiping Islam off the map isn't an option for Anglospherians to consider, for it flows against our concept of religious freedom. Thus, we'll be working at minimizing the number of jihadis, not eliminating them.

BinGuyvered

I'm still getting my mind around the news of the day, where the British stopped a plot to blow up large numbers of US-bound planes with a peroxide-based explosive mix. The recipe supposidely required only things you could get in gift shops inside the security check, making the standard screening moot.

The resultant new level of security has all liquids save baby formula off limits, and moms have to taste-test the formula for inspectors. Carry-on luggage is banned and any bare essentials have to come on board in clear plastic bags. So much for bringing a change of clothes in case your checked baggage doesn't make it.

The would-be jihadis were mostly of Pakistani descent.

The good news is that the plot was caught before they could pull it off. The bad news is that the bad guys have McGuyvered (or should that be BinGuyvered) things so much that we have to use zip-lock bags for carry-on luggage from here on out.

So Much for Democracy

Things are looking rather bleak in the Middle East; Israel has gone Old Testament on its neighbors. To the south, they continue to go to war against the Hamas government, taking out the foreign ministry building in Gaza. In the north, responding to a Hezbollah raid that captured two IDFers, they've assaulted targets in Lebanon, including the Beirut airport.

It was considered a coup for US policy in the region when Lebanon had open elections that forced the removal of Syrian troops. However, that doesn't take the Lebanese government off the hook; the Israelis are treating the government as an extension of Hezbollah.

Earlier, Israel's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, told Israel's Channel 10, "If the soldiers are not returned, we will turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years."

Normally, I'll give the IDF the benefit of the doubt. However, their moves in the last week signal that they're prepared to wage all out war with Hamas and Hezbollah and their enablers.

This had better be good, for they've set back Bush administration democracy-advocacy five years. What good does it do a country to step out from under a neighbor's hegemony when it means getting whacked by Israel for their troubles?

The only way this will work is if Israel can severely weaken both Hamas and Hezbollah to the point that they're no longer operational. That might require taking on Syria and Iran (benefactors of Hezbollah) and might become nuclear.

For once, the IDF might be biting off more than it can chew. The Israelis have the capability of kicking butt and taking name and giving world opinion the middle-digit salute; they're the folks who invented chutzpah. However, doing this right will be bloody by Israeli standards; I don't see the US helping them unless one of the H-boys attacks the US, and I'm not sure the IDF has the scope to do what needs to be done.

Pray that it be done right, or not at all.

Putting the Bomb Back in Bombay

It's a week late to be in on the anniversary, but today's bombings in Mumbai remind me way too much of the 7/7/05 London mass transit bombings; it smells like an al Qaeda-style operation, with seven separate bombs went off during evening rush hour

When something nasty happens in India, eyes turn to Pakistan, but no jihadis have claimed this. Pakistani leaders have properly condemned it; they're in rapprochement mode at present after coming to blows over Kashmir a few years ago.

Mumbai (the new/proper spelling of Bombay) is Bollywood's HQ and a big corporate locale as well; there's also a big domestic organized crime presence that could also feasibly explain the bombings as well. However, it is so similar to last July's London bombings that the early money would have to be on Islamic terror being behind it.

We shall see.

The Satanic Rants

Rev-run Pat might have gotten one right for a change; he let off another stink-bomb on The 700 Club-

On the programme, the 75-year-old preacher responded to a news item about the reaction of Muslims in Europe to the publishing of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

The footage showed Muslims screaming "May Allah bomb you! May Osama Bin Laden bomb you!"

Mr Robertson said the pictures "just shows the kind of people we're dealing with. These people are crazed fanatics, and I want to say it now: I believe it's motivated by demonic power. It is satanic and it's time we recognize what we're dealing with".

He went on to say that "Islam is not a religion of peace", and "the goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen whether you like it or not, is world domination".

Mr Robertson said in a statement later he was referring specifically to terrorists as being motivated by Satan.

That's not politically correct, especially in circles where the idea where everyone's praying to the same god is popular. Let's break this one down.

Is militant Islam "motivated by demonic power" and/or satanic? Most likely. It surely isn't coming from God. If you acknowledge the possibility of spiritual warfare, you're probably going to acknowledge that this is coming from the side of the bad guys. Of course, one of the places where spiritual warfare isn't acknowledged is in the MSM, especially the BBC.

Is the Devil motivating Osama and company? Most likely. It's possible that everyone's merely deluded and doesn't need any negative supernatural prompting to do their dirty work, but it's a fair assumption that Ol' Sloughfoot's got his hand in this.

Is the goal of Islam world domination? Yes, they want to bring everyone to Allah. Some are willing to do so by peaceful means, others by force. It's the latter we have to worry about; the former are no more threatening than any other proselytizing faith.

Islam as a peaceful religion depends upon who's doing the hermeneutic on the Koran; in the hands of the Wahhabis and other fans of the lesser jihad, it ain't very peaceful.

Rev-run Pat was his typical over-the-top self, but he was actually spot-on for a change.

Islamic Radiation Therapy-Part II

I said I'd be back to this tomorrow; it turned out to be next week, when a cooler head is less interested in a fisking. I'll leave that job to Hugh Hewitt's, who undresses Tom Tancredo nicely. Good site redesign, Hugh.

Let me respond to Tancredo backer Terrahawk's comments from the first post.

Is moderate Islam soft on the jihadis? Yes. A "significant portion" of the Islamic street would pick Wahhabism over Hollywood. Also, it's often hard to tell the difference between devout and jihadi; cracking down on the devotees often leads to more radicalism.

I think Terrahawk overstates the importance of Mecca. Good Muslims are supposed to pray towards Mecca and make the Haj there at least once in a lifetime.

However, if Mecca is nuked, people can still pray to the radioactive cinders. The Haj would merely be on hold for a decade or two while the hasmat teams decontaminate the joint, or have pilgrims go in wearing hasmat gear.

That last part might actually fit into Muslim egalitarianism. If I recall correctly, all the pilgrims put on the same simple white robe so there are no fashion statements or putting on airs. If everyone gets the same stock hasmat uniform, they'd be modifying that egalitarian custom to adapt to the situation.

I don't think that nuking Mecca would dishearten Islam. It might bring some people to questioning why Allah allowed Mecca to be destroyed and questioning his existence. However, it's likely to turn many folks towards the jihadi camp. If the US declared jihad against Islam (which an attack on Mecca would be), lots of Muslims would return the favor.

If a Mecca attack got 20% of Muslims to become agnostics and 5% to become active jihadis, that wouldn't be progress, and I think I'm being liberal with the number of agnostics and conservative with the jihadis. If Iraq ticked off a few Muslims, a Mecca attack would be a hundred-fold as good a recruiting tool.

Some countries would be recruited. Pakistan is nuke-packing and Iran's not that far away. Others might be able to buy nukes from North Korea or the black market; Russia's inventory could be had (or have already been had) for the right price. It wouldn't take a ICBM to bring one in. A barge would work just fine if you didn't mind a few weeks lead time. That's more important than you think, since most big US cities are seaports, either directly near the ocean or accessible via the Mississippi/Missouri/Ohio system or the Great Lakes.

A Mecca blast would leave the spiritual infrastructure of Islam intact; most of the key immans are elsewhere. The Haj would be disrupted and a few of the faithful may be disheartened, but the remainder would likely to be radicalized.

There would be an urge to do something after a major city was nuked by al Qaeda or fellow travelers. However, the answer would be to take over the remaining jihadi hotbeds, not nuking Mecca.

Occupying Saudi Arabia might be a plausible response, but even that would prompt Muslim radicals from elsewhere to reclaim the holy sites; we'd have to make the calculation of whether cutting off the root of Wahhabism and Saudi funding of same is worth radicalizing the rest of Islam. That's a tough call, especially if you add in the $5/gallon gas you'd have in the months after the war, not to mention the good US military hardware that's in Saudi hands.

Sometimes the proper response is to not respond directly; note that Bush's reply to 9/11 was to wait a few months and take over Afghanistan. Taking over Saudi Arabia might well be the answer to a nuclear 9/11 in the future, but bombing Mecca will only make Islam mad.