Oh, and the NRA isn’t getting some blame for the Ft. Hood shooting because “it’s obviously a mistake to allow anyone to carry a loaded weapon on an Army base”. Actually, the military very carefully regulates firearms on base. If anyone tried to impose those kinds of rules in civilian life, the NRA would flip. No, the reason the NRA comes up here is that, thanks to their lobbying, the part of the FBI that knew about Hasan’s purchase of a firearm with a 20-round magazine wasn’t allowed to pass that information on to the other part of the FBI that was investigating him.

The first thing to note: ‘significant harm’ is not the same thing as an existential threat. It’s not “fight or die”. It’s “fight or be hurt”. 9/11 was terrible, but killed about one tenth of the people who died in traffic accidents that year. It’s certainly worth the effort to secure against terrorism, but only to the point where the benefits in risk-reduction outweigh the costs. Reinforcing the door to the airplane cockpit does far more than all the searches in the terminals… leaving aside the demonstration the fellow passengers of Richard Reid gave us that the barn door’s closed on that horse, anyway.

Then there are the things like helping to “de-Islamize” schools in Pakistan. Not all Muslims are radical jihadi terrorists – not even most of them. The ones that are definitely present a problem, but while we’re dealing with the capacitt of terrorists we shouldn’t ignore efforts to reduce the supply… and encouraging a less radical educational system isn’t ‘appeasement’ or anything, it’s just good sense.

One thing that few people seem to appreciate is the strategic advantage of reducing our (and our allies) dependence on oil. Less oil getting bought translates to less funding for Islamic extremists. It also destabilizes the thugocracies that currently dominate the oil production. How much uranium could Iran afford if they didn’t have fat revenues from oil? Islam in its current form can’t support a technological society – their education and engineering advances are mostly imported. If we cut down on their ability to import, their progress will be correspondingly slowed… until and unless Islam can change to accommodate scientific progress. And those changes will also make it less radical.

(Speaking of the possibility of terrorists with nuclear weapons… we haven’t put nearly as much effort and money into helping to secure old Soviet stockpiles as we should.)

So, we have all these options and more along with military action. I’ve said before that our invasion of Afghanistan was warranted, and our military did very well there for as long as they were given the necessary resources. But then the decision was made to invade Iraq, too…

Don’t go running your mouth about retaliation against Muslims – it could land you in jail. The professional media and Washington politicians are convinced Americans will take post-massacre violent action against American Muslims (they understand how we “typical” Americans think) and desperately need vindication of their suspicions and a concrete reason to warn us against future thoughts of revenge. Unless some fool takes deliberate action and soon, they media will have to lower the bar on their suspicions and demand your arrest for merely talking about retaliation or even thinking about it. So watch yourself.

Modern Medicine has its work cut out discovering how “stress” caused Maj. Hasan to “go Muslim”. Many medical doctors, without personally examining Maj. Hasan, have rushed their diagnosis onto the internet – PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is to blame. As Ann Coulter pointed out recently, Hasan hadn’t experienced any trauma yet so it may actually have been Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But Coulter, while often technically correct in her facts, has a penchant for stating the obvious with sarcastic or sardonic undertones – it’s hard to tell if she’s being serious and Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder could actually be a new form of mental disorder. Unlike Franchesca Velez, a pregnant soldier killed by Hasan and who had completed a tour of duty in Iraq without exhibiting PTSD, the trauma may affect different individuals differently.

If you’re in the military at present, stay close to armed civilians like Sgt. Kimberly Munley, who shot it out with Hasan, was wounded 3 times but no doubt prevented additional murders of unarmed soldiers. “Today’s Army” doesn’t put much emphasis on violent action, they’re more into giving our young folks useful training for future well-paying careers in the civilian world – so staying close to armed female police officers isn’t a bad idea. It’s also obvious the military no longer puts much emphasis on “integrity” as one of the cardinal virtues sought after in officers and as stated in their Officer’s Manual. After observing Hasan’s jihad rant during a medical lecture, his medical colleagues and fellow officers didn’t take any action; they weren’t sure of the impact on their careers in this sticky situation involving ethnic politics and Army procedure.

For those nascent terrorists out there, Americans remain the same ditzy enemy as always and hunting season is permanently open plus there’s still no active prohibition on the taking of does and fawns as well as the big males. Already, the crazy Americans are arguing over procedural mistakes in the handling of Maj. Hasan’s arrest and his future prosecution could prove to be complicated. Without a doubt, procedural mistakes involving Hasan’s rights were made and Lawyer John Gilligan, Hasan’s defense attorney, has already voiced a protest involving the manner in which Hasan was charged with a crime – another blot on American justice.

Congress is presently looking for answers and the taxpayers will fund another set of formal precautions and corrective actions, no doubt involving millions of dollars and new positions created within the federal bureaucracy. The Inconvenient Truth here is that as terrorists find new ways to kill Americans, Congress will rush forward to plug another gaping hole in our defense. Already the NRA is being blamed for Ft. Hood, it’s obviously a mistake to allow anyone to carry a loaded weapon on an Army base. But we also know that any corrective action proposed will involve the necessary overkill we feel compelled to enact in order to demonstrate our adherence to “fairness”.

We can legally search 82 year old Chinese grandmothers trying to pass through airport security in our efforts to remain non-judgmental toward any specific ethnic group. We’ll spend the considerable sums necessary to have adequate security, with special training and more than enough security officers to avoid slowing the boarding tempo. It isn’t that we believe old Mrs. Ling is actually a terrorist, but demonstrating “fairness” constitutes some sort of psychological talisman against every form of mindless terrorism. Seeing the same future application of fairness resulting from this incident should be instructive and no doubt will involve considerable ingenuity in its design and implementation.

I don’t think ‘evil’ works very well to explain anything (if that is what you are trying to say – I’m not quite sure which side you are arguing). It works fine as a descriptive term that we all understand, but it sheds little light.

I wouldn’t agree that terrorism is ‘unexplainable’ at all. There’s some pretty good science on it already. As far as I know, scientists aren’t offering ‘stress’ as an explanation for terrorism in general, although it might play a role in some cases of course.

Oz

But “evil”? That’s a little over the top and very unscientific as an explanation – surely we can provide a better rationalization in this day and age? Or, it might have been poetic license by the Jewish writer – Jews have a sneaking suspicion that when choosing whether to slaughter a Christian or a Jew, the Muslim terrorist will choose the Jew 9 times out of 10 – and the ugly truth is the Jew is probably correct in that assumption. But another explanation for flinging about the term “evil” is that terrorists raise certain atavistic fears among Americans that can only be explained by invoking the supernatural, the Devil, the forces of evil.

The terrorist strikes without a civilized warning, the terrorist has no preference as to location or method as long as many Americans die. No one is apparently exempt from the slaughter, children and women aren’t innocent non-combatants, except perhaps for any and all American Muslims in groups easily identified as solely Muslim.

The terrorist functions well as he goes about his business, rationally planning his actions, there’s no “an irresistible impulse made me do it” excuse to offer. And the terrorist willingly gives his life to carry out his mission – something that always frightens Americans to their core. During the Okinawa invasion late in WWII, American sailors were treated for combat fatigue due simply to the fear of impending kamikaze strikes – there’s something eerie, and definitely un-American, about accepting deliberate self-immolation in order to kill your enemy. Science can’t explain this strange behavior – so why not offer “evil” as the explanation?

Invoking mystical forces is nothing unusual in periods of great fear when the terrorized realize any resistence may be futile. Stalin invoked defense of Mother Russia, the mysterious root motivation of the Russian psyche when the Germans were conquering the Soviet armies with childish ease. He knew loyalty to the “science of Communism” would provide very little motivational force toward saving his life and that of his regime. Stalin also encouraged the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church within the Soviet Union; in the event appeals to Mother Russia didn’t work, appeals to God might stop the Germans.

In a much earlier era, the Mongols were also considered evil incarnate. In point of fact, the Mongols did lose some battles and chose to avoid others. They weren’t military supermen, but they did employ military technology and superior tactics to a great advantage. However, the apparent ease with which they conquered provided them with a reputation for invincibility ascribed to supernatural forces. Their ruthless savagery when the enemy refused to surrender added to their reputation as evil and sometimes surrendering didn’t stop the slaughter of the conquered when a killing mood was on the Mongols.

Americans will keep offering various scientific explanations like “stress” to avoid acknowledging our well founded fears of terrorist invincibility and ferocity, but “evil” works as well as the next explanation to explain the unexplainable.

On October 7th instead of announcing the beginning of the military action in Afghanistan, I believe President Bush should have said the following:

Then during the Laylat-al-Qadr, the ‘Night of Fate’ in November of 2001, the US should have deployed a 20 mega-ton nuclear device against the City of Mecca.

I do admire your willingness to lay your cards on the table: there are 1.3 Muslims in Mecca, all of whom, innocent or guilty, you are willing to obliterate if the Muslim world doesn’t ’round up’ enough terrorists for your satisfaction.

Yours is a plan that calls less for a geopolitical critique than for a diagnosis. But I’ll play along anyway, for a moment.

The obvious problem with your analogy to Hiroshima, of course, is that while Japan was small, isolated, with a central government and conventional military, the Muslim world is scattered, and decentralized, and comprises close to a quarter of the world’s population. It has no central authority to do the ’rounding up’, and has already developed capabilities for endless asymmetrical warfare. And great numbers are cheerfully willing to die, and watch millions of their comrades die, before they would surrender. In fact, your plan would be giving an historically unparalleled gift to the terrorists: their entire strategy, as I assume you know, is predicated upon forcing the powerful (the US, the Israelis) to over-react and kill innocent Muslims, thus attracting new converts to their cause.

Bill, there are some problems in the world that the mere application of group punishment and overwhelming force cannot solve. It is not ‘political correctness’ that prevents us from implementing your plan – it is wisdom, a sense of proportion, and sanity.

Oz

So the problem is insoluble. As they work through every possible legal, extra-legal, illegal, and violent means to re-establish the Caliphate; we acquiesce and hope they slake their thirst for the blood of infidels before we are personally confronted. Or we resist, which angers even more of them and they battle even harder to eliminate us from their world. You have, in effect boiled this down to its essence; our own moment of clarity. Fight or die. Fight that you may chance to live, or surrender and be surely killed. You may expect no succor from such people. We know this from overwhelming evidence.

Apparently; some of us have already surrendered the planet and the future of humanity. Infidels will be exterminated, and the battle will continue between the sects until one sect of Islam dominates. Then the family rivalries will, in turn, be fought to their bloody conclusions. The cycle is endless.

This is the existence you describe. We know they cannot be corrected, they cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be contained, they cannot be fought, and they cannot be criticized. Any perceived insult to their religion, culture, or politics is reason for slaughter.

We watch helplessly as they destroy civilization as we know it to satisfy their bloody prophesy. We shake our heads in disbelief as fathers cut down their daughters for wearing skirts to school, or for talking to boys in the hallways. We wonder aloud why a wife would subject herself to repeated beatings dealt under the guise of ‘correction’. We do not protest the genital mutilation of women and young girls; or the execution of gays. We struggle to comprehend why one sect bombs another sect’s Mosque. But the Shiite just looks at you and says; “Because they are Sunni.” as if that explains all. If Shiites kill Sunnis just because; what chance does anyone outside the club of Islam have?

We will vocally savage the Christian Religion but remain strangely silent on the humanitarian shortcomings of Islam. Why is that? Is it because Catholic Priests don’t issue fatwahs? Is it because the Baptists won’t send an assassination squad to your home for any perceived insult?

This is the dark place no one wants to look into; no one wants to admit this place exists. “If we could just talk longer; if we could just find the correct presentation, if we prove our sincerity by a (small) acquiescence now. They will respond. They will stop. They will change.” No they will not. THey haven’t alterd perspective in over 1,000 years. This is insanity defined, repeating the same overtures again and again, but expecting a different result.

From a world of limitless opportunity you have reduced us to none. Refuse to surrender and die. Or surrender; and die a little later. How sad.

And then there’s the idea of nuking Mecca. As H.L. Mencken’s supposed to have said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

A ‘moment of clarity’? Really? Let’s turn it around for a second. A whole lot of Christians are against the current ‘war on terrorism’ on religious grounds. But imagine if the Vatican were nuked. Do you really suppose that even Protestant Christians would not be slavering for ‘payback’, let alone the Catholics who, following the Vatican, had opposed the Iraq war?

No, nuking Mecca would simply turn essentially every Muslim on Earth into a radical jihadi. I think we can safely assume that Pakistani nukes would suddenly become available to al Qaeda in such circumstances…

Al-Qaeda is at war with western democracy, but the all the ‘Nations of Islam’ tolerate their continued violence against innocent men, women and children. Even against the innocents of their own societies

You ask; “What do propose that we do to combat this threat that we are not already doing?”

You continue with; “We did invade two countries after all, open a couple of torture camps, and have devoted extraordinary attention and resources to finding and fighting terrorists in the last 8 years or so.”

I don’t think you’ve mistaken my intent at all. There is a commonly used expression accorded to George Santayana; ” Those who ignore history are bound (or doomed) to repeat it.” Let’s review two historical events, shall we?

In the Philippines in 1911 General John J. Pershing was in command of the garrison that was battling the Islamic Moro terrorists. After an engagement with these indigenous Muslim terrorists; General Pershing reportedly had the Moro fighters who were captured tied to stakes. They were forced to watch as US Army troops slaughtered a group of pigs and dipped their bullets in the blood of the animals. The prisoners knew if their bodies were contaminated with the blood of those animals, they would be forever denied Paradise. A moment of clarity, so-to-speak.

The captured Moros were then executed with these bullets. They, along with Moros killed in the battle were then buried in a mass grave — along with dead pigs, their entrails, and the pigs’ blood. One Moro fighter who survived was made to watch the whole process, released, and told spread word about what had happed to the others. Guess what? No more Islamic violence. In fact, there was not another recorded Islamic Terrorist incident in the Philippines until the 1960′s. As I know you favor references snopes.com can neither confirm or deny the source of this report.

Let’s explore another example that doesn’t carry the same amount of possible ambiguity

First documented in 1896, but believed to have already existed for hundreds of years, this religious code spawned one of the most militaristic, savage, brutal societies in the history of mankind. The ‘religious’ philosophy was called Bushidō; the practitioners were the Japanese. By the middle Nineteen-Thirties, adherents of this code equaled nearly 100% of Japan’s military. Beginning with the invasion of China in 1937; the Japanese military wreaked havoc upon most of Asia and the South Pacific for over eight years. They finally involved the US by pretending to negotiate a treaty in good faith while actually planning an attack that was executed on December 7th of 1941.

All during 1945 and well past the time that the Japanese High Command had acknowledged to themselves the impossibility of winning the War in the Pacific, they continued to order suicidal attacks. Reference the Battle of Iwo Jima; where it was believed that 18,000 Japanese troops were dug in. 216 were eventually taken prisoner; a causality rate of 98.8%.

The Japanese were planning the same type of defense of the Main Island in August of 1945. They intended to have their own population fight from street to street, hand to hand, but ended by surrendering on September 2nd of that year. Why? A nuclear device was deployed against Hiroshima on August 6th causing 140,000 outright deaths and obliterated the city. Once again on August 9th another nuclear device was deployed at Nagasaki killing 80,000 and destroying that city as well. With these actions, the Bushidō experienced a moment of clarity: Surrender or die. Capitulate or be exterminated.

Over the next three generations these people have become one of the most peaceful, industrious, affluent members of our global society. All it took was that crystal clear moment of clarity.

You ask; “What is ‘political correctness’ preventing us from doing at this point, that you’d like to see done?” We will have to agree to disagree on the point of ‘torture camps’. Regardless of what the current Administration, the current majorities in the Houses of Congress, and the delicate sensibilities of you and your fellow progressives, nominal discomfort is not torture. There’s a distinct difference between the momentary belief that you are drowning and being forced to witness the slow drowning of five or ten other compatriots as you are interrogated (reference the first historical example above).

In answer to your original question; I believe from the body of your last comment that you were not at all pleased with the manner in which George Bush prosecuted the War on Terror after September 11th 2001. Here Ozzie, believe it or not, we’ve found common ground as I also firmly believe that George Bush made a grave error after 9/11. On October 7th instead of announcing the beginning of the military action in Afghanistan, I believe President Bush should have said the following:

“It has been proven that an Islamic extremist group named al Qaeda is responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th. While we hold al Qaeda responsible for this specific atrocity, we hold the Nations of Islam accountable. It is they who allowed the birth of this virulent, violent, form of religious extremism. It is they who have nurtured and allowed this twisted, diseased, form of religion to flourish. It is they who will now expunge this sickness from the earth. The Islamic nations have 30 days to begin rounding up, locking up, and completely dismantling these groups. If this is not done, consequences will be dire.”

Then during the Laylat-al-Qadr, the ‘Night of Fate’ in November of 2001, the US should have deployed a 20 mega-ton nuclear device against the City of Mecca. As the mushroom cloud was still advancing into the upper atmosphere, the President should have been back on international TV; announcing the strike, and revealing the next series of targets if the subsequent 30 day moratorium did not yield much better results.

The current level of ‘political correctness’ in our society precludes us from providing to the Muslim world that same ‘moment of clarity’ we were able to provide to the Bushidō. As long as this level of intellectual dishonesty exists, we will continue to be the ‘weak’ horse; and we will continue lose innocents to the voracious, violent appetite of the so-called ‘Religion of Peace’.

The media’s role is to ferret out every scrap of information, relevant or irrelevant, to feed the public’s passion for all the details. What’s the significance in media reports of Hasan giving away a bag of frozen broccoli or peas just before the attack – read into that action what you will – he knew he might die and hated to waste food – or – giving away the food should have tipped us off? The media’s prime opponent is the government, what information aren’t we, the media, being given – who knows something and is holding out on us? The media’s role is to throw out massive information, let the public determine what it all means – if it means anything.

The government’s role is to assure us everything is under control – it may not look that way, but it actually is under control. The FBI downplayed their investigation of Hasan in 2008, he was in contact with a known Al Qaeda player, Anwar Al Awlaki, it turned out to be nothing really and there is no evidence of a greater conspiracy. Other than the families of the victims who might not be comforted by the knowledge there wasn’t a conspiracy, the rest of us are expected to feel relief from that admission – at least a major conspiracy didn’t escape the attention of the JTTF – this is one of those “lone gunman” attacks, regrettable but certainly not the government’s fault. If a citizen wishes to trade email recipes for baba ganoush with Osama Bin Laden, that doesn’t make you a potential terrorist in the eyes of the FBI.

Another of those private watch dog groups also had a role. The NEFA foundation (Nine Eleven/Finding Answers) compiled a dossier on Al Awlaki, none of it encouraging to Americans, but the FBI couldn’t find anything unusual in Maj. Hasan contacting Al Awlaki, they dismissed it as part of his medical research efforts. The media uses these watch dog groups as a counterpoint to portray the FBI as bumblers, a favorite theme. The watch dog groups, in turn, have no authority to issue public warnings, carry out intrusive and currently illegal snooping into the lives of suspicious citizens or insist on deeper follow-up investigations by government agencies. Like Cassandra, who had a curse placed on her by Apollo which ensured none of her accurate predictions would be believed, the private watch dog’s role is one of frustration and impotence.

The greater public’s role, other than that of potential targets, is to play out the three stages of response: Initial shock, then frantic fact gathering and finally rationalizing the tragedy to conclude that we and our families are safe. The massive information barrage, the “official” denials, the warnings from private watch dog agencies, the existential significance of frozen food giveaways – all this detail forms a rich stew leading to a perpetual state of confusion and uneasiness on the part of the public. We, the public, play our role well.