New Rule Sets Project Sign Post - Saturday, July 30, 2005

Al Qaeda was always more ideology than organization. I don't get this frantic effort to figure out decisively whether the bombings in London and Egypt received a thumbs up or not from Osama. The base or al Qaeda was always designed to be more inspiration than calibration. Osama's not the Pope. He's the prophet spreading rationales for violence. Looking for definitive links is useful for counter terrorist strategies but it's a trivial pursuit for the home audience. Whether such links are discovered or not is never going to prove anything one way or the other about the spread and the dangerous turn and the new danger and the unprecedented sophistication and any of the other phrases that journalists love to use to jack up their daily reporting.

There will be sympathizers who strike on al Qaeda's behalf and in its name and in keeping to its broad vision of anti-Westernization and anti-globalization and anti-connectivity for Islamic countries. They will strike mostly within those Islamic countries, but in their Occidentalism, or iconic hatred of the West, they will persist in pursuing a bloody nose strategy of striking in the Core, focusing on our allies, in an attempt to scare off our publics from persistence in a Global War on Terrorism, the main outcome of which must be the connecting of the Middle East to the global economy in a broadband fashion that liberates populations there first economically and then politically from decades of state heavy economic stagnation and state heavy handed political authoritarianism.

And yes, most of these attacks will be undertaken by those who emigrate from the Gap to the Core, men who, in the resulting social isolation associated with that difficult journey, believe they find an easier way out through martyrdom. Survivor's guilt is a very powerful thing, and it expresses itself in a myriad of ways. You wanna know why so many Irish Americans supported the IRA for years with money, funding their terrorism? Because it assuaged their guilt in having gotten out and achieved something better here in the States. Macho bullshit to some, a deep call to aid the homeland to others.

We're not going to educate this nonsense out of the heads of prospective terrorists. We're not going to strategically communicate our ways out of this problem. We're going to have to connect these individuals, but more importantly their families, to economic opportunity here in the Core. I say, connect the women, and let them deal with the macho bullshit. Fastest way to a man's heart is not through his stomach. You have to aim a little lower. No women, no connectivity.