The War on Terrorism - Part 2 of 5

Yesterday I started this series with a football analogy to describe the difference between tactics and strategy. Today I’ll continue with another football analogy.

So, how is that [the previous analogy] relevant with Al Qaeda? Let’s use another football analogy. Let’s pretend that Al Qaeda starts a football training camp, and 45 jihadis throw down their weapons and suicide vests and start training for football. After a year they announce that, with the help of Allah, they will be able to defeat the best team in the NFL. After the laughter subsides, an exhibition game is scheduled in Foxboro, MA against the New England Patriots, which is wholly appropriate. Even though the Al Qaeda Ragheads have some equipment, it looks like it was stolen from a Jr. high school. At the end of the first half the score is 175-0 and half of the Ragheads have been carted off on stretchers. However, during the half-time festivities, the huge screens at both ends of the stadium appear to malfunction and the glowering sneer of His Vileness, Osama bin Laden, appears on the screens. In slightly accented English (he does, apparently, speak English), he tells everyone to look at one of the end zones where a man jumps onto the field and blows himself up. Then he tells the crowd that many more suicide bombers are planted in the stands and that that if everyone doesn’t leave the stadium immediately, they will start detonating themselves. You can guess the rest. Panic ensues, dozens are killed and hundreds are injured in the stampede to the exits. An hour later Al Jazeera releases a video from bin Laden claiming a huge defeat of the infidel football team and the capture of Gillette Stadium by a handful of faithful warriors.

In this analogy, Al Qaeda couldn’t have cared less about winning the football game. Their goal was to capture the stadium (at least for a few hours) and to humiliate Americans into panicking, hurting and killing themselves and basically looking like a bunch of scared “Chicken Littles.” The strategy they used included the tactics of trying to play football, but it was only a ruse. The players they used were expendable. They met their objective by employing a strategy that targeted the spectators (the people) not the opposing football team. The fact that we had the best football team in the world on the field was irrelevant to the outcome of this contest, because the people themselves were the targets, and, running like screaming mimis all over Foxboro, they performed their roles perfectly.

That, my friends, is the difference between tactics and strategy, and why having the best military on the face of the earth may not have much effect on whether we stop Islamic terrorism in our lifetime. You and I, rather our hearts and minds, are the real targets of terrorism. Those they kill and maim are only tools to get at your mind. You, hundreds or thousands of miles away from the event, who are glued to your 24-hr news channel, are the target. How do you react? They expect you to curl up into a ball, cry for your mother and stop living your normal life the next time they blow up a building or hijack a plane in the U. S. They expect their threats to cause us to avoid air travel, shopping at the mall or from taking certain commuter routes.

We’ve got them by numbers. We are a nation of over 300 million people. They can’t kill and injure us all. They can’t even harm 1% of us, yet the psychological damage in the wake of 9/11 crippled our economy. Guess what, folks? We did that to ourselves. No one forced us to stop flying commercial airlines. No one forced us to scale back our investment plans. All the economic damage in late 2001 and 2002 was self-inflicted, and Al Qaeda is betting that we’ll react the same way next time.

Next time? Yes. Next time.

Wednesday – The Next Terrorist Attack

"Fly high & roar loudly"

dirk