Jules Crittenden has a good post up about what he sees as a shift Westward in the war by islamists. He's projecting attacks in Europe based on intelligence that has reached the British.
The war with extremist Islam has just entered a new phase. Times of London: Al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and Iraq have issued orders for British cells to conduct a “low-tech” campaign of abductions and beheadings.
ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.
The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say.
… The revelation explains the recent deployment of a permanent SAS unit to London. The unit has been placed on 24-hour standby to respond to a terrorist attack in the capital. It would aim to carry out a hostage rescue mission within minutes of being alerted.
… One well placed source said: “Cells in the UK have been alerted to carry out this type of attack as opposed to the more sophisticated type of bombing in which you place a large number of volunteers at risk. All you need for a beheading is a bit of courage and a sharp knife.”
In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, I was puzzled by the lack of follow-on. I asked the terrorism and security experts I was talking to at that time why al-Qaeda didn’t do the logical thing. Activate the domestic cells for a series of synchronized low-intensity suicidal attacks with guns or bombs. A dozen people killed by Islamic gunmen in each of a dozen US cities at the exactly same time on a Tuesday morning rush hour, or in the malls on a Saturday afternoon, would bring the United States to a screeching halt. (And no, I’m not giving them ideas. This kind of thing is (A) obvious and (B) has been discussed quite a bit.) We knew the cells existed. Two al-Qaeda operatives picked up in Jordan had been Boston cabbies just a couple of years earlier.
The experts pointed out that no … quite rightly to date … al-Qaeda was fixated on dramatic large-scale attacks. Planes falling out of the sky. International landmarks exploding. They don’t like the pennyante nature of small-scale attacks of a sort considered part of the normal fabric of life in their own neighborhoods. Because the audience wasn’t us. The audience was the Islamic world.
All of that has changed now and al Qaeda is not able to conduct its dramatic, high profile attacks with any success. But they can play to the Muslim audiences in Europe.
One of the reasons I have strongly supported the war on terror is actually exactly the opposite of what I am regularly accused of around here by the lefties who drop by to screech now and then. I have supported it because the next attack, or series of attacks, in the US will actually bring cries for more and tougher actions against the terrorists and real – as opposed to dreamed-up – threats against civil liberties. Jeff Goldstein, riffing off Crittenden, sees Europe going right down that path if the attacks begin happening.
What will be soon evident, I think, is a stunning philosophical inversion come spectacularly to light: as Europeans who once denounced the US for forcefully prosecuting the war against Islamists begin to recognize that their social liberalism and western guilt won’t protect them from encroaching fascism gilded and reinforced with religious pretense, and so as a result begin calling on their governments to fight back in ways that the US Constitution would likely forbid, the US, for its part, always the continental wannabe, is only now coming around to that original European position—helped out by endless partisan criticisms against the campaign, by a cultural weariness toward war, by an academic establishment steeped in transnational leftism with a desire to see the US “humbled”, and by media opportunism (or bias, take your pick) that has, by force of will, almost completely sapped us of our willingness to fight Islamism proactively.
That, I think is the real danger. We will be in full reactive mode soon unless things change. If that happens, if we lose the initiative, then this whole ruckus about global warming will be completely meaningless. Because the much-vaunted "nuclear winter" that was the last big eviro-scare will be upon us in short order.
