Terrorism

A few days before the presidential election, the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, told a group of intelligence officials that the new administration could well be tested by a terrorist attack on the homeland in its first year in office. “The World Trade Center was attacked in the first year of President Clinton, and the second attack was in the first year of President Bush,” he said.

William Hartung opened the discussion by citing “$32 billion in foreign military sales in 2008,” by the United States, and that “there are many big deals in the works that may make 2009 as big or bigger.” The report looks at the biggest recipients of foreign military aid and analyzes their human rights record and the extent to which they embrace the tenets of democracy. All 25 of the largest benefactors are “undemocratic regimes or major human rights abusers,” Hartung remarked.

The most important questions concerning the terrorist attacks in Mumbai are also obvious ones, yet are not asked nearly often enough by Western analysts. They are: What goals did the terrorists hope to achieve by these attacks? And how to what degree did they achieve them? Regrettably, the terrorists so far seem to have achieved at least a qualified success.

Remember when your high school teachers tried to give their lessons more urgency by repeating the old adage that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it? Well, those days are over, or at least they should be. That's because in today's hyper-connected world, oblivion and forgetting are no longer options. The much greater danger today is our postmodern penchant to watch, replay, fixate and fetishize history even as it's happening.

The congressionally authorized Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism issued a report this week that concluded: "It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013."

Nina Burleigh The Bin Ladens, by Steve Coll (Penguin). A fascinating panorama of a great family, presented within the context of the 9/11 drama. ...

According to Steve Coll of the New Yorker, America’s ambassador in India looked into building a nuclear bunker in the embassy. With hindsight, it is not ...

... to follow productive paths that lead away from terrorism,” Glassman said in a speech at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank. ...

One day in Iraq, a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad's Mansur district and took me to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We drove past checkpoints manned by "Awakening" militias created by the Americans to counteract the Shiite-led Mahdi Army militia. My friend, a Shiite himself from Shaab, put a tape in the cassette player. "Now we are the Mahdi Army," my friend laughed, as the singing started. The songs praised populist anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi militia loyal to him,… more