In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing and the killing a few days later of seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, Washington is, as it was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, obsessed with “dots” — and our inability to connect them. “The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots,” the president said Tuesday.
But for all the talk, two key dots have yet to be connected: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the alleged Northwest Airlines Flight 253 attacker, and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the trusted CIA informant turned assassin. Although a 23-year-old Nigerian engineering student and a 36-year-old Jordanian physician would seem to have little in common, they both exemplify a new grand strategy that al-Qaeda has been successfully pursuing for at least a year.
Throughout 2008 and 2009, U.S. officials repeatedly trumpeted al-Qaeda’s demise. In a May 2008 interview with The Washington Post, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden heralded the group’s “near strategic defeat.” And the intensified aerial drone attacks that President Obama authorized against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan last year were widely celebrated for having killed over half of its remaining senior leadership.
“The ‘systemic failure’ of intelligence analysis and airport security that Obama recently described was not just the product of a compartmentalized bureaucracy or analytical inattention, but a failure to recognize al-Qaeda’s new strategy.”
This is a fine article but it has also long been known that we tend to fight today’s wars with yesterdays strategy’s. My basic training for Vietnam was based on WWII and Korea. Additionally, it is more than a “failure to recognize al-Qaeda’s new strategy”. President Obama is reluctant to connect the dots between his futile strategy of a “new diplomacy” with an enemy that wants to destroy us not matter how we are packaged.
That may be so, but you are forgetting the essential Obama strategic answer to everything…it’s all Bush’s fault!
Wonderful piece of objective, critical thinking. However, #1, along with your helpful comment about yesterday’s wars, I would add my total frustration with the last sentence of the article. Enlightenment and progress are not an antidote to terror. That’s us talking; especially liberal, progressive us, for whom enlightenment and progress are, “the way, the truth, and the life”. With all that, #1 and #2, the digs at Obama at this point are straw men. Nobody’s blaming Bush at the present; Obama has been clear as he possibly could be about the war on terror, and there’s no linkage between diplomacy and counterterrorism.
Whatever we do, let’s make sure that any military translators of Persian, Arabic and Pashto are vetted [url=http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6824206]to ensure they aren’t gay[/url]. That will protect us more from terrorism.
Sick, perhaps you can offer evidence that Obama has said these things, especially in light that he’s adopted many of Bush’s policies.
John Wilkins,
How about a solution rather than your usual sarcasm? What if translators couldn’t meet the physical standards for the military? could they be brought in anyway? During the Vietnam era the army relaxed its intellectual and physical standards for draftees. If we are “at war” it seems that we could consider alternative ideas to meet the translator shortage.