Some thoughts I had this morning, nobody about to discuss them with so you lot get lumbered with it. Thoughts?
The Brain is a strange fruit.
As I've stated before I'm not a hippy and navel gazing searches for meaning in dreams are an excellent definition of the phrase waste of time. However, last night one minute I'm in an office at an old drawing board working on the design of an improvised demolition charge in a barge for the purpose of severing an underground tunnel to flood the tube system because I was unimpressed with the recent efforts of the nutters from the other week and then the next I'm shoving my house around like a piece of old furniture using a broom handle and a house brick as a fulcrum to get better light in the garden. Time for a change of medication methinks.
This has led to some odd thoughts in my head over the morning cornflakes. Please excuse the simplistic terms.
Terrorists are not engineers. They don't seem to analyse the task at hand very well or find the easy way of achieving their objective. The objective I assume they have is twofold, to create fear, panic and disruption then from that, generate political will to alter the policy or behaviour of a government. The secondary objective would be to damage infastructure and thereby have an economic effect.
The recent attacks in London are a case in point of how these groups ineptitude and lack of imagination dooms them to failure. What did they achieve? The deaths of 54 people and a few days of disruption. The cost to them was four lives and the impending capture and interrogation of the planning and leadership part of that cell. One of the few military lessons learnt well by the americans is that if you help your soldiers stay alive today then tomorrow those same soldiers, with all that investment of training you've put into them, will still be around to do unto the enemy what needs doing. Sounds obvious but it took them a while to realise it. You may argue that those gentleman who were immolated last week were hardly well trained and you may be right. But. They had value. They had the will, for whatever reason, to carry out orders that led to the deaths of people they had never met. They had been groomed over a period of several years and were thrown away casually, wastefully even. Leaving morals aside for a moment, that's bloody stupid. I believe it's an excellent example of the screwups that happen when people mix ideaology with military planning. If I was them I'd take a look at how the IRA did things in mainland Britain. Clear objectives, excellent security and good planning added up to a politically effective campaign that could be sustained long term because they valued their trained members and worked hard to ensure their survival so that they could continue making and planting devices.
The recent attacks seemed to only have the objective of killing people and they weren't overly effective at doing that. Think about the Tube system for a moment. By it's very nature it has vulnerable areas where the application of a little force could bring about their desired result on a grand scale but their narrow twisted little mindsets blinker them to the possibilities. I find it a delicious irony that their evil disregard for their own lives and those of others prevents them from being as effective as they might be. They are too evil to win.
A further example of this disability is the attacks on the World Trade Centre in the nineteen nineties. A large van full of explosives was detonated in the underground parking lot, to little effect on the structural integrity of the building. What puzzles me is that with a little more effort on their part they could have done so much more. The plans of the building were available to the public. A little analysis and some basic maths would have been enough to tell them how much force they needed and where best to apply it to seriously weaken the building to the point where it has to be demolished or even to bring it down in one go. After all, if you have gone to trouble of building one truck bomb how hard would it be to have had three or more in place?
It's things like that that make me believe in evolution. If the very ideaology that drives you to violence limits your effectiveness, promotes failure and you can't see that then you're stupid. Somebody smarter than you will succeed where you have failed and you will become extinct on a personal and societal level.
As a society, if we stay calm and don't take it personally we will win. It's not their fault, they're broken people and for the sake of the gene pool it's our sad duty to remove them from it. It's not a war, more the euthanasia of a rabid dog on a grand scale.
This is not a call to nuke the middle east, it's full of people who just want to live like you and me, raise kids, be comfortable and they don't deserve to die so do not interpret these musings as such.
