Can’t see the forest or the trees
Mark Steyn makes several significant points on Mumbai:
the terrorists targeted locally owned hotels. But they singled out Britons and Americans as hostages. Yes, they attacked prestige city landmarks like the Victoria Terminus, one of the most splendid and historic railway stations in the world. But they also attacked an obscure Jewish community center. The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other…
There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station.” The photo of the “suspected gunman” showed a man holding a gun. We don’t know much about him – he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of Western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Brothers embarking on an exciting midlife career change – but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a “suspected gunman” but a gunman…What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets, and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders…
So: (a) the MSM won’t talk about the ideology behind this ghazwa, we know that; (b) the MSM won’t even call a gunman a gunman — not a good leading indicator for our survival; and (c) it’s the sort of attack that can be carried out in almost any city. Welcome to the future.
November 30th, 2008 at 10:13 am
STEYN IS RIGHT.
I BLOGGED THIS A FEW TIMES – BEFORE HE DID.
BUT THIS IS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER:
THE ATOCHA BOMBINGS AND THE LONDON METRO BOMBINGS CAN ALSO OCCUR IN ANY CITY AT ANY TIME.
WE IN THE DAR EL HARB ARE ALL POTENTIAL TARGETS – WHEREVER WE COLLECT IN LARGE NUMBERS AND WHERE A TERROR ATTACK CAN YIELD A LOT OF MEDIA COVERAGE.
WHAT REALLY MAKES OUR FUTURE LESS SAFE IS THE FACT THAT OBAMA HAS PROMISED TO MAKE US LESS SAFE BY REDUCING OUR USE OF KINETICS, REDUCING OUR SURVEILLANCE, AND USE OF RENDITION AND HARSH INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES AND EMPTYING GITMO.