|
Al-Qaeda still loves New York
By definition, New York makes people around the world want a piece of it. And in this context, the thousands of Al Qaeda planners, bomb-makers, sleepers, and wigged-out suicide cadres strewn from Kuala Lumpur to the Sunni triangle are just wannabe New Yorkers, as delirious as any wet-eared Broadway gofer to see their work writ large across the skyline. "We know we're at the top of the Al Qaeda hit list," says Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in his trademark thirties-inflected copspeak. "The bombings in 1993 and 2001 and the landmarks plot showed that they came back here and would want to come back here."And if the next 25 years are to be a football game in which the offense lobs bombs with an infinite number of clandestine delivery methods, then we're obligated to spend lots of time thinking about how and where. Understanding the where is paramount. Al Qaeda is sentimental, which is to say its planners and strategists follow their hearts. It keeps them consistent. This is what Kelly means when he notes that for the past fifteen years, they have been announcing that they will attack—and then attacking—New York. The density and wattage of the human-target grid here—Shea on a summer night, JFK at Thanksgiving, Macy's on a Saturday, Times Square just about any time—make the city itself a meta-target and raise the value of each individual target in it. According to Osama's medieval worldview, more dead Crusaders and Jews means more dead Crusaders and Jews, so that any place attacked in New York has intrinsic value, but it doesn't get at the likelihood of what might be next. "What turns a thing into a target?" says Brian Michael Jenkins, Rand Corporation terror expert. "First, high symbolic value. Then, what do they want to accomplish with their home audience? Operations are as much for display—to attract recruits, financial support, and to establish credentials—as they are intended to hurt us. They're corporate communications." Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-05-09 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=118750 |