By: Rachel Marsden
A terrorist bomb plot involving Yemen? Yup, just as I predicted.
As we all know, a Muslim had a bomb sewn into his undies by Yemeni Islamists and proceeded to attempt to blow up his genitals, and a jumbo jet, somewhere over Detroit. Now Senator Joe Lieberman and others are saying that if something isn’t done pre-emptively to flush out al-Qaeda in Yemen, then it will turn into “tomorrow’s war”.
Tomorrow’s war? You fools. Do you have any idea – even the faintest clue – what you’re doing?
Last month, in a email sent to someone close to me who was headed to the refugee camps north of Sanaa, I pointed out that Yemen is the big flashpoint for al-Qaeda, and that naturally America won’t give a damn until it directly impacts them. The fact that Gitmo was filled with Yemenis never penetrated public consciousness. I cited a column I wrote in December 2006 about Ethiopia (largely a Christian nation) bombing militant Islamic strongholds in Somalia on behalf of that country’s secular government. I pointed out that America didn’t take notice of terrorists in Somalia until nearly two and a half years later, when Somali Islamists took to the high seas and started hijacking US-flagged ships.
Likewise, Yemen doesn’t represent a new war. It’s part of the same old war against a radical ideology that America hasn’t the faintest idea how to win – which is why so many fanatics have been released from Gitmo right back into Yemen.
When warfare morphed from nation-vs-nation with clear geopolitical boundaries to “fourth generation” guerilla-style fighting, America failed to adapt. Bush bombing Iraq was a good start. But then a meme started making the rounds: “We need to stop fighting because we’re only increasing al-Qaeda’s recruiting!” That’s how you know you’re not fighting a war properly. If the enemy is still fighting back, you harass and crush them until anyone else thinking of making trouble reconsiders. It’s what America did in the Second World War – the last one it fought properly.
After that, the Civil Rights movement emerged, and has now been extended to embrace every foreign enemy – to the point where the idea of trying foes in military tribunals, as was done with Nazis and various foreign spies over the years, is considered unacceptable.
Before political correctness took hold, America knew how to flush out the mob without worrying about offending Italians, and how to fight Nazis without being too concerned about the feelings of Germans. Many within these two ethnic groups realised that the solution was to turn in those who were causing the average person to make common-sense judgments based on the average offender’s profile. It worked. Now few people automatically associate Italians with the mob or Germans with Hitler. And therein lies the solution for Muslims who are sick of being given side-eye on airplanes.
As for America – you’re not going to do anything. You’re not going to wage a winnable war that will anger the Left, because that would mean a Predator drone dropping the requisite bombs over various troublesome swamps to take out the enemy, some civilians, and any United Nations types hanging around the area in an attempt to exchange “bombz 4 hugz”. Instead, you’re going to further harass air travellers, and your own citizens, and do everything in your power that is both useless and annoying to avoid actually having to win a guerilla war.