Why Do Terrorists Love To Strike Around Elections?And what can we expect in the coming weeks?
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2008, at 2:25 PM ET
According to the "prediction market" of Rasmussen polls, Barack Obama has an 87 percent chance of winning the presidential election. That's a pretty high number, but if there were a prediction market in which people who've worked in counterterrorism would bet on the likelihood that we'll soon be hearing from Osama Bin Laden, the number would almost certainly be even higher.
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StumbleUponA surprise could be of the proverbial October variety, or it could come sometime after the election—perhaps within the six months that Joe Biden said would produce a major test of a President Obama. The record clearly shows that jihadists see the run-up to an election and the months just afterward as an opportune time to act.
Everyone remembers the Bin Laden video that was released days before the 2004 presidential election and the Madrid train-station bombings that occurred 72 hours before Spain's national elections in March of that year. When the conservative government of José María Aznar mistakenly attributed the attacks to Basque separatists, the public punished his party, which was felt to be pretending that its unpopular support for the war in Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks. The socialists, led by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, had been trailing in the polls, but after the government's blunder, they thumped the conservatives by a five-point margin.
Those are only the best-known jihadist interventions. Alongside them should be added the first bombing of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, a little more than a month after Bill Clinton took office, and the attack on the USS Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, three weeks before that year's Bush-Gore matchup. Last year, radicals attempted multiple car bombings in London and Glasgow, Scotland, three days after Gordon Brown's June 27 installation as Britain's prime minister. And let's not forget the murder of Benazir Bhutto while she was campaigning in Pakistan or the September 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, which preceded the Australian elections by a month.
What makes elections and transitions so attractive to terrorists? After the October 2004 Bin Laden video was released, I wrote here about jihadists' need to leave their fingerprints on big events. These are the seam moments, the points of inflection in history, and the terrorists want to demonstrate that they are central players in determining outcomes. They especially want to show their Muslim audience that they are having a powerful impact on the world stage and are the global actors they claim to be. Do they try to tilt events to help preferred candidates or parties? There isn't much evidence to support that—and the terrorists seem to have some regard for the law of unintended consequences, so I don't think they believe they can act with sufficient precision to ensure, for example, a victory for McCain or Obama. (The outcome of the 2004 Spanish election was a freak event; no one could have predicted that Aznar's government would have botched its reaction to the bombings.)
That said, jihadist ideology does suggest that even though they despise all U.S. leaders, they know which leader would be better for their cause. There is a thick vein of Leninist thinking running through radical Islamism—Sayyid Qutb explicitly advocated the creation of a revolutionary vanguard of true believers. Another inheritance from Lenin was the notion that a hard-line enemy was better for mobilizing supporters than one who played down animus.
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The terrorists have already won. They didn't win by blowing up the World Trade Center, and damaging the Pentagon, and by hitting the Cole. They won because of our reaction to all those events and others. The evidence is everywhere-- the stupid signs in airports that say "Threat Level HIGH!" and the unending recordings nearby that urge people to be on the lookout for unattended baggage. Even inside the zone of safety, after we've removed our shoes and had our hand luggage rooted through, x-rayed and swabbed, we hear the message not to accept anything from strangers.
The multi-gazillion dollar War On Terror and the fear that the government spreads is the terrorists' prize, their Oscar, their blue ribbon. Make no mistake, if people are nervous it's less because of anything terrorists have done and more due to the incessant reminders by the government of what the terrorists have done.
And what exactly have they done? They've killed around 4,000 Americans, and caused some property damage. In the years since the World Trade Center Attacks, ten times as many Americans have been killed-- by cars. Where is the War On Automobile Fatalities? Far more Americans have their homes burgled, their cars stolen, find themselves robbed every year-- yet where is the War On Crime?
We lock our cars and houses, and we rely on the police and the justice system to deal with criminals. After 9/11, all we had to do, ALL we had to do, to ensure that something like that never happened again was to change the protocol of letting hijackers into the cockpits of airplanes and to beef up the doors. That's it.
Sure, someone could have snuck something onto a plane that could cause a fire, even an explosion, but they planes themselves couldn't have been turned into missiles against us. And to reduce-- not prevent, only reduce-- the chance of someone menacing a plane full of people, increasing screening measures somewhat would suffice.
But the high-profile, fear-mongering does nothing to make us safe, in fact we all feel less safe, and we find our civil rights compromised at every turn by the government, in the name of security. Sorry, how is that not a victory for terrorists? Whose aim is to force change, to strike fear in the hearts of people who live in a free society?
Everyone KNOWS that if terrorists want to bring down a plane that it's a done deal. Most people who can manage to use the internet are smart enough to think of ten ways, ten simple ways, to bring down an airplane, ways that skirt all the security measures in place.
But why would terrorists even go there, when there are so many easier targets?
No, the answer is to give law enforcement agencies the resources they need to reduce the chances of success of terrorist attacks-- and for the rest of us to put it in the recesses of our minds and to go about our daily lives pretty much as we did before 9/11 and the fear-mongering that followed.
--DuckworkerMike
(To reply, click here.)
No one who's followed AQ over the past decade believes they somehow "want" McCain. McCain is their worst nightmare. He enabled Bush's strategy that is decimating them in Northern Iraq, requiring them to retreat back to the mountains and resort to needling forces in Afghanistan. They don't want McCain. They want Obama in.
The lack of resolute U.S. responses to the embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole bombing, and the 93 World Trade Center Bombings convinced Bin Laden that the U.S. was a paper tiger, and would fold like a cheap tent from one big attack. His plan was to issue a demand that the U.S. convert to Islam shortly after 9/11. He thought he knew what made Americans tick, and he was wrong.
It would also be ludicrous to suggest AQ is "happily occupied" with destabilizing Pakistan and eroding security in Afghanistan. They can walk and chew gum at the same time and their goals are global, not local.
Further, the notion that Bin Laden's intent was to draw the U.S. into a quagmire in Afghanistan is weak. He didn't think the U.S. had the will to stomach any war, period. The quagmire ended up being an Al Qaeda quagmire in Iraq, requiring them to retreat back to the mountains and start needling forces in Afghanistan.
They know McCain is the one that enabled that strategy, and intends to do the same in Afghanistan. They're not ten feet tall and unstoppable, as so many Americans seem to fear. McCain is AQ's worst nightmare and they're not likely to gamble on the reaction to a strike going one way or the other and thereby blowing the very good odds that Obama's on his way to the White House.
--marjor
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And the attack on 9/11 was associated with what political event? I think that all the article demonstrates is that terrorists attacks can take place before and after elections, before and after installations and before and after inaugurations or pretty much anytime.
Human beings seek to detect patterns since it useful to do so.
I am not a terrorist but it seems to me that the impact of a terrorist act is magnified when it is perceived as random. Random in the choice of target - it could be anywhere, random in the choice of who it targeted - it could be anyone, and random in choice of time - it could happen anytime. Committing terrorist acts according to a pattern chances that the pattern will be discovered and anticipated.
--ccblend
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(10/28)