Juan Cole speaks! We agree!

Finally, somebody other than our modest blog, a Big Name in other words, says something we have been beating the drum about for a couple of years*. In a recent post about Cheney's comparison of al Qaeda to the WW2 Axis, professor Cole writes: (excerpts, emphasis added)

Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.

So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions.

I repeat, al-Qaeda proper only has a few hundred fighters, those who pledged allegiance personally to Bin Laden, and a few thousand if you count other Afghan Arabs and their ideological soul mates. Most of them are not wealthy or trained or competent, and a lot are just crackpots. (Read an account of the misadventures of Richard Reid again). September 11 was possible mainly because Ramzi Bin al-Shibh lucked out and managed to recruit some high-powered engineering Ph.D. students in Hamburg who knew something serious about kinetic energy.

Cheney is lying again. Iraq is obviously a much greater priority for him than is fighting al-Qaeda.

Why is Iraq a bigger priority for Cheney than is fighting al-Qaeda? Because there are corporate profits to be made in Iraq. There are virtually none in Afghanistan or the Pakistani tribal regions. Cheney wants to crucify the Bill of Rights on the cross of "national security," but has avoided doing the one thing that would make us both free and safe. That is developing a serious counter-insurgency plan for the Middle East that wins hearts and minds and deals effectively with asymmetrical threats. All his emphasis has been on dealing with governments, like that of Iraq, which can be defeated militarily, and the defeat of which unlocks national resources for American companies to exploit.

The most recent Terror Alert is about the possiblity of certain buildings being targeted by truck bombs. That is a menace, but not anything on the order of a state-level threat. To think that a motley bunch of guys managed to get lucky in September 2001, and that their aggressive act resulted in a wholesale restructuring of the federal government, a clamp-down on civil rights, and a war in Iraq is mind boggling. But true.

* - to be fair, some other bloggers, like Digby, have also expressed the view that al Qaeda is not as big a threat as people have been led to believe.

posted by Quiddity at 8/02/2004 07:18:00 AM