MB Civic

Walt in Foreign Policy (via Glenn Greenwald) ..

Remember how the London Olympics were supposedly left vulnerable to terrorists after the security firm hired for the games admitted that it couldn’t supply enough manpower? .. Well, surprise, surprise. Not only was there no terrorist attack, the Games themselves came off rather well .. [a lesson of this] is that we continue to over-react to the “terrorist threat.” Here I recommend you read John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart’s The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11, in the latest issue of International Security. Mueller and Stewart analyze 50 cases of supposed “Islamic terrorist plots” against the United States, and show how virtually all of the perpetrators were (in their words) “incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational and foolish.” They quote former Glenn Carle, former deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats saying “we must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are,” noting further that al Qaeda’s “capabilities are far inferior to its desires.”

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