Should we still fear al Qaeda?
Across the Atlantic, American politicians also got into sky-is-falling mode. Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, fulminated, “This is going to get worse. You cannot allow this to become a national security issue for the United States. And I argue it’s already crossed that threshold.”
Previous real U.S. national security threats and their manifestations include 9/11, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (from the potential use of nuclear weapons) with the Soviets, Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s armies taking over much of Europe.
A ragtag group of jihadists roaming the North African deserts is orders of magnitude less significant than those genuine threats to the West and is more comparable to the threats posed by the bands of pirates who continue to harass shipping off the coast of Somalia. They are surely a problem, but a localized and containable one.
Western politicians and commentators who claim that the al Qaeda linked groups in North Africa are a serious threat to the West unnecessarily alarm their publics and also feed the self-image of these terrorists who aspire to attack the West, but don’t have the capacity to do so. Terrorism doesn’t work if folks aren’t terrorized.
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We ignore them at our peril.
thebrokenrattle on February 4, 2013 at 8:26 PM
I don’t see what good it does to fear them. Now, crushing them like cockroaches, on the other hand …
OldEnglish on February 4, 2013 at 8:27 PM
Na , BO said so .
Oh , and GM is #1 .
Lucano on February 4, 2013 at 8:29 PM
AQ is on the run and terrorist attacks against us are over, and all due to that fantastic Cairo speech given by Bark.
Bishop on February 4, 2013 at 8:31 PM
And a guy sitting in a cave in Afghanistan wasn’t a threat either, right?
rbj on February 4, 2013 at 8:31 PM
Probably not as much as we should fear Obama.
behiker on February 4, 2013 at 8:35 PM
Fear is not the word I would use in this instance.
Bmore on February 4, 2013 at 8:41 PM
“Fear” is what the enemy should know, pain is what our enemies will feel.
The idea that terrorists and despots regard our nation as a “paper tiger” reminds me of the serious error in judgement that Japan made in the 40′s … oops.
We might have a State Department filled with legalize and lackluster leadership, but, I can assure our enemies that we don’t fight fair.
kregg on February 4, 2013 at 8:54 PM
So what do you think of this Benghazi connection?
http://news.yahoo.com/white-house-rebuffed-clinton-petraeus-plan-arm-syrian-023937923.html
onlineanalyst on February 4, 2013 at 9:01 PM
This guy Peter Bergen has to be one of the most arrogant idiots on the planet… He claims to be a terrorist expert, does not know a sh*t about the islamic terrorist evil dogma but brags that his name was mentioned by some Al Qaeda leader as “some an Al Qaeda expert”… Before 9/11/ 2001 very few of us gave a dman about Afghanistan and Al Qaeda and look what they did to us and they came from a sh*thole country literally living in the 7th century… Now islamic terrorist are free to roam in many more countries, have access to much more money and weapons, on the verge of controlling Yemen… will control Afghanistan once we leave there in a year… will control Libya in 2 to 3 years, and already the muslim brotherhood the godfather of modern islamic terrorism in control of Egypt the largest Arab country… And this idiot is telling us not to worry about islamic terrorism…
Any so called expert who thinks that the destruction of the old Al Qaeda leadership means the end of Al Qaeda and islamic terrorism is an utter fool and it is extremely dangerous to listen to fools like that… Al Qaeda old leadership was ineffective and practically dead since October 2001 when we first went into Afghanistan… However it did not stop islamic terrorists from conducting major terrorist attacks in Spain and London…
mnjg on February 4, 2013 at 9:05 PM
And the man also has no interest in finding out what happened in Benghazi. Fog of war, ya know. al Qaeda? Totally blowing that out of proportion now too it seems. Good grief…
lynncgb on February 4, 2013 at 9:11 PM
Obama is the most immediate enemy and clear and present danger.
wildcat72 on February 4, 2013 at 9:20 PM
Hmmmm. Does he mean the original brand name “al Qaeda”? Or the various re-branded generic kinds? Or the new and improved re-branded variations? They are all poisonous and toxic and potentially fatal, but I think the last of these have become far more widely dispersed than the other kinds.
farsighted on February 4, 2013 at 9:27 PM