Shannon Love

Happy Kill a Terrorist Day

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Terrorists kill to spread terror, hence the name. A terrorist attack is, by definition, an attack against random civilians for the pure purpose of intimidating a population. Basically, everybody in the terrorist targeted population is a target.

This is a real problem from the security perspective. Even a small country or ethnic group has millions of members. If a terrorist just needs to kill a handful of them out of millions to have a successful attack, he can attack anywhere and at anytime. This makes terrorists nearly impossible to stop if they have the least foothold within a society. They get to pick the time and place of the attack.

It is easy to be a big shot terrorist who can pick from thousands of miles of street, tens of thousands of buildings and any time over a period of months. You can strike without warning and easily escape before any authority can catch you. However, what happens to if you are forced to attack a few heavily guarded sites on a particular day?

You die.

I think the elections today in Iraq will serve as a lethal honey-pot for the terrorists. All the polling sites will be heavily guarded. They will have to fight prepared forces in order to strike them. No more skulking about, choosing the time and place to strike. They will have the time and place imposed on them. If they don’t fight, they will be further exposed as paper tigers.

I predict that (1) election violence will be far less severe than most fear, because the terrorists will not like the odds, and that (2) attacks which do take place will largely fail with heavy casualties.

(Update: Well the polls have closed, violence was low. The terrorists barely made an appearance. They suffered a huge defeat here. Perhaps we need to come up with a strategy wherein we create situations that require the terrorists to strike at specific times and places or risk losing face.)

Revenge of the Uncool

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So, Vice President Check goes to the Auschwitz remembrance ceremony wearing a heavy olive-drab parka over his suit.

Oh, the humanity!

There is apparently much gnashing of teeth among the cool kids over this supposed fashion faux pas.

Whatever personal affection I have for members of the Bush administration comes from the fact that from head guy on down, they are a bunch of uncool dorks.

I like that because I too am an uncool dork. Just ask my children.

Bush can’t give a speech to save his life. I mean, he tries, but I don’t think he really ever pulls it off. I would rather have a fork scraped repeatedly across my teeth than listen to one of his speeches waiting for a gaffe or one of his patented mistimed pauses. Cheney is worse in some ways. Listening to him is like being lectured on fire evacuation procedures by the guy from accounting.

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Does He Know What He is Holding?

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Via Instapundit comes a link to a photo of a Leftwing professor who is so smart he went all the way out the other side to stupid.

I couldn’t help but wonder if a contemporary radical-Left college professor actually knows how to maintain and shoot an AK-47? Does he own the weapon himself? Is it full auto? Is its collapsible stock legal?

I mean, is this guy really a bad-ass revolutionary capable of taking the fight to “the man” or a 60s retread, Che Guevara-wanna-be poser?

I think I’ll be taking bets.

The Long Nose of the Law

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Over at the The Volokh Conspiracy Orin Kerr notes that the Supreme Court has reaffirmed that getting sniffed by a police dog does not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment. I wonder how this will play out if technology replaces the dogs?

There exists an emerging class of chemical detectors for which the best description is artificial noses. Like biological noses, these devices can detect a wide range of compounds wafting in the air. Some designs even use biological receptors embedded in microchips. Within 10 years or so these detectors will reach the level of sensitivity of a dog’s nose and they will fit in a handheld unit. Unlike a dog, these devices will be able to tell us exactly what they detected and in what amounts.

Let’s call these devices eSniffers. Their existence raises all kinds of interesting legal and cultural questions. For example, at what point does the use of an eSniffer become a search under the Fourth Amendment?

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E.U. Uber Alles

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Old joke:

Q: How do we know for absolute certain that the C.I.A. had nothing to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

A: He’s dead isn’t he?

The CIA hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory when it comes to predicting the course of events. It screwed up the Cuban missile crises, failed to predict the Iranian seizure of the US embassy in Teheran, failed to predict the collaspe of the Soviet Union, completely missed the existence of the Soviets’ massive biological weapons program, failed to predict Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, etc.

Of course, intelligence is one of those areas where people and institutions only get noticed when something goes wrong. Successful predictions usually lead to actions that head off a possible negative event long before it shows up on the radar of the general public.

Still, I can’t help but worry that a CIA report (via Instapundit) predicting the breakup of the EU within 15 years actually presages the EU’s emergence as an economic and military hyperpower.

Given CIA’s track record, it could happen.