Month: July 2005

The liberation of East Timor from Indonesia was Noam Chomsky’s pet issue for many years. It’s clear to people familiar with that issue that it was a major irritant to Southeast Asia’s Muslim fanatics, and a root cause of the Bali bombings, among other atrocities. Yet journalists of the “who am I to judge” school forget this, so people like Australian prime minister John Howard have to educate them:

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia’s involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn’t have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq — a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations — when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Jeff Jarvis opined recently that he thinks Chomsky sincere. I think his flip-flop in East Timor proves that he’s not. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and 7/7 were not retaliating for the liberation of Iraq.

See the full transcript of Howard and Blair’s press conference here. The good part is toward the end.

Here we go again:

Terrified passengers were evacuated from parts of London’s transport system today after incidents involving explosives at three underground stations and a bus.

The explosions were attempts to kill that had failed, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, said tonight.

Two small blasts occurred on tube trains: one near Warren Street station in central London, and the other on a tube train near Oval station in south London.

A third small explosion was reported on a No 26 bus in Shoreditch, east London.

A suspect package was also found at Shepherd’s Bush station in west London.

One woman was reportedly injured at Warren Street, but there were no reports of casualties during the other incidents, which happened shortly before 1pm.

Sir Ian said tonight: “The intention must have been to kill.”

But he added: “The intention of the terrorists has not been fulfilled.”

Or maybe not, since these terrorists couldn’t pull it off. But this is a really bad sign because it probably signals a copy-cat bombing attempt that will be followed by others.

See this on America’s greatest enemy:

In 1998, an official People’s Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called “Unrestricted Warfare,” written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the general public.

“Unrestricted Warfare” recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. “The way to extricate oneself from this predicament,” the authors write, “is to develop a different approach.”

Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).

Cols. Qiao and Wang write approvingly of Al Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the “bandwidths understood by the American military.” They envision a scenario in which a “network attack against the enemy” � clearly a red, white and blue enemy � would be carried out “so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed,” leading to “social panic, street riots and a political crisis.” Only then would conventional military force be deployed “until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty.”

It’s about time we started taking the China threat seriously. China is a fascist state that’s out to dominate the world, and we can’t let that happen.

HT Instapundit.