By the way, if there is another al-Qaeda attack on the United States, what would you suspect the most likely target to be? Blue state or red state? Military, economic or population target?

I don't agree with some of the points made in that analysis, but it is a point of view worth considering. [In brief, the major thesis is that Islamists want to reconstruct the Caliphate,* an earthly kingdom of Islam to unite politically all Moslem countries, but that the U.S. stands in the way. So the U.S. will to interfere (and/or its ability to offer Moslems a different aspiration, a good secular life) must be broken. To do that, Islamists must get the U.S. to overextend itself in multiple invasions of the Moslem world, as to provoke worldwide Moslem revulsion at everything American and secular, and bankrupt the United States economically, as will force it to remove itself from the Moslem world as mujahedeen actions in Afghanistan contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union.]
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The problem for Islamists vis-a-vis the United States is that the U.S. is a real superpower, with a depth of wealth, technology, and power of many kinds that the Soviet Union, a paper superpower, did not even begin to approach, much less equal. Moreover, money is nothing to the U.S., and unless the Islamists can do better than a few piddling American deaths a day, the U.S. can sustain a war forever, the "permanent war" of Wolfowitz & Co. Worse, for Islamists: the U.S. is developing unmanned aircraft and robot warriors that can kill and otherwise cause devastation abroad without endangering any U.S. life.
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Hoping to exhaust the U.S. economy is sadly uncomprehending. The wealthy of the U.S. are just SO wealthy and the economy is just so huge, that a trivial and painless increase in taxes on the rich would raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year for perpetual war, in addition to the hundreds of billions already spent, which have not even been perceived by Americans.
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As for provoking the U.S. into vicious overreaction, the problem for Islamists is that the U.S. is not even nearly as extreme as Israel, not as forthright in regarding Moslems as subhuman scum to be slaughtered in huge numbers until their will to resist is broken. U.S. neocons have had to pretend to care about "the people" of Afghanistan and Iraq, because the people of the United States do not want to see themselves as mass murderers and bigots — even tho the behavior of their Government produces results little different from what they'd be if killing Moslems rather than helping them were the explicit purpose of their acts. The Iraq invasion and continued occupation have to be presented to Americans as necessary to HELP the people of Iraq, to "liberate" them and "protect" them. And the more Americans there are on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, interacting with ordinary (Moslem) people, especially kids, the more human connection there comes to be, so that when they return to the U.S., American soldiers become a built-in pro-Moslem constituency that not only has been scarred by the terrible things they have had to do but also has come to identify with and sympathize with the aspirations of the people they met over there.
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In short, it doesn't look good for the Islamist cause if that rests on creating the United States into a super Israel. And now that both Iraq and Afghanistan have had elections that international observers have reported to be pretty free and fair, the UN, Arab League, EU, and other entities — e.g., the World Bank (under its new president, Paul Wolfowitz!) — are planning to put money and personnel in, as will reduce the drain on the U.S. Bankrupting the U.S. is becoming daily less feasible, and it never was the slightest feasible anyway.
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I also don't understand the assertion that the U.S. military is stretched thin by the existing Iraq and Afghanistan actions. According to Department of Defense data there are 1.4 million active-duty personnel in the U.S. military. How is 150,000 (or, now, less) in Iraq and 18,000 in Afghanistan straining our resources?
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As for an attack on a megachurch, that would be a good choice, from Bin Laden's point of view. There are a bunch in TEXAS, which would be especially appealing psychologically, for taunting Bush by attacking his own state. Texas also is constantly infiltrated by illegal migrants from Mexico, so if terrorists can get into Mexico, they should be able to move on to Texas with minimal difficulty.
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The problem with a targeted attack that focuses on anti-Moslem bigots in rightwing churches, however, is that Americans would not be as unified in demanding a retaliatory war. The unity and patriotism/jingoism the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks — but mainly the WTC attack — produced, resulted from the feeling that simple working people, just doing their job, were killed by the hundreds and hundreds. 'It could happen to any of us!'
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But if an outspokenly anti-Moslem megachurch were attacked, a lot of Americans would feel that there's a certain justice to it: you denounce Moslems, that's "fiting words", and bigotry gives rise to bigotry, attack gives rise to counterattack, tit-for-tat. Tribalism would almost certainly still prevail, but not with the kind of vengefulness Al-Qaeda wants. The response would be too nuanced, too narrowly targeted on terrorist organizations, training camps, etc., not on innocent Moslem civilians, to produce white rage in the Moslem world. And many voices of moderation in the U.S. would say "See what you get when you practice religious intolerance? Let's not make the same mistake. This is why Jesus told us to turn the other cheek, to void violence by not inciting more. As Gandhi said, 'An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.'" That wouldn't play into Al-Qaeda's hands at all!
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It is, of course, hard to know what thought processes are going on within Al-Qaeda and other groups. There is so much suspicion of Arabs now that using other groups might be more productive. Abu Sayyaf comes to mind: Filipinos are a large Asian minority, most of them perceived as Christian. It might be easy to sneak extremist Filipinos into the U.S. Indonesia has gotten a lot of sympathetic media play of late, with the tsunami and earthquake. Black Africans from Moslem North Africa could glide in under the radar.
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It's hard to understand, actually, why there's been so relatively LITTLE terrorism in the United States. Europe has had far more, from Bader Meinhof to the Madrid train bombing, ETA in Spain, Croatian nationalists in the Netherlands, bombings across France, etc.
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Plainly, the lowest pain for huge gain would be to assassinate Dubya. That would make Cheney President(!) and produce the total triumph of neocon extremists, in addition to its symbolic warning that no one is safe from Al-Qaeda. A single assassin or tiny group can kill almost anyone, if s/he is willing to die in the attack. Mahatma Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi (killed by a woman suicide bomber, whom our culture would not suspect), Kennedy, Lincoln, the Archduke Ferdinand, and on, and on, prove the case. But for some reason, terrorist organizations don't always choose the most obvious targets, for instance, Sharon for the Palestinians, Britain's PM for the IRA. With today's technology, high rises, high-powered rifles and missiles, no security detail is large enuf. Sooner or later, somewhere, a crevice opens wide enuf to let a bullet, bomb, or missile thru. I repeat a point I made in my blog months ago: the human race is slime.
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We will go on and on killing each other until and unless someone can find and distribute all across the Earth a genetic lobotomy to remove violence from our essence.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:08 AM