With Enemies Like This, Who Needs Friends?

[n2doc]

by KEVIN CARSON
The U.S. government’s persecution of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (who came out publicly as a transgender woman after sentencing) is the latest example of a general rule: In the transitional struggle between networks and hierarchies, sometimes networks’ most powerful weapons are the hierarchies themselves. You spend a few thousand bucks to yank a network’s chain just right, and it’ll respond by doing something stupid that costs itself millions.

The bad networks do this, obviously. Al Qaeda has followed a consistent business model of goading Uncle Sam into doing utterly stupid things — a business model that never fails. AQ spent a relatively minor amount preparing and carrying out the 9/11 hijackings. In response, the United States became bogged down in two regional wars in South Asia and the Middle East that alienated public sentiment in the Islamic world, and embarked on a general policy of permanent war, torture and police statism that did irreparable damage to its reputation around the world. Entirely through its own responses to 9/11, the U.S. government has run up $1.5 trillion dollars in war debt and turned its civil aviation system into a comically totalitarian nightmare straight out of the movie “Brazil.”

Since then, Al Qaeda’s rope-a-dope policy has repeatedly paid off. Every time an AQ agent attempts another airline attack, the TSA implements a cumbersome, inconvenient and incredibly stupid policy to prevent that same tactic from ever being used again. Hijacking with box cutters? Make everybody empty their pockets of potentially lethal weapons like nail clippers. Shoe bomber? Make everybody take off their shoes. Underwear bomber? Invasive and demeaning pat-downs and body scans.

Al Qaeda has explicitly declared its strategy is no longer to maximize casualties, but to maximize Return on Investment by provoking the U.S. to impose the maximum possible cost on itself through its own stupidity. An “unsuccessful” attack is plenty successful, just so long as Uncle Stupid comes through as expected. It’s only a matter of time till some smart AQ operative figures out he can shut down the U.S. aviation system with body cavity searches by smuggling explosives in his rectum.


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http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/29/with-enemies-like-this-who-needs-friends/

[L0oniX]

1. American idiots continue to play into this losing game. n/t