All Mighty Al Qaeda?

By Jon Taplin
May 4, 2010, 12:40PM
Courtesy Of The Talking Points Memo

From the day after 9/11, the Neoconservative narrative has been to build up the awesome threat of Al Qaeda power, so as to substitute this new enemy for their old nemesis, the Soviet Union. Remember Bin Laden's Mountain fortress in Tora Bora? The need to continue to spend $1 trillion per year in fighting this mighty foe, depends on the American people buying into this fictional narrative.

So the capture of Faisal Shahzad, the bungling bomber of Broadway, must make Jonah Goldberg and the folks at The Corner a bit crazy. If this is the best that Al Qaeda can throw at us, they must be reaching the bottom of the would be terrorist barrel.

Shahzad allegedly bought the car for $1,300 about a week ago, responding to an Internet listing posted by the daughter of the person who bought the vehicle from the used car dealer. He gave the seller a fake name, but an e-mail from the transaction included a phone number that was from a disposable cellphone. Extrapolating from telephone records, authorities found Shahzad and confirmed his identity with the seller, the official said.

Obviously one cannot make light of any attempt to blow up a car in Times Square, but this guy was comically incompetent. The best he could find for detonators was a few M88 firecrackers and no one told him he had to open the valves on the propane tanks for them to ignite.

The Military Industrial Complex's hold on America's treasury sustained itself for forty years on this narrative written by Paul Nitze in NSC-68 in April of 1950.

The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world...The assault on free institutions is worldwide now, and in the context of the present polarization of world power, a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.

But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Neoconservatives and their MIC allies had no rationale for putting 58% of our discretionary spending into the military budget. But after 9/11 they merely substituted the words "Al Qaeda" for "Soviet Union" and assumed they could continue business as usual.

So far they have succeeded. But Al Qaeda is a lame excuse for our MIC profligacy and even Bob Gates, who runs the Pentagon can see through this sham, asking in a recent speech, "Do we really need 11 carrier strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?" He continued.

In his speech Monday, Mr. Gates said many of the Navy's current missions, including counterinsurgency and fighting piracy, didn't require particularly advanced ships or weaponry. "You don't necessarily need a billion-dollar guided missile destroyer to chase down and deal with a bunch of teenage pirates wielding AK-47s," he said.

Mr. Gates said the Navy was already so large there was no pressing need to spend tens of billions of dollars on new high-end ships and submarines. He noted the U.S. had more nuclear-powered submarines than the rest of the world combined and more sea-based missiles than the 20 other largest navies put together.

If Gates has accepted the new reality of Life After Empire, then what is left is to fight a rear guard action against all the Congressmen on the MIC Pork Barrel Express and the discredited Neocon ideologues still fighting the last war.