Babbling Idiots?

I've been watching events unfold in the War Against Terrorism after September 11th with some puzzlement. Why are we, easily the most powerful country this planet has ever seen, having so much trouble with these terrorists? 

I mean, look at it this way, the NSA literally monitors every single communication outside of the United States. All of them. Every phone call, every cable, every internet packet, everything. In fact, the NSA's biggest problem is there is so much data that it cannot store it all. On top of that, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have satellites and unmanned drones and spies and just about everything else that you can imagine at their disposal, combined with an almost unlimited budget and the resources of the greatest industrial giant this planet has ever seen.

And with all of that power, we cannot catch a few terrorists.

Conventional wisdom says, well, the terrorists are very intelligent, motivated and talented. They would have to be, after all, to pull of something the magnitude of the attacks on September 11th, wouldn't they? Weren't these attacks carefully planned, brilliantly executed and strategically sound? At least, that's what many people, all over the planet, would like to think.

On the surface, it does seem like these attacks were well coordinated and well planned. Two years (at least) of effort cumulated in a single day of terror, a hammer-strike directly at the heart of the hated America.

Two years of effort? TWO YEARS of planning? For one attack? What was so difficult that this much time needed to be put into this thing? How much planning does it take to hijack a few planes? What vast intelligence is required to fly those planes into the biggest buildings in the world?

I submit that these attacks were NOT well planned, they were not well coordinated and they almost failed. 

I submit that the reason why the civilized world is having so much trouble finding and eliminating these terrorists is because we are vastly overestimating them. I submit that our intelligence gathering efforts and war planning is practically crippled simply because we believe that the enemy has power, has strength and has more than two brain cells firing. 

Why would we do that? One reason is simple; it's difficult to believe that a weak enemy could do so much damage. It's an incredible leap of the imagination to even suspect that people with no strength and no power could pull off the worst, most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor.

But that's exactly what happened. The plain and simple truth of the matter is the attackers on September 11th succeeded by accident and because we simply were not watching. They succeeded because Americans do not want to believe that such evil could exist; as a group we simply have trouble seeing evil at all. In other words, the attackers succeeded because they are so evil, so despicable, so horrible that good cannot confront it without a severe effort.

After all, that's how Adolph and his pals in World War II got as powerful as they did. The good people on the planet just could not believe that men could be so evil as that group. In fact, that is the main tool of evil - disbelief and an unwillingness of good to confront it.

What is the evidence? To begin with, the attacks were not well coordinated by any means. There was a clear twenty minutes between each strike on the towers, almost enough time to get interceptors up in the air (if we had been prepared, it's probable that the second plane would have been shot down before striking the building). The forth plane was so late that the passengers figured out what was going on and put a stop to whatever the hijackers had in mind. (The hijackers were so incompetent that they didn't even confiscate the passengers cell phones.) If the coordination had been better, the forth attack would have succeeded.

The Pentagon strike hit the wrong side of the building. You see, the building was being renovated, and the terrorists hit the NEW side, not the old side. This part of the building was reinforced and used better construction techniques. Had the hijackers hit the other side, well, the loss of life and destruction would have been far worse.

On top of that, the supposedly well-trained terrorist pilots almost missed their target! Flight 175 hit the south tower and ALMOST MISSED. The plane hit one corner of the building - a hundred feet more and it would have missed entirely.

Interviews with the instructors at the flight schools show a fascinating story of failures, of students who were among the worst pilots ever seen. 

In the days and weeks following the attacks, events prove how stupid these people actually were. I remember the news reports of the Taliban proclaiming they would resist us to the death. We would never take Afghanistan, they said. And these people were actually considered by the news media to be intelligent. (Well, considering the state of the news media in the US perhaps it's not so difficult to understand after all.) For God's sake, the United States took out Iraq in 1991 without even really trying very hard. We took Panama in a few days and destroyed Yugoslavia without working up a sweat. And these Taliban thought we couldn't swat their silly little country like a gnat?

Something that's very important to understand is this: terrorism and suicide attacks are not done by rational, civilized people. This type of behavior is the result of desperation, of hopelessness and despair. The Japanese in World War II with their Kamikaze are a prime example. These were not rational attacks - these were a desperate attempt to fend of an enemy that could not be defeated.

It's been argued that Ben Ladin and his thugs have justifiable grievances against the United States. The Arab countries are being abused by the big, bad country for their oil (undoubtedly true), and thus they are fully justified in killing thousands of innocents. 

Yet the situation in South Africa was far, far worse than anything the Arabs have had to survive. In fact, it could be argued that the situation in South Africa twenty to thirty years ago is the worst that has existed on the planet to date. And yet, a man named Nelson Mandela was able to change the situation without violence - to pull himself up from being a prisoner for decades to the president of the country. On another continent, a man named Gandhi was able to change his country forever without harming anyone. There can be little doubt that the situation was far worse than that claimed by the terrorists. And yet, change was made without firing a shot or killing innocent civilians.

In conclusion, I submit that these terrorists are conditioned by years of pain and suffering at the hands of their own fellows (so-called training camps which are actually used to condition people, changing them from slightly irrational beings into evil monsters). They are NOT rational beings by any means, and they are not intelligent. In fact, I would submit that for every successful attack, hundreds fail due to the incompetence and idiocy of the "people" involved.

I believe we are having a difficult time finding and destroying these terrorists for the same reason the police have trouble with heavy drug addicts and criminals - the police assume a certain level of intelligence and rationality that actually does not exist. 

The September 11th terrorists were not rational beings. They were not "good" people. They did not have any "good" intentions. They were not intelligent and their attack succeeded more by accident than by design. I strongly suspect if we stop trying to be rational and instead look at these beings for what they are, then we will succeed all the better. 

In other words, think of these terrorists as if they have been inmates of an insane asylum. I strongly believe this would give us a stronger reality on how they think and what they want to accomplish.