> What is the clear connection between Zarquawi, Bin Laden, the Chehens,
> Moslems in Cape Town and Sudan and Zanzibar, Arab radicals in Paraguay
> and Ecuador, Moslems in the Balkans and China, the PLO etc. - the point
> is that there isn't and the 'war on terror' is predicated on the
> assumption that this is one large integrated entity.
Terrorism scholars and policy makers, from the RAND Corporation's Arquilla and Ronfeldt to those that publish in journals like Parameters
from the US Army War College don't postulate such. Instead they see a "network if networks, " decentralized in a cellular structure, (the Madrid train bombings, for example were not ordered by a "Terrorist Int'l.", only far rightists like Yossef Bodansky would say so). http://www.google.com/search?q=Al++Qaeda+%22network+of+networks http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0FQP/is_4646_132/ai_105656700 (John Gray on al-Qaeda and Burke.) http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=400&issue_id=2909&article_id=23535 (Conservative think tank focusing on Russia, interview w/ Burke.) http://www.boomerangbooks.com/reviews/al_qaeda.htm Book Review Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror by Jason Burke. The basic premise of Burke’s analysis is to question whether Al Qa’eda was and is a coherent organisation or a network of networks controlling and directing trans-national Islamist terrorism. He concludes that Al Qa’eda usually operated at the margins of the real threat of Islamic terrorism. Many of the acts attributed to Al Qa’eda, such as the East Africa bombing in 1998 or the ‘Millenium Plot‘ in 1999, were conceived and attempted by individuals or groups outside the aegis of the inner hardcore grouping of Al Qa’eda. Osama Bin Laden was and is by no means the master controller. Consequently the jihadi-salafist Al Qa’eda worldview acts more as a formula than a network, a function not an entity. ‘Islamic militancy is a broad based, multivalent, diverse movement. It goes far beyond the deeds or words of one man or one small organisation’. There is no ‘network of networks’ nor are there ‘tentacles of terror’, as each applies a degree of central control that Burke believes simply does not exist.
-- Michael Pugliese