15 January 2010

Well, This Has Fail Written All Over It

It appears that Yemen, under US pressure is looking to arrest Anwar al Awlaki, the Imam tied to both the Fort Hood shooter and the Underoos bomber. The problem here is that, absent any information that he's actually involved with al Qaeda, he's just someone who speaks in support of them. That makes him a bad person, but we are in the process of making him a martyr, and the counter-terrorism forces will use his sermons, convincing Muslims even more thoroughly that this is a war on Islam. Really, I think that anyone involved in counter-terrorism should read Wasp by Eric Frank Russell, or at least the first chapter:
The title of Wasp comes from the idea that the main character's actions and central purpose mimic that particular insect; just as something as small as a wasp can terrorize a much larger creature in control of a car to the point of causing a crash and killing the occupants, so the defeat of an enemy may be wrought via psychological and guerrilla warfare by a small, but deadly, protagonist in their midst.
The point is, pedants arguing about anaphylaxis notwithstanding, is that the wasp cannot kill us, it can only induce us to kill ourselves.

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