HEADS WILL ROLL

That headline, while a pun, isn't meant to be funny. The beheading of American civilian Nick Berg in Iraq is an atrocity, and tragically it probably won't be the last of its kind during the "War on Terror" as long as the Bush administration governs.

Salon points out that a few thoughtful right-wingers think some heads should roll in the Bush administration for its failed foreign policies.

And don't forget that "...long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger."

BuzzFlash interviews terrorism expert Jessica Stern:

After reading "Terror in the Name of God," it becomes even clearer to us that Bush's only dubious accomplishment is the implementation of policies that create more terrorism, not less. That's because, based on Stern's analysis of religious-based terrorism, Bush responds to terrorism exactly as terrorists would want him to, thus playing into their hands.
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BuzzFlash: One of the key things that comes across in your book is the complexity of terrorism. The war on terrorism is being waged almost purely as a military campaign. Yet the way your book is structured indicates the grievances that give rise to a religious terrorist are complex and varying -- humiliation, demographics, history, territory. Any individual terrorist may have one or a combination of these. And then you say, on page 283 of your book, that the terrorism we are fighting is a seductive idea, not a military target. Terrorist leaders tell young men that the reason they feel humiliated personally and culturally is that international institutions are exploiting them, and that in many cases, although not exclusively, the enemy is modernity.

Given that it’s a seductive idea and not a military target, how do we respond? You do come to some suggestions at the end, but currently we’re being told by the Bush administration that it’s virtually purely a military response.

Jessica Stern: I don’t mean that there aren’t some military targets. There are some important military targets. For example, I think it was important to destroy al-Qaeda’s headquarters in Afghanistan. But that is just a short-term measure. Over the long term, what should trouble us more than anything is what is coming out of the Pew polls, showing that the level of antipathy to the United States is continuing to go up, especially after the Iraq war, especially in the Islamic world, but not exclusively in the Islamic world.

In one of the Pew polls -- not the last one, but I think the one before that -- there was a finding that a number of Islamic-majority countries, more people have confidence in bin Laden as a leader than in President Bush. The word was confidence, not faith. To me, that is an extraordinary vulnerability. If I were advising the President, I would see that as a very significant threat to U.S. national security because, as Mao said, terrorists swim in a sea of ordinary people who are their supporters and provide logistic support. Terrorists need that support. And when there’s so much hatred toward the United States, they’re going to get that support. And they’re going to be more successful also at recruiting.

So I think what’s most important is that we try to undermine the false idea that the al-Qaeda movement is promoting that the U.S. is out to humiliate the Islamic world. There’s no military target there; indeed, military responses largely feed into that false idea. When military action is necessary, I think it ought to be as covert as possible. And I think we ought to be focusing on penetrating the groups more than killing operatives.