Lessons of Boston: What the fanatics took away. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, April 23, 2013.
Did the Brothers Tsarnaev Fail? By Pat Buchanan. Real Clear Politics, April 23, 2013.
Lessons from Boston and Chechnya. By Dennis Prager. Real Clear Politics, April 23, 2013.
The Real Boston Story. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, April 23, 2013.
Did We Win or Lose the Battle of Boston? By George Rasley. ConservativeHQ, April 23, 2013.
Peters:
The
superb work of our law-enforcement officials in the wake of the Boston Marathon
bombing ignited a blaze of self-congratulation that obscured the event’s
implications.
Yeah,
we killed one fanatic and nabbed the other. But our dysfunctional system
couldn’t prevent this latest Boston
Massacre.
That
carnage was a dirt-cheap terrorist triumph. Fanatics will take its lessons to
their shriveled jihadi hearts:
Lesson No. 1: Two amateur terrorists can
paralyze a major American city for days. The Tsarnaev punks generated
global headlines, ran up millions in government expenses, punished a major
metro-area economy and disrupted society. And now we’ve got a costly civilian
trial to come for the surviving brother — with more headlines to inspire
copycats.
We’re
relieved that the two young terrorists were “brought to justice” and delude
ourselves that we “won.” Uh-uh. At the cost of two expendable young thugs, a
few guns and a couple of homemade bombs, radical Islam generated a bloodbath
that created genuine terror on our soil.
Al
Qaeda and its ilk have long used suicide bombers and doomed assassins to
rupture societies in the Middle East, killing tens of thousands of Muslims (a
fact we fail to exploit in our lame “information campaigns”). Now the Islamists
are in the export business. Expect more of these low-cost, high-return missions
within our borders.
Lesson No. 2: The best weapons against
targets in the US are disaffected legal immigrants or radicalized native-born
converts to jihad. Political correctness — a pathetic fanaticism
of our own — and legal paralysis make it virtually impossible to stop legal
residents such as the Tsarnaev brothers before they commit a crime.
The FBI
questioned Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother, after the Russians asked us to
look into his radicalization. (Moscow’s murky role is another story.) It
appears that the agents asked him, Are
you a Muslim fanatic? To which he replied, No. End of investigation.
Get
inside the red-white-and-blue tent legally, and you, the terrorist, have a
license to kill.
Lesson No. 3: Our immigration system is one
of terrorism’s best allies. Related to the last point, this is a case
of just how idiotic a politically correct bureaucracy can be. The father of the
Tsarnaev punks only had to declare himself an asylum-seeker afraid for his life
in the Russian Federation and our consular officials fell all over themselves
to get him to America.
Nobody
cared that “fearful” Pops retained his Russian citizenship and passport, then
voluntarily returned to Daghestan, a jihad-roiled Russian province, to live. Or
that his elder son’s dream vacation appears to have been a terrorist training
session.
If
you’re a highly educated, ambitious West European who wants to become an
American, your chances are near zero. If you’re a radical America-hater from a
hostile region, all you have to do is shout that you’re a political refugee and
we’ll give you residency and benefits.
There’s
no reason that anyone from Chechnya should be granted a US visa. It’s a
gangster mini-state (within the Russian Federation) at war with home-grown
Islamists. There are no good guys. Chechnya’s sole export besides terror,
Chechen mafiosi, make Mexican drug cartels look like Franciscans. And some of
the cruelest jihadis our troops faced in Iraq and elsewhere were Chechens who
joined al Qaeda.
Lesson No. 4: The more open a society, the
more targets it presents. We all failed to see the obvious.
Obsessing about attacks on the Super Bowl and other facilities-bound events, we
missed the appeal of public displays, such as marathons, as targets: 26 miles
of vulnerability, tens of thousands of (mixed sex, scantily clad!) runners and
hundreds of thousands of spectators.
We’ve
done a good job of protecting hard targets, from stadiums to government offices.
But that only deflected the fanatics toward softer targets whose very
randomness creates authentic terror. And don’t underestimate the appeal of
butchering female athletes, who are almost as terrifying to Islamists as girls
in bikinis.
You
won’t hear that last point from our politically correct authorities or our
“experts.” But Freud has more to tell us about Islamist terrorists than any
think tank. My suggestion to the feds, if they want to understand why Tamerlan
Tsarnaev turned to jihad? Check out this wife-beater’s love life. Scratch a
terrorist, find a lonesome perv.
Last
week, Islamist fanaticism scored a resounding victory on the cheap. The
effectiveness of our manhunt didn’t change that.
