November 9, 2002 7:45 AM

Talk about unfair matchups

Robots more relentless than zealots

In the blue corner, scurrying like cockraoches, please give a big hand (and a swift kick in the ass) to AL-QAEDA!!

In the white corner, projecting it's power globally at a moment's notice... it's Shrub and the Hellfires!!!

Now, you'd think that, being in the middle of nowhere in a Third World backwater like Yemen, you'd be reasonably safe. Right? Wrong!! We can find your sorry ass, and blow it back into the 15th century, in real time, any time. Scary, no??

Of course, I have some profoundly mixed feelings about assassinations of any sort, but if these folks were affiliated with Al-Qaeda, well...let's just say that I'm a big believer in Karma. Apparently, the accounts of these poor saps were overdrawn.

A counter-terror war necessarily plays out in cruel shadows, where targets may be poorly defined and mistakes a certainty. It's a gray war, always on a slope toward darkness. The Predator attack in Yemen verges on assassination, echoing the U.S. Army Air Corps ambush of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943. US P-38s flew 415 miles to intercept a bomber carrying Yamamoto. Intercepting bombers is a military mission, but killing Yamamoto -- the architect of Pearl Harbor -- was the goal.

Technically, al-Harthi died in an air attack. His convoy can certainly be construed as a "command and control center," but that becomes a word game. The United States bans political assassinations, but the U.N. charter permits military defense against attack. Al-Qaida wages a war without limits. Its operatives define themselves as holy warriors. Every American, in al-Qaida's war doctrine, is a permissible target. Al-Qaida's own decentralized organization is part of its offensive and defensive strategy. Individual al-Qaida members -- its suicidal terrorists -- are indeed its military weapons. Bin Laden praised his "asymmetric" warriors of 9/11 for their "unstoppable" dedication.

But now a fearful symmetry appears. CIA's robots are more relentless than bin Laden's most committed zealots.

I have this terrible feeling that not only will the members of Al-Qaeda learn much about the awesome power the US military can project, so will the American public. Thankfully, though, at least it won't directed at us. It is, however, a fitting coda for a war in which there is no "battlefield", at least in the conventional sense. It's like watching a Tom Clancy novel come to life....

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 9, 2002 7:45 AM.

Protecting our vital, God-given Second Amendment rights was the previous entry in this blog.

"The Eagle" gets his wings clipped is the next entry in this blog.

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