Assessing the threat

Via our pal 42, I found this ed in The Week:

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Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the al Qaida threat, said Youssef Ibrahim in The New York Sun. The organization may be capable of occasional bombing strikes on Western civilians, but it's a small, grubby group of fanatics blinded by its own ideology. These few thousand men do not pose "an existential danger to the world." When they fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, they "lost every battle they ever engaged in." Their previous bombings - the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000 - were "more pugnacious than crippling." Only the grotesquely successful assault of Sept. 11 made al Qaida seem like a menace to Western civilization itself. It's now clear that it is not, said John Tierney in The New York Times. Compared with the Nazis, who had the world's most powerful military, and the Soviet Union, which had the ability to incinerate every square inch of the U.S. in a matter of minutes, al Qaida's terrorists are "a minor problem." It may sound flip to say so, but the fact is that more Americans have died in bathtubs over the past five years than have died in al Qaida attacks. [my ems]

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The current administration in the United States is a far bigger threat to Western Civilization that Osama ever was. Al Qaeda is a gift from Allah to the Chimp and the military-industrial complex.