It's Time to Stop Talking About Terrorists As If They're Diabolical Geniuses
It's Time to Stop Talking About Terrorists As If They're Diabolical Geniuses by Gregory D. Johnsen - The Atlantic
… He has been called al-Qaeda’s “master bombmaker” and an “evil genius.” He is the reason we pass through body scanners at the airport, and why laptops were banned on several international flights last year. In 2013, Time magazine labeled him “the most dangerous terrorist in the world,” and this week the United States said it is confident that he is now dead. But Asiri has been declared dead before. In 2011, the United States said that he was killed in the same drone strike that took out Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American radical imam; in 2013 he was said to be seriously wounded, and in 2014 he was dead again…
… That is the problem with personalizing the war against groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State: We inflate our enemies into larger-than-life villains who reflect our fears rather than their own capabilities. We did it with Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, and now we are doing it with Ibrahim al-Asiri. By talking about them as masterminds with irreplaceable skillsets, the United States projects the mistaken impression that if they could only be killed, the terrorist threat would be greatly reduced. Bin Laden and Awlaki are dead. Yet al-Qaeda lives on.
We will likely know soon whether or not Asiri is dead for sure this time. But regardless of the answer, al-Qaeda will survive and the threat will persist. The United States isn’t phasing out body scanners, and sometime soon another threat will add yet another item to the list of those passengers are banned from taking onboard.
For nearly 17 years we have talked about terrorists as if they were superhuman, the “worst of the worst,” diabolical geniuses capable of defeating all our defenses from distant caves. It is well past time for us to talk about them as they are. In Asiri’s case that is as a college dropout who tried to attack America and its allies multiple times, but failed each time. His successors, whenever they appear, will try again.