Stardate 20021213.0658

(On Screen): Stan from Oz sends me this article which contains a claim by the "spiritual leader" (whatever the hell that means) of Jemaah Islamiah that if Australia actually does try to preemptively attack Muslim terrorist groups in the region that Australia would be, in his words, "destroyed instantly". Stan writes:

Interesting to see how he would be able to carry out his threat to instantly destroy a nation, which would be pointless as he wants Australia to be an Islamic state within the next 100 years.

It seems to be an aspect of the culture of our enemies to make extremely grandiose threats (God willing) to their opponents, especially as a way of covering up weakness. They seem to think highly of bluff as a way of making a strong opponent back down, and the weaker they are the more they'll claim they can do.

I find myself wondering just who the actual audience for this kind of thing is. Does he really think that Australians will somehow decide to convert the nation to an Islamic Republic? I don't think even he's that far gone, though it's possible that the Islamist movement has somehow created its own equivalent of the Marxist dogma of historical inevitability (and therefore suffers from an equivalent frustration when their inevitable future victory shows not the slightest sign of arriving any time soon).

I think this is more intended for local consumption, to build him up in the eyes of the local Muslims. I have to wonder whether he might not be doing a Schröder. Is he standing up to big bad Australia primarily so as to try to build up his own reputation in the eyes of the other members of the movement?

But it may be that I'm too practical and too concentrated on the temporal. Another possibility is that he's expecting divine intervention. If so, instant destruction becomes completely plausible.

But we've been seeing this kind of bluff and bluster from our enemies in this war from the very beginning. The Taliban made truly amazing claims about the size and equipment and training of their core military in late September 2001, and about how if America tried to actually attack then the American soldiers would be as animals led to slaughter. Saddam's international rhetoric about the power and dedication of his armed force is part and parcel of the same thing. And the government of Syria just invoked, yet again, the spectre of the "Arab Street" in claiming that a US attack on Iraq would somehow or other cause even more terrorism.

While one would have to be an idiot to assume a perfect correlation here, it seems to be a useful heuristic now that the greater the threats coming from our enemies, the weaker the reality. When our enemies actually have the capabilities they claim, they use them. When they bluster, it's because they're weak. There were no threats before 9/11. There were no threats before Bali. And there has never actually been a major attack or a major danger revealed after any of their threats.