Myth of the Terrorist Mastermind

[thepapacy]

"It is hard to look at the horror of Paris and tell ourselves that it wasn’t exceptional, that it didn’t require a masterful plot to disrupt one of the world’s great cities—it just took weapons and commitment and luck, good and bad. But that’s the problem we’re really dealing with. When we turn the bad guy into a mastermind, we’re offering ourselves an oddly false comfort—a way to make sense of a world that is neither as full of evil geniuses as the TV version would have us believe, nor as comforting."

www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/the-myth-of-the-terrorist-mastermind-213367#ixzz3rlODLZpY



Pretty spot on. No, Abaaoud is not a "mastermind", and nothing about the Paris attacks was exceptional. These individual persons are not worthy of the obsessive engrossment they get - they are special in no way, and inflating the importance of some cave-dwelling fncks only serves to exacerbate inherent problems in American foreign policy and resource usage.

[Luchador El Guerrero Azteca]

I'm not sure of the desired impact of the article.

Was bin Laden not a mastermind that pulled off a pretty significant attack.

Both were impactful. The Paris attacks were the fourth in France in the past year. I think the cumulative effect has has a strategic effect on the French who up to note have been content to deal with the attacks after the fact instead of something more proactive. Treating these as police actions doesn't take into account of the terrorist network that throws it's foot soldiers into the fight and maintains the planning and leadership capabilities. The fact that there is a mastermind and some don't want to conflate their importance doesn't square with reality. They may not be bin Laden's or al Baghdadi's, but they are willing to kill scores of innocents over and over again, sacrificing their own people.

The most recent attacks were much more comprehensive. Just the logistics alone but adding the secrecy that they seemingly maintained, the numerous suicide vests which I don't think are ordered off the internet give credence to the bottom that this guy is growing in his ability and to minimize him with comments such as "took about as much imagination and skill as ordering a pizza" and comparing it as less than Sandy Hook demonstrates a significant lack of comprehensive thinking and analytic ability when looking at it from a macro perspective.

If the writer doesn't like the term, that's ok since it obviously connotes a strawman in his mind. Perhaps changing the media description to something more like ring-leader, planner, leader, etc will bring him back to reality.

Some times it seems like the local thug is just that, other times they are key cogs. Who knows? Regardless, the media coverage and government statements have been less than informative but this article strikes me as more political than analytic.

[AztecWilliam]

It's immaterial what one calls the leader of a gang that commits a serious crime. The damage is the same whether the top dog has an IQ of 140 or 90. The main thing to realize is that people of only modest intelligence can kill a lot of people and blow up a lot of buildings. What is important is how much resolve and energy a terrorist has.

AzWm

[aztecwin]

Mastermind or Dunce? Does it matter? Abdelhamid Abaaoud is now in a thousand pieces identified only by DNA after the French raid.