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Lagniappe:
The Coffee Messiah serves up a hot pot of Mail Art.

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AP

President Barack Obama, right, salutes as an Army carry team carries the transfer case containing the remains of Sgt. Dale R. Griffin of Terre Haute, Ind., during a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, Del., Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009.

(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

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Lagniappe: It appears I spelled Wessagusset wrong. D’oh!

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Meanwhile, down at the old Johnson Farm…

Lagniappe: Doghouse Riley Runs Down The Voodoo

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“Remember the Maine!” was the media-led cry once. It took a generation to forget it and several to refute the justifications for the Spanish-American War. Spain was not the likely direct instigator of that.

So how goes the call to “Never forget” the 9-11 attacks? Nobody of an age to witness that has forgotten it. But in the larger context of what lessons to draw from that memory, where are we now?

One needs to get past the media sensationalized stories to multiple sources of serious research for the important stuff.

There’s probably 1.5 billion Muslims in the world. One out of 50,000 could belong to Al Qaeda, creating an active force of 30,000 spread around the globe. That’s a very crude guess. Many experts estimate far fewer exist. Out of the 49,999 other Muslims, though, perhaps 5,000 share some sympathies with the active terrorists. Which means roughly 45,000 don’t. So 9 of 10 Muslims are not terrorists nor have any interest in seeing Al Qaeda succeed.

Relative to the total population of everyone on the planet, 60 million people are not Al Qaeda for every individual that is.

And what exactly IS Al Qaeda? Now it seems to be a very fragmented organization. Imagine a mop head with 100 strings. The overall central leadership might guide 10 of those strings. Other heads may guide 2 or 3, independent of each other. Nobody can quantify any of these numbers precisely but a key strategy to limit its power is to keep it fragmented so its multiple strings or clumps of strings remain far weaker.

In short, compared to any other war our country’s ever fought, our enemy this time is puny. Its weapons manufacturing capabilities are crude, it has no factories to provide transportation devices and its members try to stay hidden completely or moving in very small groups.

With the intent of terrifying many people by killing relatively few.

We can’t forget them but it’s ludicrous to overestimate the damage they can or might someday do.

They’d love to capture the existing weaponry of many nations or materials to construct weapons with. But almost always that means weapons or explosives that can kill a few dozen at most. Most of the time, you’re more likely to get hit by lightning than to die in a terror attack.

Two things scare our leaders about that threat. There’s the ‘what if’ factor that acknowledges the 1 in a million chance that they could obtain a deadlier weapon. But more important to our leaders, even in their more common small scale attacks, they often target political and capitalist leaders, or the wealthy and influential. While they do attack innocent civilians, that’s minimal relative to the innocent civilians that die at the hands of governments, including our own. Innocent populations face far more terror from governments - including democratic ones - than they do from small groups designated as ‘terror groups’.

9-11 reminded us of what can happen when there’s a convergence of problems. A small threat, by being ignored, with lax safeguards in one particular transportation industry, was able to destroy 3,000 lives and scare billions of people, with hundreds of millions willing to resort to all manner of brutalities in response.

Hundreds of thousands of innocents have died because they killed 3,000. That failed ‘cure’ proved worse than the malady it was trying to eradicate.

So now, we’re confronted with two ongoing wars - in Iraq and Afghanistan - and other stealthy intelligence or proxy wars elsewhere. What course makes sense to pursue after 8 years of studying that ‘malady’?

I’d say it’s important to work with every civilized nation to eradicate any terror group that targets innocent civilians. Most of that effort, though, requires the work of intelligence operatives, public safety personnel and limited numbers of specially trained military forces. Thus in Iraq, a US military withdrawal is the only wise course. That war-exhausted nation has little tolerance of violence spreaders and is now capable, with minimal outside assistance, of containment. Equally important, oversight must be provided to limit that government’s vengeance attacks that display any traits of genocide between religious factions there.

Afghanistan has to be analyzed from a significantly different vantage point. The bigger threat there is not Al Qaeda but the Taliban, though the lines are often blurred between the two. As extremist as it is, the Taliban provided that war-torn and anarchistic nation a degree of order that was welcomed by significant numbers of the population. So any alternate to Taliban control must equal or exceed the amount of civil order the Taliban achieved. Or it will fail.

That’s not what we’ve accomplished thus far. We’ve made progress in some places and lost ground in others. Continuing that course means guaranteed disaster. In place of what was done wrong, I now see greater international cooperation in the plan development, with our allies considered. I see plans that go well beyond military firepower into increasing the safety of communities. I see our government signaling clearly an unwillingness to prop up regimes that advance corruption to sustain their own power.

All of these are welcome changes. So is the Pakistani government’s recognition that both Al Qaeda and the Taliban can never be trusted in any form of alliance or detente, at this point in time. It is entirely conceivable that pressure on these two organizations, applied on all sides, can diminish their strength and future threat considerably.

So long as the goals are clearly and publicly stated, so long as legitimate governments are encouraged and growing, so long as communities are strengthened and made safe and so long as community members have active input that’s utilized effectively, there is sufficient value to the effort to continue it for a set period of time longer. When that time’s expired, objective analysis must be applied to weight the benefits and liabilities anew of any further military action.

The longterm plan is only a thin outline and should not be set policy. The short term reviews must hold the greater sway over any grand sweeping pronouncements.

In short, this very liberal writer opposes an immediate troop withdrawal. But I also oppose being compelled to keep our troops in the fray without the conditions I described. Perhaps short or intermediate term containment and diminishment of Al Qaeda and the Taliban is the best result possible. Our long term goal should never be stated as the destruction of all members of each. It should be to take out the violent members of societies that pose an ongoing threat to citizens.

Making that clear is critical. Because one can strategically insert and withdraw troops while maintaining that goal. Unstated, a subsequent withdrawal is an admission of stalemate or defeat. So in Iraq, decare the successes achieved and withdraw. In Afghanistan, continue the evolution and declaration of the strategy. But make it understood that withdrawal is a viable option to achieve maximum effectiveness, when the right time presents itself. Time limits are also essential, too, to avoid an ongoing quagmire.

Our ultimate goal should be a country safe for its citizens that can no longer export violence to other lands. We must be as much for them as we are for ourselves.