Saturday, March 20, 2004

"I have to put off planning attacks until after tax season." This NYT Mag. article reads likes it was ripped from a movie script - half of me wants to say this is a hoax. An accountant in Long Beach is the leader of an armed resistance movement in Cambodia. The group has already had one unsuccessful coup attempt, but they're not giving up. The State Dept. condemns them, but they've got powerful friends in Congress. They're apparently not afraid of publicity.

The author of the article has no idea how much actual power these guys have in inside Cambodia; hence, it's not clear if they should be even be taken as seriously as the Iraqi National Congress was. Regardless, this story powerfully shows that if you have the money (equivalently, plenty of donors) and your government will just look the other way, then you can have your own foreign policy. This state of affairs is a blessing if you're trying to overthrow an odious regime. Unfortunately, it is also a blessing for groups with less noble objectives. Thus, if the War on Terror is a war against a tactic, then it prospects are about as good as those of the War on Drugs. Fortunately, the War on Terror is just a PC term for the war on Islamism.