The two terrorist bomb incidents in the United Kingdom this past weekend show a further splintering of the al-Qaida command structure.
The targets -- the Glasgow Airport and a London dance club -- had low strategic value. And, as is shown in the airport security video tape, the Glasgow attack had very little chance at success.
The original fatwa delivered by Osama Bin Laden and his inner circle called for attacks against the west with maximum bloodshed. Intelligence analysts have compiled a list of targets that could result in a higher death toll than New York's World Trade Center. Without going into great details, there aren't too many.
A later, perhaps superseding, fatwa urged radical Islamic terrorists to go for the biggest bucks with their bang. That order stated that the measure of success would be the amount of economic disruption rather than body count. It was a worrying change because something like a suicide bomb in Grand Central Terminal with even a hint of radioactivity could shut down New York's business community for a longer period than occurred after the Sept. 11 attacks. Suddenly there were a lot more potential targets.
But the UK incidents over the weekend missed some simultaneous high profile somewhat porous targets including the concert for Princess Diana, an enormous Gay Pride parade, and Wimbledon tennis matches.
It would seem unlikely that British and US intelligence agencies would throw around the phrase "al-Qaida related" lightly. But this cell -- apparently based in a rented home in Scotland--seemed to lack the kind of command and control structure that has created Al Qaeda's successes.
The analysis of the devastating strikes against train lines in London and Madrid shows how a number of cells and operatives acted relatively independently until right before the attacks. We also see that inevitably the networks that executed the attack are quickly destroyed afterwards as police work their way back through the chain and arrest the related parties.
The self destruction consequence creates the need for careful strategic analysis: Terror cells take years to create. Does a proposed operation, if successful, create the strategic benefit to justify the time and expense needed to create the network?
Al-Qaida has historically conducted cost benefit analysis before carrying out operations. While I, a former Belfast man, need to be careful not to show any disrespect for Scotland, I will note that Glasgow Airport is not Heathrow. In other words it's the wrong scale to be a target of strategic value. Second, to repeat, the security measures were so obvious and more than adequate that even an amateur would have seen the folly of a Jeep bomb. So despite some nervous moments a terror cell let itself be wiped out on operations of little strategic potential and relatively little lack of success.
That said it is important to recognize the danger inherent in such knucklehead terror cells. If they had gotten a bomb through the security cordon at the Glasgow airport -- if for instance they had tried to walk it in rather than drive -- it could have been a homicide of seismic proportions. Think back to the chaos that ensued across the US and Europe following the out-of-the-blue ban on carry-on liquid and imagine what a real airport terminal bomb could have done.
US officials take heart in the fact that Islamic communities in America are, for the most part, newer and less mature than those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. There are an unknown number of sleeper cells here in our big cities, and training centers in sleepy suburban settings like the Catskill Mountains.
Whether this was a rogue operation or a miscue from the Mullahs won't be clear for some time. But while we can savor a knucklehead operation we must recall that even a dopey terrorist doesn't have to be right more than once.