Al-Qaeda Cannot Speak

Long War: Over the last few days the CIA has completed a drone blitz in the northern tribal regions of Pakistan. Langley had gone a long time with very little drone activity, then suddenly the skies over North and South Waziristan are filled with flying robotic wolf packs and the air screams of Hellfire missiles. And then the blitz is gone as quickly as it materialized. Dozens of Al-Qaeda chieftains were killed but the media is telling us that of special importance is the death of Al-Qaeda's second highest ranking leader, Al-Libi. More to the point, Al-Libi was the most media savvy leader within Al-Qaeda. Ever since Petraeus took over the CIA there has been an intense focus on using drones to kill media savvy bad guy leaders. Petraeus is reaching into Al-Qaeda and removing its voice box, its ability to communicate with the outside world. The CIA is rendering Al-Qaeda mute.

The CIA is somehow doing the same thing to the western media. In Yemen we don't know how well the Yemeni Army is doing except for this clue: the Houthi rebels in the far north of the country are trying to negotiate a peace deal with the Yemeni government. The Houthis are allies of Iran and have always batted the Yemeni government around like a cat playing with a mouse. But now they are scared of the mouse and want to sue for peace. This indicates that the Yemeni Army is chock-a-block full of Navy SEALs and Green Berets and has become a jihadist killing machine that the Houthis want to have no part of.

The CIA successes we are seeing in recent days involve manipulating the media and internet to allow the good guys to win the war of headlines in both the West and in the Islamic world. I am struck by the similarities between the mind of CIA Director Petraeus and the late North Vietnamese Dictator Ho Chi Minh. I've always considered Ho Chi Minh to be the greatest military mind in all of history. After North Vietnam had finished executing the Tet Offensive the entire Viet Cong Army was destroyed and the conventional North Vietnamese Army could have been knocked over with a feather. All America had to do was fight hard for just a few more months and the war would have been won. According to traditional military doctrine the Tet Offensive was a huge disaster.

But it was launched while Walter Cronkite was in country. In fact it was launched because Walter Cronkite was in country. Ho Chi Minh's goal was to get Walter Cronkite to tell the American people that Nixon was a liar and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Cronkite did just that and the entire USA believed him. Ho Chi Minh essentially wrote Cronkite's news script. Ho Chi Minh reached into the mind of the American voter and got him/her to surrender. Ho Chi Minh understood the western media and western voters much better than anybody else on the planet at that time. He was a kind of super-genius.

CIA Director Petraeus is also a genius of that caliber.