“What Can President Ali Abdullah Saleh Do About His Failed State?”

[Picture of a confused-looked Saleh with his right hand tucked behind the nape of his neck]

“Yeah, Keep Scratching Your Head.”

And then the attribution: “This ad is brought to you by A Cold Diss.”

That’s the twelfth PDF’d page of the third issue of Inspire, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s third issue. Inspire is a publication whose themes can pinball wildly. The first issue offered romantic stories of what young men can expect when they go to fight for religious-based conspiracy theories, with a sub-feature on how to “make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom.” The second issue potted up the first issue’s subordinate theme: this time, O American Believer, you shouldn’t go to Mirim Shah or Yemen to fight; you should stay home in the U.S. and pull off small-scale attacks, like shooting up a D.C. sandwich place or ramming a Ford F-150 up on a pedestrian-packed sidewalk.

The third is about bragging on last month’s printer-bomb plot. Much shorter than the others, and coming less than two months after the last issue, it’s a rush job. Its cover shows a UPS plane taking off in front of the legend $4,200 — in other words, the success of the plot isn’t in its ability to kill people, it’s in demonstrating the disproportionate economic and psychological impact that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula can cause even when it fails.

Guess what: that’s Terrorism 101. Make a virtue out of being on the short end of a strategic asymmetry. Now, the varying themes of Inspire reveals an objective confusion: AQAP doesn’t know where its next success will come from (Yemen? Inside the U.S.?), so it’ll plant the rhetorical seeds to portray the failed ones as advancing stages of a Cunning Plan. That’s why they call the cargo-bomb plot “Operation Hemorrhage.” Consider:

“We will continue with similar operations and we do not mind at all in this stage if they are intercepted. It is such a good bargain for us to spread fear amongst the enemy… our objective is not maximum kill but to cause a hemorrhage in the aviation industry, an industry that is so vital for trade and transportation between the U.S. and Europe.”

Success comes from provoking a U.S. overreaction. Like a TSA agent’s hand on a traveler’s genitals — can we stop saying “junk”? It’s juvenile — and a resultant national freakout. These people, simply put, are fucking with us, and hoping we’ll treat them as a Threat To Civilization. Were we to put that mission statement in context, we’d see that it’s commensurate with bin Laden’s 2004 “Bleed to Bankruptcy” manifesto — “We win by forcing the Americans to spend themselves into collapse in the name of fighting us” — except this time it’s actively dismissive about its need to kill people to succeed.

For the last year-plus, I’ve been arguing that such an argument is a desperate one, concealing al-Qaeda’s glass jaw — namely, it’s just not as potent an organization as it used to be. But I’m no longer sure how relevant that assessment is. The ad shows that AQAP understands the U.S. intimately well. It doesn’t just know the national mood. It understands America’s idioms, how to joke around and be casual in effortlessly familiar ways. I wouldn’t be surprised if AQAP members are about to wonder why the NFL insists on showing us another futile Lions game on Thanksgiving.* As a result, it can forecast American overreaction extremely well, and count on that overreaction to redound to its benefit.

Thomas Hegghammer wisely assesses that “global jihad requires worldly men” in the course of arguing that the U.S. really does need to take down Anwar al-Awlaki. He makes a fascinating-if-circumstantial case — I have to research further to determine if it’s a compelling one — that an Inspire article on Operation Hemorrhage bylined “The Head Of Foreign Operations” is penned by Awlaki. Hegghammer’s overall point is that killing or capturing the Foreign Operations branch of AQAP will be its own efficient way of neutralizing the organization’s actual potency.

That’s a compelling point in theory — except that it presumes the ease with which such a thing can occur. And it neglects that there has to be a correlative American meta-action that has to occur: Americans have to decide that we’re not going to be terrified. There is such a thing as vigilance in counterterrorism, an understanding that some small-scale plots against us are going to succeed, and we can withstand that sort of shit without sustaining open-ended wars or junking sections of the Constitution, all while mobilizing resources against larger-scale plots. That meta-move isn’t going to be sufficient to deal with al-Qaeda and bring this unhappy Post-9/11 Era to a satisfying conclusion. We have to kill and capture members of al-Qaeda and discredit the easily-discreditable conspiracy theory behind it. But if it’s not part of our response, at long last, A Cold Diss will continue to sting us far out of proportion to its actual offense.

* Update, 2:50 p.m.: In fairness, with two minutes to go in the 3rd, the Lions are punching above their weight in an exciting game.