If it is true that the greatness of men and nations is measured in the greatness of their enemies, what are we to say of the numberless but talentless hoard sent against us? Yes, truly we can say “sent” now. This week’s Jihadi Jihaderson as much as the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber and the now quaintly convicted Shoe Bomber has demonstrated fandom if not straight employment beneath the ragged parasol of International Jihad. And it is easy and quite hilarious to wonder, is this all they’ve got? The not so hilarious but plain answer is, yes. Yes it is.

For now.

The Christmas Bomber earned his position as shahid as a simple mule. His explosive undergarments were quite sophisticated but he played no role in their conception or construction. His was simply to do and die. He failed in both regards, surviving but with serious genital burns. Perhaps now we have found something to discourage the suicide bomber… fireboarding we might call it, as a compromise to those who object to waterboarding.

Richard Reid, the Shoe Bomber was likewise a dud as a suicide soldier. It is also a clinical fact that he is deranged. While the explosives in the shoes were quite real and of a decent weight there was no fancy cell phone trigger or anything like that and Mr. Reid did not stop in the airport to purchase a Bic lighter or even roll into an airport bar to grab a last meal and a box of stick matches. No, he relied on the book type known as “gopher matches” since you almost always have to go for another, and so was unable to light the two inches of cannon fuze extending from each Reebok.

One may call this incompetence from the one end or luck on the other but what is plain is that the functional components necessary for devastating mass attacks, the infrastructure we might say, is alive, well and expanding. The final component is necessary and can sometimes be sufficient by itself. That final cog of course is an actual agent; someone willing and competent to actually do the deed. In the Times Square Bomber the mullahs got half of half this equation.

To the bosses in Damascus or Islamabad, this bum’s first big failure was to even conceive a timer. Brother YOU are the timer; also the detonator and may even provide some of the injurious agents if you are HIV positive or suffer hepatitis, as have so many of the human bombs detonated in Israel. But this guy just didn’t have that much martyr in him. Killing, okay… but dying? Mmm, no thanks. You first, Omar. So even in the jihadi community, this puke (who shall remain unnamed) was a washout before he started.

It’s humorous, isn’t it? It’s like the Benny Hill of al Jazeera, all these bumbling, ill-clothed specimens… some citizens some straight out of the goat pens… at odd moments they may blow up or ignite or just smolder. Or they may be arrested for some lame traffic beef that they try to explain in charming accents and then be found to be isolating ricin in their carports or some such but they only ever hurt themselves and then in comical fashion. The mad lead-spitting psychiatrist of Fort Hood does not fit here due to his level of success in slaying unbelievers but we don’t hear much of him, do we? No, the producers know that if you are doing comedy, stick to comedy. And in politics if you are doing tragedy, switch to comedy. But sometimes even a free hand in the editing room is not sufficient. Some things just aren’t funny, dude and ideological reasons aside there are serious reasons that the failed Times Square Bombing is one of them.

Unklike his fellows, the TSB constructed his device personally. To hear the press accounts it is a shambolic pile of hardware store clearance items, which it is, but whether it is merely  that we must make sure. And naturally it is being examined seriously by the pros and no doubt the declarations of Jihadi Jihaderson’s incompetence are part of a purposeful PR strategy but if all that separates us from immolation on our county squares is the ignorance and stupidity of the perpetrators then to these deficits must attention be paid.
The presence of commercial fireworks in the bomb is a central laughing point. Nearly no correspondent mentions their would-be role as detonators, not instruments of damage. An M-80 doesn’t sound too deadly but read on. The propane tanks are pressurized and highly energetic, as testified by a deadly home explosion just weeks ago, but their mundane nature makes them seem relatively innocuous, more so than bricks of C-4 or hot-dog strung dynamite anyhow, and again it is claimed that they indicate an amateur operation. The most damning inadequacy is the presence of “the wrong kind” of fertilizer. Anyone who remembers the OKC bombing knows that even the right sort of fertilizer, ammonium nitrate, needs careful stewardship to efficiently explode and Miracl-Gro never will.
The conclusion in some quarters is that this catalog of basic ignorance makes this whole event laughable. The Christmas and Shoe Bombers and some other lesser lights aid Barack Obama as much as Jay Leno by manifesting risible, even pathetic figures that are sometimes, disgustingly, seen as sympathetic. But the inventory of wet squibs in the SUV are not so unlikely a WMD as the press coverage implies. While poorly realized, what the bomber was attempting was something fairly new. We have long known of Improvised Explosive Devices, pipe bombs yes, but think more of an old artillery shell wired to a car battery . These killers of many a kaffir are improved by precision milled shaped-charges into Explosively Formed Penetrators that may punch a hole even in modern armor or spread a hot curtain of metal in a lethal circumference. The Times Square device, though a dud, was an attempt at an ugly firecracker first conceived by the Russians and a bit older than the M-16: The Improvised Enhanced Blast Munition.

 
Also known as thermobaric munitions due to their nasty mechanics, these gadgets attempt to reproduce the devastating LOW speed but WIDE impact explosions that occur with some regularity in grain silos and not long ago a sugar warehouse in Savannah. The infamous Daisy Cutter is an Enhanced Blast Munition. A bit of googling will inform you of the peculiar and vicious effects of this hellish thing that in a flash exposes one to a near vacuum, generates tremendous pressure and incidentally consumes all the oxygen for a couple city blocks. An EBM married to an RPG style rocket turned the tide for the Russians in Afghanistan, but then it was turned back when a freight car of the so-called Satan Sticks fell into the hands of the turbaned locals.
What all these treacherous bits of ordinance have in common is that, while a conventional explosive carries all its combustion components within, the EBM uses available atmosphere making it more powerful, incendiary and far more efficient against soft targets like bunnie rabbits and your auntie.
For those who can stomach it, the following is the best case scenarious envisioned by allah, according to this puke:
The fertilizer would have been properly mixed with some igniting agent and placed around the propane tanks. The valves on said tanks would have been open, at least partially. The gas would have filled the car mixed with atmospheric oxygen. As far as the press can be told, the detonator was a simple ignition source linked to an alarm clock, improperly set and of course a willing martyr would have made this issue moot. If the igniter had clicked by command or timer or remote, the vehicle would have had a pretty nasty explosion within, opening it like a tuna can but that is just the beginning. The initial explosion would have ruptured the tanks and also spread the fertilizer preparation into a cloud. The fireworks were intended to shoot out and detonate said cloud causing a low (in explosive terms) overpressure wave that would crush folks beneath it like bugs. Those at greater distance would suffer something like a blunt force trauma to their entire bodies, rupturing organs and breaking bones. But this is just the positive blast. The great heat generated by the dust cloud explosion quickly dissipates causing the atmosphere to rush back in to the void. This has effects similar to spacewalking without a space suit on the ears, eyes and lungs. And then there is an incendiary effect from fuels that were not exploded but only ignited.
None of this, thankfully, occurred. Much of it was quite unlikely to occur given the materials and assembly and almost certainly, unless this is a simple probing attack, the bomber’s knowledge of EBMs came from a very brief exposure to true expertise or serious immersion in faked expertise. Which is more likely or favorable is unclear but what we can know for certain is that these troglodytes are not so idiotic as their hygiene habits imply. If they are experimenting with Improvised Enhanced Blast Munitions this represents a serious and detrimental development. Surely, sometimes things are better left unsaid by the authorities… public panic and all that, but let us who claim and aspire to be the better informed and the candidly serious players in our political gene pool, address these things forthrightly and admit that if we rely on the stupidity of our foes we count on a wasting asset. Likewise if we rely, solely, on the luck of our leaders, this also is, to say the least, finite.

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