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I would not bank on all "cells" being "100% combat effective". Even American soldiers go AWOL.

Very good point. It's even possible that some of the recruited fighters were not totally honest with AQ in volunteering to come over here for Jihad, and in fact only wanted to get here and disappear into a better life. Maybe.

a few thousand fighters nationwide (at the extreme) who have difficulty coordinating their actions and are easily mopped up once they present themselves.

I have to agree with the problems of coordinating attacks especially since the USA is a heckuva lot bigger than the Sunni Triangle. That's why I wouldn't be surprised at multiple handlers each isolated to their own set of missions in different regions of the country. If they decided to stagger their attacks, they could sustain their ops for perhaps a year or so.

Creating chaos and killing lots of civilians is not the same as being militarily effective.

Exactly! They have a choice, go for the high body count and propaganda values to "show" the world and yada yada yada. OR Go for the kill shot and that means maybe foregoing civilian casualties in favor of primarily infrastructure and economic shots. Power grid. Petroleum. Financial. Food Distribution. Transportation.

And the more they get "involved" they more the risk exposure (and are resigned to that fact). So again, why? There must be something "special" about what is underway.

You decide: Kill a lot of Americans for propaganda value or go for the "kill" shot? If they can't hope to sustain guerilla operations long enough to take advantage of chaotic conditions (conditions caused by what?) then what is so "special" about this operation?

Wait until volunteers line up in waves to take revenge for the WMD strikes and we all beg for a draft. We'll send *millions* of troops to take apart the region village by village, town by town, city by city.

We won't launch any nukes of our own, we won't risk irradiating the oil fields or their vital iol infrastructure. Therefore our "tot" involvement in the ME (short term) may be what they are hoping for to force the rest of that community of nations into joining into global Jihad and try taking out Israel as well.

"Very good point. It's even possible that some of the recruited fighters were not totally honest with AQ in volunteering to come over here for Jihad, and in fact only wanted to get here and disappear into a better life. Maybe."

Offset that with local recruiting.

"Exactly! They have a choice, go for the high body count and propaganda values to "show" the world and yada yada yada. OR Go for the kill shot and that means maybe foregoing civilian casualties in favor of primarily infrastructure and economic shots. Power grid. Petroleum. Financial. Food Distribution. Transportation."

Both together wouldn't be enough to bring us to our knees, militarily anyway. The bullets still exist. They are either exaggerating, or they have a big brother or two in the wings. Our allies would have to be hit hard at the same time. Nato countries, too. Our most faithful allies are the Australians. They may have their own fight with Indonesia while all this is going on.

Just rambling.

"You decide: Kill a lot of Americans for propaganda value or go for the "kill" shot? If they can't hope to sustain guerilla operations long enough to take advantage of chaotic conditions (conditions caused by what?) then what is so "special" about this operation?"

WMD

"We won't launch any nukes of our own, we won't risk irradiating the oil fields or their vital iol infrastructure. Therefore our "tot" involvement in the ME (short term) may be what they are hoping for to force the rest of that community of nations into joining into global Jihad and try taking out Israel as well."

At some level of civilian casualties, our response will lapse into "irrationality". I am not saying what *should happen* only what *could happen*. I don't think either we nor they understand how badly this could escalate. Collateral damage at some point (infrastructure or more important enemy civilians) would make any victory pyrhhic.

I think you hit their motivations on the head. They are hijacking the region and willing to sacrifice their own innocent civilians if they can set off a global jihad by provoking an "insanely" violent reaction from us with WMD mass casualties.

The only way to pull the 99.9% (literally) of the Muslim world that is not actively fighting jihad (.1% of the over one billion Muslims equates to over one million fighters, and that is still ten times the actual number) is to provoke the enemy (us) to do something so unprecedentedly violent that it validates their ideology (that we indeed are bent on a holy war and conquest of the Mideast).

The only way to bait us into doing something horrific enough the bring the entire Islamic world off the sidelines is to force us to fight their type of war (slaughtering civilians). A WMD-war does not permit precision targeting and most of the damage (if not all) is collateral.

This is all about WMD. It is their Holy Grail.