Russia Calls It Terrorism

This report from Moscow cites Russian intelligence sources as attributing this week's simultaneous plane crashes to Islamic terrorists.

"According to our initial investigation, at least one of the air crashes ... came as a result of a terror attack," a spokesman for Russia's FSB intelligence service was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.

The spokesman, Sergei Ignachenko, announced that investigators had discovered traces of Hexogen, a powerful explosive with both military and civilian uses, in the wreckage of one of two planes that crashed almost simultaneously on Tuesday.

In addition to the fact that this proves how woeful Russia's security system is, it shows to me the futility of fighting a war on terror in a military fashion. It's the equivalent of playing that Wack-A-Mole game in an arcade- every time you knock down one terrorist, another few pop up. That's because the number of disenfranchised youth receptive to a hardline Islamic fundamentalist message grows with each piece of global policy. You never hear about the economic front of the war on terror, the idea that if you lift up poor people around the world, if you work with governments to close the madrassahs, if you give an alternative to theocracy that stresses individual potential and development, you narrow the pool of potential terrorists. It might rid the world of terrorism, but maybe it beats turning Mesopotamia into a river of blood. Whenever you have hopeless souls who want to change their world, you have the potential for terrorism. In my opinion, injecting some hope makes sense.