Ex-FBI boss: Al-Qaida the McDonald’s of terror

"Hey Osama, can I get some fries with that?"

No, the world's most infamous terrorist mastermind has not taken refuge in a McDonald's kitchen. But the Golden Arches' business model is remarkably similar to al-Qaida's, and wiping out the terror organization may be even more difficult than putting McDonald's out of business, according to Steven Pomerantz.

"People look at al-Qaida as if it were General Motors, an organization with a well-defined hierarchy and structure, and if we only break that, we're home-free. But, in reality, it's more like McDonald's. It's a franchise," said Pomerantz, the former assistant director of the FBI and, before that, its chief of counterterrorism.

"There's a headquarters somewhere, and the local guy may rely on them for some things. But he knows what he's got to do. He's there to sell hamburgers, no one needs to tell him that. He knows what God has called upon him to do."

So the same diversified "corporate model" that may make it difficult for al-Qaida to mount a second large-scale attack on America makes it nearly impossible to wipe them out completely.

Pomerantz, now the American Jewish Committee's Washington, D.C.-based senior adviser on counterterrorism, was in San Francisco last week for a pair of speeches sponsored by the AJCommittee.

When asked what aspect of counterterrorism the public least understands, the Bronx-born Pomerantz answers in a New York nanosecond: It's the intelligence, stupid.

"Everyone presupposes that an attack is at its final stage. The guy at the airport manning that screen is only useful at the end of the process. That means we failed to detect that [the terrorists] were here and plotting," said Pomerantz.

"If you're hoping this guy at the checkpoint is going to stop the whole thing, then that's a failure."

The second aspect of counterterrorism eluding the general public is the specter of terror-sponsoring states, he said. You can chase bands of terrorists from one end of the map to the other, but as long as they have a safe haven — in, let's say, Iran — "our chances of success will be minimal."

And the third aspect is something of war of semantics. You can't fight a war on terrorism — terrorism is just a tactic. You can fight a war on radical Islamists, and, 10 years removed from public service, Pomerantz is willing to violate the norms of political correctness and flatly say so.

"What I think that people don't understand is that this [radical Islamist] ideology metastasized in Afghanistan. They had the war against the Soviets, there was the rise of the mujahadin, and all these people spread out across Europe, Asia and America and brought with them the idea of jihad," said the 63-year-old Pomerantz.

"There was a sense of strength; after all, they defeated the second-greatest power in the world and believed they had the ability to do that again."

Today's Islamic terrorists are much more lethal and nihilistic than what one could now call "the good old days" when Pomerantz was the FBI's counterterror chief in the 1980s. Back then, terrorists had clear aims and resorted to violence as a means of achieving political goals. As much worldwide attention as the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro garnered, Pomerantz notes that Leon Klinghoffer was the only fatality.

"If you asked Osama bin Laden what his goals are, he'd have a harder time explaining it to you so it'd make some sense to the Western mind. Killing in the name of God, it's not a political imperative, there's no political goal. When you're on a messianic religious mission, the same limits don't apply," he said.

"As Westerners, we hear people say things that seem so outrageous to us that we dismiss them as the rantings of madmen. Or we think they really can't mean that. Osama bin Laden declared war on us. He did mean that."

Bin Laden also declared war on the Jewish people, and Pomerantz thinks we'd be foolish not to take him at his word.

"It's emphatically plain and clear that we're still their principal enemy. We the Jewish community are at a greater risk than other segments of society. That's just the truth," he said.

Pomerantz points to a litany of smaller-scale attacks against Jewish or Jewish-related targets in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, and intelligence reports that potential terrorists in America were scouting Jewish targets in New York City.

Even during the trials of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, the Twin Towers were revealed to be something of a "Jewish target."

"You have to think like they do. [The Towers] are a symbol of business in America, and who runs business in America? The Jews."