Remember the horrible mutilations in Fallajah? Even Iraqi's who wanted to kill Americans thought they were wrong. They were not repeated. Somehow the terrorists care about public opinion. Hence another great idea from Mark A.R. Kleiman with the help of one of his readers:

A reader who works for a national security think-tank (not one of the ideological press-release generators, but an outfit that makes a living giving technical advice to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and other national security agencies) writes:

For three years, I have been urging an offensive information operations strategy – my analogy was “the day after” – that would be focused on Islamic and third world audiences (to get to Al Qaeda) that would make the point that the developed world would fare better in the resulting smallpox pandemic than the poor parts of the world, no matter how distant from the initial release.