Captain's Quarters -

"The West will face a crisis soon in the world's largest Muslim nation. We had better pay attention to what happens in Indonesia, because al-Qaeda has already highlighted it as a future battleground for its war on the West. We cannot afford to let it slip away."

slip away? that boat left 10 years ago and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it except watch it sink somewhere off shore.
once radical islam gets a toe hold and rolls a few heads down the alley, people especially westerners flee.

the only folks that can rescue islam are muslims--no one else. we can fight wars when they encroach on us directly, physically or economically, but indonesia---not a chance.

the only place i watch with interest is europe. they are our canaries. how they go is probably how we go. judging from pelosi's dhimmitude it won't be pretty but it will be fast.

i still think the big money is in designer burkas!

"With 95% of the world's oil transported by sea -- and even worse, a large percentage of its highly explosive liquid natural gas transported by tankers -- the shipping lanes of Indonesia seem very susceptible to that tactic by a group with al-Qaeda's organization"

While I agree with the sentiment, I have to take a bit of exception to the description of LNG as "highly explosive".

LNG by itself is quite stable. Once vaporized and mixed with an appropriate amount of air, it has both flammable and explosive characteristics. However, the doomsday scenarios of exploding LNG tankers (played endlessly here in Massachusetts by opponents of existing and proposed LNG terminals) are quite difficult to achieve.

If you could punch a hole in an LNG tanker (no small task) and light the resulting stream of LNG as it boiled to gas, you would have one hell of a fire. It is difficult to construct a scenario, however, where you could release the LNG, vaporize it, and mix it with enough air to detonate a large portion of the cargo at one time. Once a fire had been started, you would get a spreading flame front, but the chances of an explosion would drop markedly.

OTOH, you could do signficant damage if you controlled the ship, I would dread seeing what determined terrorists could do with it.

We had better pay attention to what happens in Indonesia, because al-Qaeda has already highlighted it as a future battleground for its war on the West. We cannot afford to let it slip away.

OK...how do we keep Indonesia from slipping away? Captain, what should we do to prevent Indonesia from slipping into the grasp of Islamists?

One thing that radical Muslims know, and Americans seem to have forgotten, is that if radicals can get hold of the education system, they're 2/3 of the way there--to whatever long-term goal they have. As the Chinese proverb says, "Much easier to bend the young twig than bend the tree."

Interesting post but possibly we are going to have to concede some of these countries sooner or later or become a whole lot serious about all of this. We're already fighting (or assisting in some way) to keep Islamic terrorists from establishing a firm foothold in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Horn of Africa, the Phillipines ..the list goes on.

So far, the results are at best mixed. We have little support from other nations, the international and transnational organizations are useless or counter-productive and we aren't even of one mind about all this here in our own country (witness, for example, Pelosi's recent Mideast road trip). We have no clear strategy, no consensus on tactics and no coherent vision of our objective, other than to keep the nuts from blowing us up here on our own soil.

And on this happy note, I wish all a blessed Easter. He is Risen.

Instead, capital has shifted to Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, causing a collapse of the Indonesian economy.

No, don't tell me, it's all just statistical gobbledygook cooked up by the evil socialist European-led IMF to drag the USA down. Curse those Europeans! Will their propaganda war never cease?

Indonesia,

Don't let the door hitchya in the ass on your way out.

I think we have done all we can (maybe too much) to save "The Moslem World" from itself.

Yes, it' descent into NeoIslamotalitarianism will be catastrophic on many levels, but our efforts to prevent this catastrophe seem to just add fuel to the fire.

If this is what "they" want, then there is simply nothing we can do - without looking like raging hypocrites - to prevent them from giving themselves the experience that will teach them what no amount of eloquent and inspirational speeches about the nobility of democracy and reason seems able to.

LNG is dangerous because it is volatile and flammable with air. In an unconfined air environment, it is not a realistic explosive hazard at all. Unconfined gas explosions at atmospheric pressure don't produce significant wind or overpressure unless they proceed to detonation. To turn LNG into an explosive, it is necessary to vaporize and then mix it with air within fairly narrow explosive limits and then to properly initiate the mixture. Because LNG boils at low temperature, its vapor is denser that ambient air. Both the pure vapor and the mixture with air are dense and will spread close to the ground or sea. All this is easy; just spill it on the ground to allow the heat from the ground to cause boiling without allowing sparks or other fire initiators to start a fire. After waiting for these things to happen, it is necessary to detonate a significant sized high explosive detonator within a region within the explosive limits of the mixture. This could all be done, but it wouldn't occur by accident and it is not as easy to do or more dangerous than fire which could happen by accident.

No offense, Bennett, but at first I parsed that as "He is Riesen!", and started kicking myself for not thinking of it during the "Chocolate Jesus" incident ...