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Without a discussion of the extensive use of false flag terrorism, I think it is best to say that this article is "facile".

E.g. Lavon Affair (Israeli attempts to plant bombs and blame them on Muslim Brotherhood), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag#As_pretexts_for_war and so forth.

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Suppose false flag attacks represented as much as 20% of the scores of thousands of recorded attacks - even though prextexts for war like the Manchurian incident only require one or two attacks and not ongoing campaigns, for example.

What then? What of the other 80% in this hypothetical? Why are they still so incompetent?

If you want to seriously claim that the majority of all terrorist attacks are false flag operations, I don't give a skosh about what you consider 'facile'.

I suppose that statement is true iff you believe false flag terrorism is not uncommon.

Historically it seems reasonably common as it comes from a well used tactic during the days of privateers. It seems unlikely that the governments of the world would suddenly give up such an obviously useful tactic through some sort of singular moral awakening, yet still go wage war with ever increasing levels of mechanised death.

And yet the number of specific incidents for which we have evidence of a false-flag attack being carried out is relatively small.

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