Friday, July 09, 2004

It's not always about you. The true goal of the Islamists is to come to power in Muslim countries, and their problem until recently was that they could not win over enough local people to make their revolutions happen. Getting the U.S. to march into the Muslim world in pursuit of the terrorists was a potentially promising stratagem, since an invasion should produce endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That might finally push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get their stalled revolutions off the ground. Specifically, the Al Qaeda planners expected the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and get bogged down in the same long counter-guerrilla war that the Russians had experienced there, providing along the way years of horrifying images of American firepower killing innocent Muslims. Osama bin Laden and his colleagues were simply trying to relive their past success against the Russians and get some more mileage out of the Afghan scenario. In fact, their plan failed: the U.S. conquered Afghanistan quickly and at a low cost in lives. Even now, despite huge American neglect, Afghanistan has not produced a major resistance movement. The reason Al Qaeda is still in business in a big way is that the Bush administration then invaded Iraq. The Islamists were astonished, no doubt, but they knew how to exploit an opportunity when one was handed to them. And so the real game continues, while the public debate in the United States is conducted in terms that have only the most tangential contact with strategic reality. [Toronto Star] And now, a look at the thinking of al Qaeda. Note how the Feds and their Crusader cheerleaders couldn't help al Qaeda more if they tried. 11:44:16 AM    comment () The big picture. From Mark Steyn, a crystalline summation of the reasons to fight Islamist terrorism here and now, rather than later: So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and I... [Samizdata.net] A look at the thinking (such as it is) of the enemy. The language these brownshirts use reminds me an awful lot of the way certain people talked about Jews in the 1930s, with their paranoid fantasies about how their hated enemies are conspiring to rule the world. I won't be at all surprised when some Crusader starts writing about "the final solution to the Muslim problem." Meanwhile, back in the real world, this puts things in perspective: "That truth is simply this: it isn't the Moslems who came to the west to push us around, steal our resources, sneer at our customs and beliefs, depose our leaders and replace them with puppets, reshape our political institutions, or redraw our national borders to suit their own foul purposes. No, that's what we Europeanoids have been doing to them." Torturing the Truth, L. Neil Smith 10:44:41 AM    comment () Why They Fight. 'Iraq Insurgency Larger Than Thought'. Oh. But now, rather than the mythical foreign fighters, it's "well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power." Maybe so. (Darn that Saddam Hussein for not having gun control.) Or could Iraqis be angry at being starved... [LewRockwell.com Blog] I think it's going in circles. The Feds were originally claiming that the rebels were all "Baathist holdouts," which is the same thing as "Sunnis angry about losing power." Then they switched to claiming that they were all foreigners for a while, and now it seems they've switched back. 9:29:20 AM    comment ()

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