OK, by your metrics how long will it be before they take over the world and set up their Caliphate?
They will never set up their Caliphate, Ed. But like the Bolsheviks before them, they can sure leave a lot of wreckage in their wake trying.
There's nothing we've done over the years since 9/11 that would have prevented them from carrying out that kind of attack and I can only assume that they've decided that any potential benefits are not worth the expenditure of their assets at this time.
You don't know that and neither do I. They may have decided that; they may have been checked by our efforts; or they may simply have decided to bide their time and concentrate on Iraq before striking the US again. Their resources are limited too.
Two things about AQ are generally agreed on: they are very patient, with a timeline in decades, and they have a pronounced sense of symbolism and theatre. For another US attack to be really effective, it will have to top 9/11. That's a tall order.
The real danger of Al Queda, however, is in the power of their ideas. Those ideas have struck a chord in the Muslim world mostly BECAUSE OF our actions in Iraq
Oh really? So what was the reason for the chord it struck before and after 9/11? Did Al Qaeda declare war on us in 1998, train thousands in Afghanistan, bomb our embassies, the Cole, etc, because we attacked Iraq? And please don't try to tell me that AQ didn't strike a chord back then; I don't have amnesia. The Arab Mideast threw a party on 9/11.
This is the same argument I have with the various ignorant numbskulls who keep claiming that Palestinians are only trying to blow up Israel because of the 1967 occupation, as if Israel had lived in mutually recognized harmony with the Arab world until then.
Al Qaeda strikes a chord with the Arab and Muslim Middle East because it addresses the drive trains of today's Muslim culture: the feeling of pride in being Muslim; the feeling of shame in being in such a mess compared to the rest of the world; and the feeling of bewilderment that it should be so. They have embraced comforting conspiracy thinking to explain their situation - it's all a conspiracy of the West, of which the Jews are either the masterminds or the servants, take your pick - and hoo, boy, does Al Qaeda know how to resonate with this! And since it's agreed that others are to blame, the question only remains how to make them pay.
At the base is the Wahabbi ideology of Sayd Qutb, promoted in thousands of mosques for the last 30 years by Our Friends the Saudis. I respectfully submit that this ideology is of their own choosing, and was not created in response to Iraq, Israel or anything else you care to name. People in positions of weakness always have grievances, sometimes very real ones.
Grievances may motivate their reactions but they don't form them. The Nazis had very real grievances with the Treaty of Versailles, but the treaty wasn't responsible for every tit and jottle of Nazi ideology and policy. The treaty did not make them commit genocide. Do not fall into the malaise of today's left, that ridiculous notion that nobody in the world can act except the big bad USA; everybody else merely reacts, helplessly. |
