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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KonKilo who wrote (113139)	8/28/2003 9:38:52 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

How many of those jihadists flypapering into Iraq are new recruits, fighting because we are there? I don't know, Shilohcat, and frankly, it doesn't strike me as a very important question. We've already seen that staying quiet enough to make these guys leave us alone doesn't work too well. In the long run, we are fighting a battle of ideas, and these jihadists are in love with a Perfectly Stupid Idea - that all the Muslim world's problems are due to an attack from the West, and that blowing up random people is the right way to make it all go away. Since the idea is stupid, we want to disabuse it, and giving the jihadists a few stinging defeats where Allah does not ride to the rescue seems like a good way to go to me. And Iraq is one of the few places in the Arab world where most of the people are not susceptible to this stupid idea.

To: KonKilo who wrote (113139)	8/28/2003 10:05:41 AM
From: E	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

How many of those jihadists flypapering into Iraq are new recruits, fighting because we are there? Good question, but who knows?... but it's very convenient for al-Q that we are there, whether the excited assembling jihadists are veterans or hot-headed bandwagon types. And it's quite inconvenient for us. To quote a Dowd characterization of the situation posted earlier (and if there's anything below someone thinks is inaccurate, I'd be more than happy to read why they think so): "Our exhausted and frustrated soldiers are in a hideously difficult environment they're not familiar with, dealing with a culture America only dimly understands, where our desperation for any intelligence has reduced us to recruiting Saddam's old spies, whom we didn't trust in the first place... We don't know exactly which of our ghostly Arab enemies are which, how many there are, who's plotting with whom, what weapons they have, how they're getting into Iraq, where they're hiding, or who's financing and organizing them. And we certainly don't understand the violent internecine religious battles we've set in motion... ...Just because the unholy alliance of Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters and Islamic terrorists has turned Iraq into a scary shooting gallery for our troops doesn't mean Americans at home are any safer. Since when did terrorists see terror as an either-or proposition?..."