I don't think you understand the difference between stoicism and running away. Which is too bad, imo. There is a huge difference. I am sure the terrorists would realize that, even if you can't.
Please show your evidence for believing that. Your surety alone is not enough. I base my analysis on Bin Laden's quoted remarks, such as this:
In 1993, 18 U.S. soldiers, part of a contingent sent on a humanitarian mission to famine-struck Somalia, were murdered by street fighters in Mogadishu. Bin Laden later claimed that some of the Arab Afghans were involved. The main thing to bin Laden, however, was the horrified American reaction to the deaths. Within six months, the U.S. had withdrawn from Somalia. In interviews, bin Laden has said that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were "paper tigers" who "after a few blows ran in defeat."
time.com
Here is David Warren's analysis of the terrorist mindset, which is based on their words and deeds to date. He predicts that their fear is of failure, and that they will continue to hit soft, symbolic targets:
Readers in the West have, usually, no idea of the mindset of our enemy, and are protected from finding out by the scruples of politically-correct journalists, editors, and producers. We both over- and under-estimate the enemy, depending on breaking news.
By Western standards, the Muslim "holy warrior" is a coward, looking only for the sucker punch, and refusing to offer battle when his enemy is even slightly prepared. By his own, of course, he is not.
The terrorists will attack civilians, religious, and other innocents and bystanders, for the very reason they are unprotected. But the idea is not mere tactical surprise. He wins through fear, not force of arms.
He is not afraid of death, as we would more likely be. He is instead, by our standards, almost morbidly afraid of failure. He wishes all observers to believe he is invincible, and will avoid doing what might show he is not. Directly attacked himself, he melts away.
While the Ba'athist "dead-enders" in Iraq begin as secular fanatics; and Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, etc., are religious fanatics; there is no difference between them in practice, and less and less in theory. That they are in full co-operation is obvious both in their selection of symbolic targets, and their common tactics.
It would now appear, from available information, that the U.N. hit was performed by Saddamites on an Al Qaeda target (the Brazilian diplomat was the man who negotiated the recovery of "Christian" East Timor from "Islamic" Indonesia). Whereas the Najaf hit was performed by imported Wahabi terrorists, but on a traditional target of Saddam Hussein's.
My own "flypaper" thesis -- currently ridiculed on liberal websites in the United States -- assumed this would happen and is proved by it. Iraq has indeed become the flypaper for Wahabi-sponsored terrorists in the region. It is a rare thing when the enemy can be persuaded to behave as we would wish him to behave -- to go where we are most ready to collect him -- but the U.S. presence in Iraq has proved irresistible.
This does not mean that they all go there. It does mean that wherever they are -- and many remain under cover in North America -- their own morale depends on driving the U.S. out of Iraq, and destroying the emerging Iraqi government. As, ditto, in Afghanistan, the previous Wahabi setback.
To their mindset, domestic American targets are not the focus, just now. They think of those as too well protected, as being too far behind the front line. It is striking that no major terrorist hit seems even to have been attempted in the U.S. itself, since 9/11, despite what I take to be the bureaucratic incompetence of U.S. "homeland security", which will not even use racial profiling, or suspend such civil liberties as are normally suspended in wartime, when lives are at risk by the tens of thousands.
Note well: this is the one advantage we have with an enemy inspired by religious and ideological fantasies, if, as the Pentagon has tried, we make a good effort to understand how he ticks. His behaviour will be "rational" according to premises quite different from our own. He is obsessed with symbolic, rather than with strategic targets. He will go where the symbolic action is. But having arrived, his other principle kicks in, which is to hunt exclusively for defenceless targets.
Need I add, that all this could change tomorrow morning, if Islamists are persuaded that the Bush administration is vulnerable to a cut-and-run impulse in U.S. domestic opinion. They work from an acute sense of irresolution in their enemy, and are held back as much invisibly by the public resolution of President Bush, as visibly by specific security measures.
The enemy does not think like us. But that doesn't mean he couldn't defeat us -- by understanding our cowardice better than we understand his.
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Comment/Sept03/index160.shtml |
