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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (24777)	1/18/2004 6:58:24 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793691

Okay, maybe the man who starts a war is just feeling depressed and is looking to get killed. According to you, this is a less "binary" and therefore more sensible approach. I don’t recall saying any such thing. why do you think Osama wanted war? First, because without a war he and his cause were almost certain to slide into oblivion. As long as the Russians were in Afghanistan, Osama was the man, the defender of the faith against the infidel invader. He had a ready-made pitch for recruitment and fundraising, and it worked. When that war ended, the hard core stayed with him, but support among the less than wholly committed was clearly on the wane. Radicalism needs an enemy to survive, and that enemy has to be immediately hostile. Osama needed aggressive American action against Muslim states to legitimize his own existence. Second, Osama did believe he can win. He probably still believes he can win, and he may be right. He knows he can never conquer America or convert it to Islam, but the immediate goal of chasing America out of the Islamic world is by no means unachievable. I don’t think he ever believed that America wouldn’t fight. I think he believed that if he could force Americans into an occupying role in faraway territory and extend the conflict, Americans would not have the stomach to continue fighting for an extended period of time, especially if their objectives were getting no closer. He will never defeat the US military in combat, but if he can create a situation in which he can win by not losing, he strikes at the well known American achilles heel – the political unacceptability of costly extended conflict. He fought the Russians in a war of attrition, and won. It makes perfect sense that he should try to create the same situation when fighting another superpower, especially one with a known domestic aversion to prolonged low-intensity conflict. People do tend to go back to tactics that succeeded. We should not congratulate ourselves too much on the ease with which we took Afghanistan. The Russians took it just as easily. They just couldn’t hold it, and we don’t seem to be holding it very well either. We’re also exposed in Iraq, and while nobody can chase us out, it is by no means certain that we will be able to achieve the goal of leaving behind a peaceful, stable, Iraq that is at least neutral in the conflict between the US and radical Islam. We’re isolated from key allies to some degree, and our problems in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are rapidly approaching the critical point. If our conduct of the war on terror helps spur an Islamist rebellion in either of those states, especially while we are still tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of Afghanistan and Iraq will be well worth the trade for our enemies. The very scale of the 9/11 attacks argues that they were designed to force a military response. The notion that they were planned with the assumption that there would be no response, and that Osama is toast now that this assumption has proved false, is emotionally appealing but does not stand up under any serious examination. It would be nice if we had the upper hand, but we don’t. They don’t either. This could still go either way, and if we want it to go our way we will have to be not only stronger, but smarter. Call my thinking silly and binary, have you checked out his ideology? Yes. His is perverse. Yours is just self-serving. I dearly hope that if the necessity arises, you will not be too "multifaceted" to defend yourself from your enemies. I don’t see any reason why a blunt, non-ideological assessment of an enemies methods, motives, strengths, and weaknesses should be a disadvantage in defence. It seems to me that it would be an advantage.