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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (34960)	3/16/2004 9:49:58 PM
From: KLP	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

Thank you, Nadine...Well said as usual! OBL's 1998 declared "war on America and Americans" seems to not be believed as "real" by most journalists, and by many people both here in the US and elsewhere in the world. >>>>>This ascribed "resentment" motive (as with the "desperation" motive ascribed to the Palestinians) ignores one of the great themes of Islamism - that martyrdom is glorious, that death is to be wished for, that through the Muslim love of death, the West will be defeated and Islam will re-emerge triumphant. For these true believers, the suicide in the suicide bombings is the central, glorious act. And these true believers are heard by millions every Friday in places like Morocco, Jordan and Pakistan <<<<

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (34960)	3/22/2004 7:21:33 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

Who thinks that suicide bombings are caused by or approved of due to resentment? Hardly matters, really. Who cares if the desire to blow people up is a function of resentment, anger, desperation, or a bad mood? The point is that a large number of Pakistanis think it is ok to blow us up, and that this, given that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal and that the Pakistani military and intelligence apparatus has numerous and close connections to terrorists, is a situation that should concern us. They don't seem to understand that for a believing Islamist, blowing yourself up and killing a hundred infidels is the whole point of the exercise. I’m not so sure about this. There are lots of prosperous Muslims in the UAE, Kuwait, and other places who talk the Islamist talk, but very few take it to the level of actual participation, far less to the level of blowing themselves up. It’s always going to be easier to generate fanaticism among the desperate, and it’s always going to be easier to recruit terrorists among the poor and the uneducated. Suicide is far less appealing when you have a Jacuzzi and a couple of hired Russian blondes hidden away in your basement. This is one reason why our presence in Iraq is so convenient for the terrorists. In order to mount operations in the US they need educated English-speaking operatives, and the risk of exposure is very high. They have a few people meeting that description, as we learned on 9/11, but they don’t have many. Any committed footsoldier can drive a car bomb around Baghdad, which means they can attack America, Americans, and America’s image without risking key assets. Back in the early days of the Iraq war, and also when it became clear that our presence in Iraq was going to become a magnet for terrorists, we heard a lot of very silly chest-thumping about how these terrorists were going to be fighting the US Army instead of the NYPD. This was never anything to crow about: the sad truth is that the NYPD is better equipped to fight terrorists than the US Army in Iraq is. Sure, the army can defeat any terrorist group in combat, but combat, especially on a large scale, is very rare in the fight against terrorists. Our people in Iraq have no effective immigration controls or investigative capacity. We have any number of informants, but no way to determine whether the informants have real information or are just trying to stab personal enemies in the back by fingering them as terrorists. We have to assume that the police force and military that we have recruited are riddled with our enemies and their sympathizers. Not a comfortable situation.