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Politics : New FADG. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (987)	5/26/2007 3:33:01 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4152

"You judge [the threat posed by Al Queda] by their ideology, membership, goals, and assets that can be used to achieve those goals, including assymentric. By their willingness to kill and be killed. By their ability and determination to take punishment and keep going. By their ability to offer an attractive option to their base. By the size of their base of sympathy. All these. OK, by your metrics how long will it be before they take over the world and set up their Caliphate? As for my judgement of the threat posed by Al Queda, it's two tiered. The first tier is an assessment of their ability to directly harm us. They have actively supported the insurgents in Iraq and killed our soldiers and they have the capability to create another terrorizing incident on our soil. 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. 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. We've given them a forum, we've made them the Davids fighting Goliath, and we've acted in ways that buttressed their assertions that we're evil infidels intent on stealing their wealth, impoverishing their people and governing their lands. If we're going to win the battle for the respect of the Muslim world, or at least stop garnering the hatred of the Muslim world, then at some point we're going to have to stop acting in ways that lend credence to their views. By the way, I didn't "misread Hawk because of a false assumption." Maybe you didn't read what he wrote? Ed