In a message dated 6/27/2005 8:17:19 AM Mountain Standard Time, qtopic+15-cysSFgyrHZf@quicktopic.com writes:

We're not in a conventional war here. A lot of the outcome hinges on a propaganda war, where if we win the propaganda war, the flow of new recruits for Al Qaeda dries up; whereas if we lose the propaganda war, they obtain an inexhaustible supply of
new recruits, vitually ensuring that the war on terror will go on indefinitely. Through Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, we have single-handedly given the enemy by far the biggest victory in this propaganda war they have achieved to date. -- complete horse manure.
 
Before 9/11, while we were still essentially ignoring him, Osama was running _five thousand_ terrorist trainees through his camps in Afghanistan _every year_.
 
They made their first try at blowing up the World Trade Center in 1994.
Shortage of willing recruits was not his problem.
 
Let's face some facts: al Qaeda's objectives, and often its tactics, have broad popular support in the Muslim world.
 
Not a majority, except in some individual countries, but a big minority. Tens of millions of people, possibly hundreds of millions.
 
Millions upon millions of people want to kill all the Jews and slaughter the infidels and impose medieval theocracy, ideally on everyone. It's an ocean of bestial, genocidal racist hate.
 
This animosity to us is not based, at seventh and last, on anything we do.
It's based on what we _are_. It's based on the fact that we're wealthy and powerful, and they're weak and backward, and they wish it was the other way 'round.
 
In other words, being soft and accomodating and "sensitive" will produce more terrorists, not less, because they'll attack when they sense weakness. It's like bleeding in the water near sharks.
 
The way to deter them is demonstrate ruthless, irresistable power. People fight, on the whole, because they think they can win. Suicide bombers aren't the product of despair, but of hope.
 
Despair just makes most people submissive and passive. It's hope, however crazed, that produces warriors.
 
We didn't beat the Nazis by making them love us or addressing their "legitimate grievances"(*); we did it by demonstrating, in the ashes of Hamburg and the corpses of the battlefield, that we were more powerful than them and that we were fully prepared to kill them all.
 
(*) that approach was tried, by Chamberlain among others. Didn't work too well.