Al Qaida is not trying to conquer territory. They are trying to drive US/Western influence out of the Middle East by making the governments and people in the region hostile to us. If they can’t do that, they foment chaos and we leave because no politician can sustain the domestic political price of nation building.

Al Qaida doesn’t have a military force, per se. It is a loosely knit group with a common interest and figurehead. Despite some conjecture that Bin Laden wants a Caliphate from Thailand to the UK, it is more accurate to say that the Islamo-facist movement is based on removing Western influence from Muslim lands and reestablishing Muslim rule through any land that was ever Islamic (including Southern Europe). This is different than having a single Caliphate, which Al Qaida has not even called for (Ahmedinijad has implied that he is working for this, though).

I don’t necessarily disagree with your remedy. I don’t think we’ve tried very hard to do this. But the UN and EU have resisted any meaningful action and Bush is reluctant to widen military action.

Bottom line: the US lacks the political will to win. We can argue about the ultimate goal of UBL and Al Qaida, how to deal with state sponsors of terrorism, and the right ratio of diploamacy to military threat. But I still contend (and you may agree) that we have yet to demonstrate the will to will.

Al Qeada and the jihadist movement in general is kinda like the Airbus of Islamic governements. The jihadis will attack who they want, but they get their funding and resources from Islamic governments like Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Those countries get to have their enemies hurt, and yet they can deny responsibility and prevent retaliation on themselves. So they get their cake and eat it too. To stop terrorism the terror sponsoring states have to go. Then you have to go after the ancilliary sources of funding they get, like the west’s reliance on muslim oil. Then you have to go after the philosophy of Islam, because everywhere Islam has been imposed, misery, poverty, and conflict are sure to follow.
Finally we need to makes these countries start to appease us. We’ve talked softly long enough. Its time to start swinging the big stick.

We did in WWII, granted it wasn’t as widespread.

We defeated armies and navies in WWII. Al Qaida has neither. Hitler and Hirohito were attempting to conquer landmasses. Al Qaida is trying to foment chaos. This is asymetric warfare in both its methods and its goals.

We (the US) have three huge problems with defeating Al Qaida:
1) We’ve never fought this kind of war before. It’s going to take a while for DoD, the State Dept, and the rest of the administration to figure things out. And they’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way.

2) We do not understand Muslim culture. We project Western value on them.

3) The American public wants a quick, clean fix. Islamo-facism didn’t spring up overnight. It is a centuries-old problem. And they know we are impatient.

. . . it requires mass force to oppress the evil of the region

I don’t think the US, even if we fully mobilized could muster a force that massive. Even if we could, I don’t think we should. Even if we should, someone would have to convince the American people that we should and that we should accept the inevitable casualties.

After 9/11, Bush told the people to lead their lives normally, go on a cruise, shop a lot . . . . This may have been his greatest mistake. He missed the opportunity to get the American people engaged. He should have told the US people to gird their loins and prepare for a long, confusing struggle; to prepare for bad news and bad times; to make personal sacrifices to win this war. Instead he ensured the “me” generation was uninvolved.

If people aren’t engaged in a lot of meaningful work, they do two things: gossip and complain. You wanna know why support for the war has eroded?

Profitsbeard, I would like to respectfully disagree with you. War is politics by extreme means.

Nice simplification of Clausewitz. That may work when you have two Christian nations intending to fight, it doesn’t work when you have a religion spread over 23% of the human population that requires their killing of infidels. We may act like it is politics, but it isn’t. It’s about survival and civilization.

There is no way the military can destroy or defeat an ideology this widespread. We have no political will to invade Iran or to lend direct military assistance to Pakistan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia (these countries have no political will to accept direct military assistance, either).

We did in WWII, granted it wasn’t as widespread. But without violating my promise to Allah, it requires mass force to oppress the evil of the region (read into what group I’m referring to as you will.) and the Christianization of the people.

It should be *MADE* required reading at the White House.

Sadly, I’m sure that Santorum’s regarded around DC today as a has-been, a lame-duck crank whose views, inconveneint to leisure-seeking constituents daily awash in apologist propaganda, got him ousted from the Senate. Be that as it may, he’s going to turn into this generation’s Cassandra…destined to speak the truth and have no one believe him.

Let’s keep an eye out for this boy.

What the American people fail to understand is that the military, if unleashed, could win this local battle against the global jihad with no more pain or inconvenience to the genral population or economy than purposely trying to lose now costs us.

Profitsbeard, I would like to respectfully disagree with you. War is politics by extreme means. It is a tool to express and impose your political will. Islamofacism, radical Islam, or whatever else you might call it is spread out in dozens of countries. It is concentrated most strongly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Pakistan. It is very, very strong in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and parts of Turkey. It exists in varying degrees in nearly every country in Europe, Asia, and Africa. There is no way the military can destroy or defeat an ideology this widespread. We have no political will to invade Iran or to lend direct military assistance to Pakistan, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia (these countries have no political will to accept direct military assistance, either).

The bottom line, unfortunately: Santorum is right. Iran and much of Islam have declared war on us. And you are right: We don’t care, yet. We won’t care until it gets much, much worse.

The failure is of imagination and survival instincts on the part of the diffident civilians. Merely seeing (Media purposely) upsetting images of the (Media purposely) confusing conflict, for two minutes, on their evening news, is enough to fatally unnerve them.

Thank God they weren’t at Bunker Hill. Or Gettysburg. Or Iwo Jima. Or Omaha Beach. Or confronting the gates of Dachau and Auschwitz.

The extent of the spinelessness is staggering.

And it encourages the predatory jihadists.

Leaving the only real question left in this War:

How many more must die to finally wake the West?

Defeat Jihad!!!

Sorry, but I find it difficult to take a guy with a two dollar wig on his head very seriously.

The litmus test for who is and isn’t persona non grata with the administration seems to be a person’s stance on immigration, period. Teddy the Swimmer is more welcome to the White House than Tom Tancredo or Rick Santorum.

Unless someone can devise a formula to squelch the Politics of Pull as the prime motive force in Washington, we are in a death spiral as a constitutional republic.

But something tells me that President Bush never really much cared for Santorum in the first place, and that the ‘new tone’ in the Adminsitration would make Santorum Persona non grata around the White House.

Shame, really. Santorum is one of the few that cares more about the survival of the Nation than he he does merely retaining his power and membership in the Frat Boys Club of the Senate.

Santorum’s farewell: “The Gathering Storm of the 21st Century”Allahpundit Never in my seven months of blogging for this site have I encountered meat this red. This is the speech he delivered a few nights ago after voting no on Robert…

When does negotiation cease to be a useful tool?
natesnake on December 8, 2006 at 3:24 PM

Good question…
One example is early December 1941. While we were negotiating with Japan, at the exact time we were sitting down and negotiating, half their fleet was ON ITS WAY to bomb Pearl Harbor.
When your enemy, and history, show that you should not trust them at the table, and as Santorum’s entire speech points out as proof, Iran and all islamafascists can not be trusted, EVER.
Maybe we could just believe what they say, that they want all infidels dead, or converted to islam.
We negotiate AFTER they’ve proven they can be trusted, and not a minute before.

- The first scene being where Lancelot charges the gates of a castle, the two gate guards just stupidly watch him come up and don’t lift a finger as he cuts them both down before massacring the people inside;

- The second scene being the “killer bunny” that – despite obvious warning signs (“Look at the bones!!”) – everybody treats like a joke (“One rabbit stew, coming up!”) until it starts ripping people’s throats out.

People see the dangers, and they just ignore them to their own destruction. Only the Python gang could make me laugh at that.

But what Santorum talks about is no laughing matter.

It’s been said that the greatest failure of the so-called “Greatest Generation” (”so-called” because if they were still living today I think that the American Revolution and Civil War generations would put up a spirited debate to that claim) was this: that they failed to replicate themselves.

Instead, we’ve presently got what history may one day remember as “The Stupidest Generation:” after all, it only took one Pearl Harbor to wake up our parents and grandparents to the mortal threat they faced. Evidently, given that the electorate last month voted for what amounts to a “vacation” from fighting the present struggle, we’ll need two or three Pearl Harbors to achieve the same effect.

So let the Iranians and North Koreans build their bombs. Let Chavez turn South and Central America into another cauldron of violent revolution and anti-Americanism. Let the Syrians gobble up Lebanon again. Bug out of Iraq and let the whole region go to hell.

Ironically enough, the faster we let our enemies work up the means and the gumption to clobber us another two or three times, the faster we might finally reclaim our WWII forebears’ collective spine and confront what lonely Rick Santorum already sees coming down the tracks.

And as an Oregon resident, I second what PaisleyCow says above about Gordon Smith. He’s always been a squishy Republican, at best, and a borderline RINO on too many occasions (including this one).

They killed 3,000 on 9/11 and most Americans seem content to accept that.

LakeRuins on December 8, 2006 at 3:58 PM

Which is, at least for now, more than we’ve lost so far in Iraq. And yet nobody in the media talks about that…

I fear we will lose many thousands more in the coming years.

They killed 3,000 on 9/11 and most Americans seem content to accept that.

Dude, that was, like, five whole years ago! Ya gotta stop living in the past, man!

Who wants to be the star pupil and answer this simple question:

When does negotiation cease to be a useful tool?

natesnake on December 8, 2006 at 3:24 PM

Multipart answer:

If you are a socialist, who doesn’t care to support or defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, the answer is NEVER. Always negotiate, never act. The appearance of being civil rather than jingoistic is of the utmost importance, moreso than even national security.

If you are an American patriot, the answer is the moment your nation’s goals cease to be viewed in good faith by the other side of the table. In other words, before you reach the table, when it comes to anyone with world domination on their minds. Since the-bad-man-in-a-dinner-jacket has publicly declared his willingness to lose half of his population to defeat the West, we can safely say that point has been passed.

Jacka**.