the only people that can defeat al Quaeda are the muslims.

Our clever foreign policy has turned an obscure fringe sect into a vast international army. Way to go, W.

that really was the idea

If you turn that image about 80 degrees counter clockwise....

If we do that the terrorists win! ... So do we, but they get a little win too. Win-Win. We get peace, they get a compromise with their local government to not be arrested if they don't do some stuff.

Wouldn't the 40% of policing qualify as using force to solve the problem? I think it suggests much of their data is based on terrorism within a country. If it is international terrorism, there is no way "policing" could solve it.

By combining "policing" and "military force" you find that 47% of terrorists were shut down by some form of forceful authoritarian measures, compared to only 43% by politics.

Well spotted, Cycle23.

When was the point of the war on terror was to win?

Cycle23@4: Shhh! You weren't supposed to notice that...

Okay, I give up; I'm obviously missing something that must be obvious: what has Cycle23@#4 spotted/noticed?

Little John

It's the symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, aka the peace sign.

@JoeMichael: Police and military are both in the broad category of "force"; but they are organizationally, tactically, culturally, and otherwise quite distinct. This fact gets driven home rather unpleasantly when military forces get stuck playing police, or vice versa.

I doubt anybody is going to argue that sitting around the campfire circle and singing is going to work; but there is a real, and nontrivial, difference between war and law enforcement(well, unless the neighborhood really sucks).

Is there even any proof that "Al Queda" is a real organization? As far as I know it's just a fiction.

Ah - I thought Cycle23 was suggesting Pac-Man was involved in the conspiracy...

The only effect of the war on Drugs was that hard drugs have never been so available and cheap in the USA as they are today.

So I really hope your war on terror goes better or you'll havce to get your prayer mat out and start working out which way Mecca is.

Ah if only we'd known that, we could have avoided bombing Ireland back into the stone age.

No, wait! That didn't happen! We did solve it with policing and political settlements!

If only Dubbya had taken a moment to talk to Bill and Tony, they might have been able to tell him a thing or two.

To destroy al queda we have to destroy it in our imaginations because this is the only place where it exists. It is not too unlike the red scare and all the crap we were told about the Soviets for over 50 years.

I'm bored of the Al Quaeda scare. I'm ready for a new one. Any one know what Hugo Chavez had been doing lately? He's got brown skin, and he's got the cajones to stand up to the American imperialism once in awhile. Maybe he and his cohorts will do as the next propagandized despot.

@1:

The only thing that can defeat Al Qaeda is education and enlightenment. Al Qaeda only exists in the minds of western politicians and under the beds of the populace.

Al Qaeda is a universal enemy, an enemy that exists everywhere but nowhere, and is used as a weapon to justify the actions of corrupt governments all over the world.

Al Qaeda == Emmanuelle Goldstein.

@13, "Al Qaeda" is arabic slang for "The toilet" and literally translated means "The base". Ironically and purely coincidentally im sure you'll agree, "The base" is also something of a slang term for the core of the U.S. republican party.

Hagbard @ #11, thanks for the tip.

And, okay, the peace sign sign I saw, but Cycle23@#4 said 80 degrees, not even really close to 155 degrees.

At 80 degrees, the circle is bisected rather horizontally, with a couple of arrow wings or something on the left. I thought maybe it Cycle23 saw a logo or something. Reminds me very vaguely of Amtrak, or, I thought, maybe it's supposed to be the logo of one of the airlines hijacked in the 2001 attacks.

#20 (defunct) Eastern Airlines Logo?

the link in the story is to the research brief. if you want to read the full monograph, please go to http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG741/

--the editor (not of boingboing--of the rb and mg)

Nice call, Cycle23, regardless of the degrees.

Perhaps just as important is the finding itself. It gives weight to the anti-American librals who want to talk to them terrists.

From the Economist July 19th:

"six excellent ideas

In an internet video in September 2007 Abu Yahya al-Libi, a prominent al-Qaeda leader, mockingly gave the West six tips to wage ideological warfare: highlight the views of jihadists who renounce violence; publicise stories about jihadist atrocities against Muslims; enlist Muslim religious leaders to denounce jihadists as heretics; back Islamic movements that emphasise politics over jihad; discredit and neutralise jihadist ideologues; and play up personal or doctrinal disputes among jihadists. These would indeed be good starting-points."

shame he's on the other side really.

full story is here: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11750386

oh noes, now we can't do those things because it would be negotiating with terrorists! Those terrorizers are wraskely.

40% policing? oh dear god, please no... not that...

The authors of this report hold no real hope for a negotiated settlement, nor do they recommend negotiating.

This bargaining space does not exist with many terrorist groups. As the concluding chapter notes, for instance, al Qa’ida’s broad goals of establishing a caliphate across the Middle East offer no bargaining room with western governments.

Since al Qa’ida’s goal remains the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate, there is little reason to expect that a negotiated settlement with governments in the Middle East is possible.

When using historical president when evaluating current situations, it may be useful to also remember that you can never use the past with much accuracy to define the present with regard to human behavior. We have nothing in our history to compare the current Muslim terrorist situation with; too many factors are unique. And it is unlikely that we will ever be able to stamp out terrorism totally. How can you defeat terrorism when terrorism is borne on the shoulders of dysfunctional human psychology? Should we force everyone into therapy? Drug the water? As long as people feel shit upon they will retaliate, rationalizing the most repugnant behavior as being necessary to their cause: justice. That is a historically definable truism.

#28: Replace "feel" with "are"...

me personally, i prefer the airport dogs sniffing for non-existent explosives. i also agree that the "al-qaeda" is a fiction.

Anyone else notice that the wonderful pie chart provided looks like a nearly inverted peace sign?

Anyone else notice the hard work from the Rand Co folks to rotate the chart so it is less obvious?

Just remember hiding something in plain sight don't make it disappear.....

Thanks Rand Co!

I hate the war as much as the next guy, but I think Joelmichael #6 makes a good point about the data set they're working with.

If you're dealing with international terrorism, who is the police force? The UN? NATO? These organizations are quasi-military at best. If you leave it up to individual countries to pursue police actions within their own borders, you run the risk of any one country dropping the ball, either deliberately or by just not having enough resources to do it properly, and now you have a terrorist haven and base of operations.

No, what this tells me is that the answer will be political, not through force at all.

This is what I argued when I was 17, organizing my first peace rally in Kennebunkport. Sadly, everybody was so reeling from 9/11 that the fervor wasn't tempered by this kind of analysis. And, I think the results are clear. I am glad that this report is out, and think it's hilarious that the chart resembles the peace sign.

I think the most important thing going on in Afghanistan right now is the establishment of a trained police force, the reestablishment of education, repairing and building infrastructure, and creating jobs. That's the real work; keeping terrorists or insurgents or whatever they're called today out of the way is secondary.

The problem with Iraq was that GWB decided to invade on sketchy evidence while a lot of resources were still tied up in Afghanistan.

If they'd waited until they started seeing actual success in Afghanistan, they might have had more success in Iraq. People want jobs and food and running water more than they want "liberators."

They're absolutely correct. Capitulation will eliminate any motivation for terrorist groups to continue to exist.

Is this a surprise to anybody?

Oh, were people under the impression that the disbanding of a terrorist group meant the terrorist group failed?

#34: If you don't count going into Iraq in the first place, clearly what this report states is that the mistake in Iraq was the disbanding of local forces.

What would the political answer be?

From a cursory count, the authors data set includes information on about 650 groups that have used the tactic of terrorism since 1968. These groups range in size from a few members to 10's of thousands.

From this report, religious groups have never succeeded, probably because they have always refused political solutions.

This report recommends local police and when necessary, such as in cases of an insurgency, military action.

They also recommend criminalizing those activities that these groups need to operate; this is where it gets scary.

Finally they recommend fighting the ideological battle.

The final sentence of the report states:

Based on al Qa’ida’s organizational structure and modus operandi, only a strategy based on careful police and intelligence work is likely to be effective.

IMO - Whether al Qa'ida is real, an umbrella group, or simply a marketing tool is relatively unimportant as there are indeed violent groups opposed to any political settlement, which in their minds means eternal damnation, intent on fighting a hopeless battle.

Wow, Talk about hindsight. It would have been nice to have this information publicized, say 7 years ago?

We could have saved a lot of lives, money and trouble by treating the criminals behind 9/11 like... criminals.

I heard Noam Chomsky make exactly the same point on NPR in 2002 - the way to stop terrorists is to criminalize the perpetrators and make political accommodations where possible (such as withdrawing troops from Saudi Arabia). Never expected something so sane from RAND though.

THEBLOWLEPRECHAUN:

Your question, while valid, takes too narrow a view of the situation. The type of policing you describe is really only appropriate in the context of societies that have collapsed entirely, such as post-invasion Iraq and Afghanistan. Often a force of this nature can run the risk of being perceived as invaders (see NATO actions in Kosovo, or the Black & Tans and later the Paras in Ireland during the Troubles). That's not to say that this approach can work in certain situations- the OAS has had some success in parts of central and SW Africa.

What the paper seems to be arguing is that a better approach following 9/11 might have been to use existing law enforcement and investigatory bodies (FBI, MI5, Interpol) appropriately, while taking full advantage of intelligence assets on the ground (which had unfortunately been spread rather thin by CIA cutbacks) as well as higher level analysis. Then, through diplomacy, cooperation from local law enforcement and judicious use of military force only when necessary, apprehending the people responsible for the attacks and trying them (either through US courts or some international body).

Instead, we had the invasion of one country without clear intelligence on the location of our targets (who, it seems, escaped during the encirclement of Tora Bora), and the invasion of another country for no apparent reason at all. This has now created situations in which military forces must now be used in a policing role, leading to exactly the kind of worst case scenario described in this paper.

Furthermore, the kind of extra-judicial activities we now see on the part of several intelligence agencies are the direct result of this failed approach and serve two roles: satiating a public hungry for revenge but unsatisfied with the lack of military progress; and ass-covering for the massive errors of analysis and strategy made by higher level officials in the intelligence services and the administration.

Sorry, that should be the African Union, not the OAS.

We can (and do) use the FBI to combat terrorism within our own borders, but we can't send the FBI to, say, Pakistan.

It's doubtful any of the organizations you mentioned would be allowed to operate freely within another country as a police force (with the exception of Interpol within the EU), so if we're looking for police action, we have to rely on individual countries to handle it. I just don't think that would happen thoroughly enough to be effective.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of military action - my whole point was that military doesn't work, and policing is practically impossible, so we have to turn to options that might work, which looks like a political solution to me.

#35 said, "Capitulation will eliminate any motivation for terrorist groups to continue to exist."

Capitulation in regard to what, exactly? For one to use this logic train, one first has to consider the original behavior (terrorism) as a rational, forgone response to the cause (define the cause). To justify terrorism as a legitimate response means it has won. If that’s the model we are going to use in our reality, then we might as just conclude the United States, or any other nation that wants to flex its muscles is justified in doing so, no matter what.

@#40 thanks Boba Fett Diop - There it is in a nutshell.

I think the strangest days in each president's life are when they receive their first full briefings. Briefings that will possibly leave little room to act.

Imagine sitting there next January between a irock and a hard place with everyone staring at you after they've asked, what is your decision Mr. President.

#42 - (life, the universe, etc.) The FBI is in Pakistan

Actually, the FBI frequently works in cooperation with a number of foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and travels overseas in an advisory role. They also have a foreign presence through the Legal Attache program. Whether they do a good enough job at this remains to be seen.

The CIA is prevented by statute from domestically spying on US citizens. Whether they still hold to these restrictions also remains to be seen.

Ladies and gentlemen!

The universe has solved itself. Everything is now at its logical conclusion. The Rand corporation and Noam Chomsky are in perfect agreement. If I may quote Dr. Chomsky:
“The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it,”

makes sense .... and to get people to drive the speed limit, we need to remove all posted speed limits.

Whoa, no one has said to stop investigating, arresting, and prosecuting criminals for criminal activities.

Heh, yeah, my angles were way off. I was laying on my side while reading the blog?

Noam seems brilliant in some regards and retarded in others. We should all refuse to “participate” in the drama, and then the drama will go away. All we need to do is look the other way, then all those poor SOBs in those prison camps will fade away into the miasma of the “non-participant culture.” I should have been so enlightened before I decided to be a marine. We should let the bad guys win, and then the drama will be over. And if you were a Jew in a Nazi prison camp, well, sorry, but the allied forces were too busy not participating in Hilter’s little drama. Noam sounds like he’s made a profound discovery—he’s discovered what it’s like to be a coward. Let’s all clap and go off and eat some cake. Death by chocolate, please.

Um... *cough* ... ahem... Should read Cow's links

Does anyone actually think we're trying to eradicate AQ?

Really?

If we do, what world threat justifies our military budget (larger than the rest of the world, combined).

I had a professor in 1995 tell me that islamic terrorists were the next "other", since the cold war was over and we needed the Russians oil to be on the world market. He nailed it.

"Beware the military industrial complex" ring true these days - and only one of our two candidates is part of that complex.

Agreed. Noam Chomsky is an idiot.
Takuan's first post had it right, only muslims can end this madness... or rather, someone else can end extremist islamic practices.
Until such incomplete philosophies of deficit and death end, until the uneducated stop wishing for a return to the 4th century, the rest of the world will just have to continue policing.

In response to Jeff @#28 - Sorry it took so long to find this in the report. I've excised as much as possible, I hope I've not changed the author's intent.

Some have argued that history has little to offer, since al Qa’ida’s global breadth and decentralized organizational structure make it somewhat different from many other terrorist organizations, even religious ones.

But this is not true.

While al Qa’ida is different from many other terrorist organizations because of its global reach, its modus operandi is not atypical. Like other groups, its members need to communicate with each other, raise funds, build a support network, plan and execute attacks, and establish a base (or bases) of operation. Most of these nodes are vulnerable to penetration by police and intelligence agencies.

Indeed, its organizational structure makes it vulnerable to a policing and intelligence strategy.

As Mark Sageman argued, the most effective tools to defeating al Qa’ida and the global Salafi jihad “simply amount to good police work.”

Some will think this idea is counter-intuitive, but it makes perfect sense to me. It's like fighting an ant infestation in your house-- poison will only work for a short time, and you can't go around stomping on them one by one; clean up the house so there is no food for them to come looking for. People don't become suicide bombers when they see they have a good future to look forward to.

"What happens to a dream deferred?"

For you guys saying that AQ is just exists in our minds, did we imagine 9/11? Is our perception of the threat overblown? You can argue that. Is our reaction too much? again, arguable. Is the threat totally imaginary? nly f y hv yr hd shvd p yr ss.

Out the gate, the Bush administration has been a failure at everything it tried (except dismantling the constitution, at which it has been rather successful). The fact that Bush bumped up Republican congressional numbers in '02 and '04, and got reelected in '04, based on fear-mongering and the cowardly smearing of heroes such as Max Cleland, is morally criminal. So yes, the "war on terror" as waged by Bush has been primarily a war for domestic political power.

That said, my concern is that there is something like a "Moore's law" for destructive power. Put another way, I fear we are heading toward a future where even a single person could, without much effort, kill millions.

Ok, before you go looking for the tinfoil hat on my head, here is the logic: Ten thousand years ago, killing even ten people was a difficult, highly risky task done hand-to-hand. A thousand years ago, it might have been done slightly more easily with arrows. A hundred years ago, there were bombs or revolvers that could do it, and it become not uncommon for one or two people to kill a dozen others. By 1927, a single person was able to kill 44 people and himself with bombs at the Bath School. By 1995, a couple of domestic terrorists were able to kill 168 people in Oklahoma City. By 2001, a dozen terrorists were able to kill thousands of people and inflict economic damage in the billions.

So the question is: What happens if the equipment and instructions for genetically engineering a hybrid of ebola virus and the flu are so simple and easily available they they can be ordered from e-bay? What happens if cold fusion is finally achieved using materials available at radio shack?

Science fiction writers frequently imagine a world where a single person can create enormous damage, but inevitably require that person to hold some special skills. In the real world, the people with those skills eventually share what they discover with the world, making it possible for anyone to inflict the same harm without needing the skills.

The best analogy I see is with computer viruses. It used to be that programming a virus was hard, and only a very few people had that talent. Of those, even fewer were willing to use that talent for evil. Researchers continued to publish information about viruses and how viruses worked. That research and information was packaged into virus assembly programs. Now any 12 year old unskilled "script kiddie" (I know, old term) can download virus building tools and use them to build a virus quickly.

I fear we will one day hit the point where today's unskilled serial killer can employ similar off-the-shelf technology to kill on a genocidal scale. If that happens, we will look back at this time and wonder why we were too busy stopping photographers and pulling water bottles out of carry on luggage to see the real threat.

I'm quite sure the current "war on terror" won't work against these new threats. But I'm also sure that policing and politics are insufficient on their own. Whatever approach we take to preventing a repeat of past tragedies must be supplemented by a war on mental illness, poverty, and hopelessness. These would go a long way to reducing the number of people who snap and pick up the increasingly destructive tools that scientific progress seems to inevitably spawn.

#54 posted by Versh:

Noam Chomsky is an idiot.

Great argument with lots of backup, Versh. See if I can halp your case against this idiot here..

This idiot has received honorary degrees from universities around the world, including:

-University of London
-University of Chicago
-Loyola University of Chicago
-Swarthmore College
-Delhi University
-Bard College
-University of Massachusetts
-University of Pennsylvania
-Georgetown University
-Amherst College
-Cambridge University
-University of Buenos Aires
-McGill University
-Universitat Rovira i Virgili
-Columbia University
-Villanova University
-University of Connecticut
-University of Maine
-Scuola Normale Superiore
-University of Western Ontario
-University of Toronto
-Harvard University
-Universidad de Chile
-University of Bologna
-Universidad de la Frontera
-University of Calcutta
-Universidad Nacional de Colombia
-Vrije Universiteit Brussel
-Santo Domingo Institute of Technology
-Uppsala University
-University of Athens
-University of Cyprus

This idiot ranks with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the 10 most quoted sources in the humanities - and is the only idiot among them still alive.

One of this idiot's staunchest critics, the philosopher Hilary Putnam, acknowledged that reading this idiot was to be "struck by a sense of great intellectual power; one knows one is encountering an extraordinary mind" ...

When the New York Times called this idiot "arguably the most important intellectual alive today", the writer continued: "[So] how can he write such terrible things about American foreign policy?"

This idiot was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. The idiot reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls".

What an idiot he is... : /

The 911 hijackers were many things, but they were not ignorant, nor were they a bunch of sad-sacks with deferred dreams.

These guys were brainwashed by religion. Muslims will never stop this, moderate Muslims enable these activities. Not all fundies come from fundamentalist homes. Moderate mommies and daddies plant the seeds, which are then nurtured, read exploited, by others for their own purposes.

Until mommies and daddies of any religious persuasion stop this abusive brainwashing of their own children this shit will continue until the end times.

To once again paraphrase Sam Harris, the 911 hijackers showed a religious people what it really means to believe in god.

@#57 BoingBoing Ate My Name:
I think Mr.">http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events">Mr. Cory Doctorow has something to say about this!

No one is saying that terrorism is imaginary, or that people with violent ideologies don't exist. We should realize, however, that their influence is exaggerated (both in the sense of its being overstated and that it increases when it hits the spotlight - or when the bombs start falling. Strange that those can have similar effects on politics...)

#54 Versh

Agreed. Noam Chomsky is an idiot, and everyone who has ever read anything by him is a moran.

Also, can this not turn into a debate over Noam Chomsky, please?

Is the threat totally imaginary?

No, but is the reaction totally proportional?

Only if you have your head shoved up your ass.

That's classy. You reek of fear.

#55, You can reduce all human group dynamics to the basics of communication. So yes, contemporary terrorism can be compared to many similar systems. But unfortunately our history can not show us a time when the pathology of culture has been combined with so much readily available communications and weapons technology. If terrorism is going to become a greater fact of life than it already is, then using every bit of advanced technology at our disposal to fight with seems to be a logical tactic. IMHO. Anything else would seem pitifully Luddite.

#61 No one is saying that terrorism is imaginary

I guess you skipped the earlier parts of this discussion?

GaryS - Out the gate, the Bush administration has been a failure at everything it tried (except dismantling the constitution, at which it has been rather successful).

What makes you think everything else wasn't just a distraction to keep us all busy fighting for our own pet issues.

Is our reaction too much? again, arguable.

Our response to 9/11 was swift and powerful and completely destroyed the wrong target. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Still doesn't. Never did. Never will.

Was that too much? Hell yes.

And when you get a military force occupying a land against the people's wills, and more and more of those people are willing to fight the occupiers, do you know what you get?

The Boston Massacre.

Back in 1770, British troops were occupying a British colony in Massachusettes, trying to protect the loyalists from the colonial resistance to British rule, especially the Townshend Acts which were unpopular taxes in the colonies.

An argument over whether a british officer owed a Boston wigmaker some money expanded into a larger standoff with gawkers and uninvolved spectators. Some kids threw snowballs, and a british solder, Private White, responded by hitting the wigmaker in the side of the head with a musket. Another British officer saw this and sent in several more British soldiers with fixed bayonets intending to relieve White and extract him. The mob grew and circled around Private White, until there were 300 or 400 colonists in a semicircle around White and about 12 British soldiers with bayonets.

At this point, the colonists were goading the British to fire, and throwing snowballs and rocks at the troops. Someone threw a club at one British solder, Private Montgomery, and knocked him over. When he got up, Montgomery shouted "Fire" as he shot his musket into the crowd. After a pause, the troops fired into the civilians, hitting eleven people. Three died instantly, two died days later, the rest wounded.

250 years later, that moment is still remembered in the US as a moment that showed the British use of force in the colonies as doing nothing but galvanizing the colonists against the British.

How many Boston Massacres have we had in Iraq? Do you think if we have a bunch more, it'll make things better?

The point isn't whether we imagined 9/11 or not. The point is whether military invasion of an uninvolved, sovereign nation is the best response to 9/11. The poitn is that any military operation involving an occupation in foreign lands among increasingly hostile civilians is neccessarily going to create Boston Massacre-like incidents. The point is the longer we stay, the more of those types of incidents we create.

Five civilians. That's all it was. Five colonists who were killed by the British. ANd they were part of an unruly mob goading and harrassing the British troops. And yet, we remember it 250 years later as an example of how horrible the occupying British were and how right our fight for independence was.

You think we're the only people who think that way? Do you think if we switch uniforms, and we're the occupiers and the Iraqi civlians are throwing rocks and US troops fire and kill five civilians, you think that those left alive won't see it the same way we saw the Boston Massacre?

#66 - I guess you skipped the earlier parts of this discussion?

J'accuse.

#63 posted by James David:

Also, can this not turn into a debate over Noam Chomsky, please?

Sorry, James... but this was inevitable. This Rand study confirms much of what Chomsky has been saying about this "war on terror" all along.

Also, this isn't much of a debate... we've all already established the man is nothing more than an idiot.

#68 - right on!

who's counting?
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9646

#64 Read my post again. I admit that reasonable people can differ as to our reaction to 9/11, but only a total fool would pretend it never happened.
Look at #17 "To destroy al queda we have to destroy it in our imaginations because this is the only place where it exists. "
And #18 "The only thing that can defeat Al Qaeda is education and enlightenment. Al Qaeda only exists in the minds of western politicians and under the beds of the populace."
Im sorry if im not as classy as these guys, but ill take classless over stupid any day.

FOETISNAIL@44: You assume "our president" does any thinking at all. I don't think he even picks his nose without Herr Rove telling him how to go about it. That's like saying Dan Quayle did his own spelling (the few exceptions when he did, it was disastrous.) The first idiot puppet for the MIC (Mil. Indust. Comp.) and proof of concept was the Gipper (does anyone understand this colloquialism? how exactly does one gip?) They learned they could prop the likable old fart up and it didn't matter what shit streamed from his mouth, America swallowed it (by and large.) Then the former director of the CIA and most likely mastermind of the coup in '63 (Dallas) stepped up to take the reigns himself. Look what a disaster that was. (Cover of Time Magazine: WIMP PRESIDENT.) He didn't need a thinking VP 'cause he was running the show (for the MIC, of course.) All that was needed was a place-holder for appearances.

The best Bush Sr. ever said of his namesake in his memoirs was "an adequate son." Do you think he would have said that if he had had any hope that his C-student cheerleader of a son could legitimately win the highest office in the land? There was no such hope until Karl took him to camp and they started training him to seem presidential. Karl knew that appearance is more important than substance in this world we live in currently. (He used to psyche his debate opponents out with boxes and boxes of empty note-cards on the table, to give the impression he had done tons of research, while he lied through his teeth.) You can't train someone how to think, just how to act. As Eddie Izzard has insightfully elucidated: 90% of what people take in is how someone looks while publicly speaking, and only 10% of it is what is actually said. Anytime he wanders off script he shows what a complete idiot he is. It's easier this way. A thinking president is less likely to be unquestioningly controlled by the MIC, and his smirking ass has more appeal to the bubbas manipulated into voting for him, the "Washington outsider" son of a Bush he is.

But don't get me started...

68 Greg London

Yes, but we're the good guys, so the situation in Iraq is not analogous, because we're the good guys.

The only thing that makes Chomsky an idiot is his inability to make his critics read his work before sounding off that he's an idiot.
The major failing of his writing is to make coherent arguments and back them up with historical fact.
His biggest blunder is being a brilliant polyglot.
Nobody likes a know-it-all.

#73 - No. You're being insulting to no good end, and you're not terribly talented at it.

Nothing in this report contradicts what you are saying, other than your statement that history does not have something from which we can learn.

Further, no one in this thread has said we should not defend ourselves as necessary. While, many are of the opinion that the invasion of Iraq was not only a huge mistake (some like Noam Chomsky would even say it was the criminal act of a terrorist state), but was also so poorly executed that the responsible parties should be removed from office for this alone; no one has yet said we should abandon the Iraqi people to their fate, though I'm sure many favor immediate withdrawal.

I really have trouble understanding where some of these comments come from when this report is rather plainly written. I can only assume many have not yet found the time to read even the most pertinent bits.

also - BBAMN,

"We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them"

Your commentary here is a microcosm of that national truth about the USA. Good day.

BoingBoing Ate My Name, I love your name! So, Bush seems a bit stupid from time to time. But, as I've spent years reading about other presidents, Kings and Dictators, I've come to the conclusion that they're all prone to being stupid. Each and every one of them. It's not so much George's problem (I think we would all love to play President), but the people who just kept giving him what he wanted. There is a lot of blame to go around.

I don't believe I got you started, I was merely trying to describe how our next president (whom I can't mention because of bb's policy of not mentioning candidates if the original post did not do so) will be cornered this coming Jan. between his campaign promises and the reality we only imagine.

Sorry for any confusion, but you will find we are in agreement.

#76 posted by NumberSix:

The major failing of his writing is to make coherent arguments and back them up with historical fact.

Yeah, facts are for dumbshits.

#77 Well, im new at this so give me some time and ill be able to insult with the best of them. I am kind of curious about your "no" response, are you saying no to my whole post, or just parts of it? Do you agree with #17 and 18?

Oh yeah, and don't forget that during the debates with Kerry, they pulled a Cyrano De Bergerac with a wireless earphone so Karl could do all the talking.

Good news! The House Judiciary Committee just voted to hold Rove in contempt of Congress (finally) for refusing to testify in the firing of the nine federal judges because they didn't tow the fascist line.

FOETUSNAIL@81: Indeed. I see we agree, I just don't like any perpetuating of the myth that this guy does his own thinking (too much of that going on in the mainstream press.)

BBAMN - "No" I won't offer you the good faith act of going back to understand your point. Your insults show a lack of respect for the other commenters here. That may well have been earned by them, but you can express it better I suspect.

Shorter: Throwing dirt loses you ground.

Take a break and try again later.

GREGLONDON@68: Good point. The US was founded by terrorism. I wonder if this was accounted for in the equation (under political resolution, I suppose.)

#79 Im sorry in what way? My comments in this thread have been mostly on the line of "9/11 happened, people disagree as to how to respond"

#80 Thank you, yes. More importantly we should understand how much power the random dipshit who is president wields. Thats the real problem, not that George W Bush is a moron but that any moron who gets himself elected can do the shit that W did. As it stands now, we give the executive in particular and government in general an extreme amount of power and hope they dont abuse it.

Oy! Can we get back to vilifying the public figures instead of each other, please?

BAMN@88: But he is a moron.
ANT@89: bwahahahahaha!

#86 Ok fine, ill take a break. For the record, i never said "We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them" you put those words in my mouth.

As for respect, when you said "you reek of fear" my first response was "you reek of deez nutz" but i realized that i wasent making an actual point so i deleted it.

I know you didn't. I was quoting my bumper sticker.

"you reek of deez nutz" would have been a great retort!!! Seriouslu, that's much more BB style than just calling people idiots and fools.

I look forward to your return, and some well reasoned discussion. Thank you for listening, and apologies for my playing moderator.

FOETIS: The confusion was all mine. You did clearly type "next january." For some reason I thought you were talking about when this debacle began.

Thanks Phikus

It seems that RAND is talking about traditional "terrorist groups" that have a specific political goal in mind related to a sovereign nation's political circumstances (IRA, FRELIMO in Mozambique, TAMIL Tigers in Sri Lanka, etc.). In most cases there is a gradual transitioning from direct confrontation to conversation and conversion of goals to a somewhat more acceptable middle ground position that can be attained. This can take as little as a decade or nearly a century as the government in power exhausts several approaches of dealing with the terrorists - usually starting with a police response at the inception to military intervention to a return of police efforts as headway is made. The society at large typically transitions as well in accepting modified demands in exchange for peace.

In the Middle East there are the al Qaeda and the Taliban. It seems that the Taliban are more of a insurgency focused on overthrowing a national government. They intermix terror attacks with small group military actions. A military response seems to be a logical defensive approach at this stage. Co-opting them into a power sharing arrangement will probably be the end result of the struggle in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda on the other hand has a broader stated goal of not only forcing the withdrawal of US and other Western military and civil forces in the Middle East, but the rolling back of the Western social and legal model. Nation states are relevant only as stepping stones along the path toward a general undermining of non-Muslim cultures. I sincerely doubt that the targets of this group will succeed often enough in infiltrating al Qaeda to make any meaningful headway against it. Nor is traditional police work likely to win the struggle. Al Qaeda benefits from rogue leadership in Pakistan's NW Frontier region providing santuary for their camps and training centers. Sympathetic governmental elements exist elsewhere as well.

Given the global nature of the group and its devotees, a large number of unconnected cells have appeared around the world. They share a common goal and tactics but most seem to operate autonomously. While some have benefited from training provided by al Qaeda, killing bin Laden will not bring the terror web down - bin Laden only serves mostly as an inspirational figure rather than operational director to groups in Africa, Asia, Europe and elsewhere.

I fear that we will see on a larger scale the exhaustion process played out. Finally, Muslims and non-Muslims alike will tire of the endless violence. More "moderate" terrorists will gain internal influence in some terror groups and bargains will be struck. (See recent decisions made in the UK for examples.) As a first step, I expect that sharia law and councils will eventually be permitted with segments within those Western societies (initially Muslim communities) "voluntarily" submitting to their role with government acquiesence. We will see freedom of expression and behavior governmentally constrained as a trade-off for peace. Next a UN sponsored Treaty of Religious Diversity and Rights will be fashioned to require such changes and nations will sign it. Broadening political, religious, and legal influence will follow under the implicit threat of more violence. It will be the beginning of the end of liberal Western culture as w