[rmnunez]

Sonart:

You suspect, or seem fairly certain, just “paying attention” (monitoring better) has effectively prevented another 911, but the DHS and its “ICE” are notoriously prone to screwup. Remember Cat Stevens, the recurring Christmas delays over LA? Combat aircraft are launched to intercept commercial flights all the time over New York and Boston. Transatlantic flights are routinely detoured into delayed flight patterns, stuck on the ground as passenger manifests get held up in countless verifications, additional searches, novel technology misapplications, biased profiling, inadequate training and excited (some think even Bush-induced) paranoia. You think this is effective?

The united statian intelligence community may be better integrated and share information at deeper levels to coordinate and focus under DHS oversight, but this has naturally simply yielded more leads as sources get included. Twenty six or more Federal Criminal and Intelligence entities contributed over 350 thousand Muslim names to their collective database last year, a 15% increase over the previous year’s output, I suspect there are some repetitions. You think false leads from documented mistaken identities, similitudes in spellings, cultural bias and Byzantine bureaucracies have somehow helped make the US safer? How many terrorist attempts have been actually foiled thanks to the disclosure of all sorts of outlandish plots derived in many cases from coerced confessions extracted even under torture in documented instances? The critical left tells us few or none. The folks at DHS are now selling the united station over one thousand kilometers of fabulously expensive, but very fancy and sophisticated Israeli prefabricated Muslim repellent walls to keep them from sneaking in via Mexico (which is 98% Catholic, has no terrorists and cultural bias against Muslims).

al-Zarqawi is actually exporting terrorists into neighboring Muslim countries.

This is fine and dandy, neighboring Muslim countries are within “Desert” in the expression “better in the desert than…” Better over there, part of the new military dynamic is taking hell to them, rather than letting them get near.

Which is exactly why they rely on roadside bombs, hide behind mosques, women and children, and melt away whenever our military mounts a major offensive. They have no intention of fighting our military straight up. That would be real suicide.

Terrorist attacks in other Muslim countries are a net benefit if this is a religious war, given the diversity of their nationality, more terrorists in Damascus, Aman, Islamabad and Jakarta is still better than more 911-like events over western capitals. For the insurgency in Iraq, each time a slew of compatriots gets slaughtered they lose human capital from which to gain adepts. Is the generalized fear and despair of the civilian population more productive of recruits? With more Muslim terrorists across the region, Islamic fundamentalists hope to destabilize their own local tyrant (probably a united statian puppet if he is ugly enough) so critical lefties should endorse the idea of fostering terrorism in the Middle East, particularly since they see it as a hotbed of anti-Zionism and this is the preeminent united station client-state.

But like I said... al-Qaeda is fighting us in Iraq because that's where, in the long run, they can hurt us the most.... by exhausting our military in an never ending war, draining our economy, alienating us from the Muslim world, undermining our global leadership and sapping American confidence in their own government.

A war of attrition? This is an innovative take on terrorism/insurgency tactics. Traditionally the rebel and guerrilla type military confrontations against regular armed forces have applied Che’s “foco” doctrine and concentrated on sudden surprise and mobility to overcome the enemy’s numerical and firepower superiority. Plenty of critical lefties will have you know this is “asymmetrical warfare” and it notoriously involves the ambush and urban warfare. Wars to draw out and sap the strength of an enemy over time require comparable numbers, it’s a game of patience. A fifteen year plan involves all sorts of contingencies and at the rate they are going it will take about 20 more years for the US to reach Vietnam levels.

Terrorism entails intolerance and bloodshed, this is why the Coalitioneers (and sensible leaders in the international community) seek its eradication forcefully.

our military forces stretched to the breaking point in Iraq, exactly what major military attack do you imagine the U.S. could mount?

There are plenty of scenarios; Iran, North Korea and Syria offer potential. The US could easily scramble 70-120 combat jets heavily armed and inflict thousands of casualties, including civilians, from Iraqi installations in any neighboring country. I have no particular insight into their military manpower but would estimate the US could move 50 to 70 thousand more men into combat within 10 days, it wouldn’t take much more than this in Iran, unless Persians predictably are presumed more combative than Arabs and other Muslims have been upon these infidel invasions.

Whoracle:

Maybe I'm missing the point... When exactly was Saddam's hand in the cookie jar during 9/11? ... what did that have to do with the issue at hand? Nada.

You are missing the point, it’s a “war on terrorism” not a “war on those behind 911”. Direct involvement and a hand in 911 itself need not be shown for a terrorist terrorist threat to arise. Even the critical lefties know Al Qaeda is made up of independent cells, each in pursuit of their caliphate using whatever resources they can draw from and the circumstances of their environment.

Saddam's ties to terrorism have been documented and there certainly are terrorists deployed in Iraq now. Recently released military intelligence indicated Saddam trained most of the captured insurgents/terrorists in Iraq.

How can you expect to win a war of this magnitude. Religion/Attrition makes for quite different circumstances than standard warfare.

This is not a war of great magnitude, a couple thousand casualties in three years is not an enormity, with due regard to the fine men and women lost in the effort. We need to know how many insurgents/terrorists have been killed. The Mosque raid produced about 20 terrorist casualties, each carbomb (sometimes there are more than one on a given day) typically involves at least 1 dead terrorist. I think the average is over 2 insurgents/terrorists per day, so they probably would need about 140 thousand jihadees over the next 15 to 20 years. I suppose this won’t be a problem since they have religious motivation, all other things remaining the same (no new military technology and no changes in force deployments or their use).

More blood has been shed in the name of God than any other cause, yet we went headlong into it and are surprised its not yet over.

This is not a religious war for the Coalitioneers, it is only so to the jihadees, their Islamic fundamentalist leadership, and the critical lefty peanut gallery.

the gloves are off, but the gloves are theirs not ours. Sure we have the means and the firepower, but what does that really get us when they actually look forward to death? It's almost impossible to gain the upper hand in that situation.

Not at all, the variables over an extended war of attrition are numerous. Some of the more readily recognized include civilian to military casualty ratios, pace of reconstruction, stability of government, regularization of local forces and border security. An “upper hand” may be gained through improvements in any of these. The Coalitioneers have managed to reconstitute a 50 thousand man Iraqi regular force with all sorts of tactical capabilities, some think they may even have rapid-intervention air-mobiles. The Coalitioneers have identified border access points and can easily deploy more forces there without diminishing their control of occupied areas and current sporadic Sunni triangle initiatives.

Meanwhile...where the fuck is Osama? Or did I miss that point as well?

Yes again, you missed the point, OBL is probably bunkered in some hidden cave near or in the disputed Indo-Pakistani Kashmir region. The status quo, with OBL safely contained within this no-man’s land of indeterminate jurisdiction allows him to recruit anxious aspiring martyrs through sporadic rants. The cream of the crop among these well-motivated jihadees are propelled to attack the infidels, especially their military in Iraq. Thanks to the timely disclosure of the depraved and humiliating torture of their brethren, martyrs are better animated to take on the armed Coalitioneers in Iraq. This is an advantageous strategy for Coalitioneers to follow given a preference for taking the war to them.

Arabic-speaker Professor Gilles Kepel, one of France's leading experts on al Qaeda, published last week "Al Qaeda dans le Texte," an analysis of the public and (intercepted) private utterances of the two Z's -Ayman al-Zawahri (Osama bin Laden's No. 2) and Abu Musab Zarqawi, al Qaeda's insurgency honcho in Iraq. Stripped if its complexities, al Qaeda's strategy, Mr. Kepel explains, is to defeat the US in Iraq, use this victory to roll over traditional oil-rich regimes in the Gulf that are security wards of the US, and then focus on Israel.

http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/...3951-9939r.htm