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fontman
08-12-06, 08:51 AM
On terror, many still don't get it
The Rocky Mountain News
August 12, 2006

Nearly five years after 9/11, some people still don't know what hit the United States, or why.

If you doubt it, consider the reaction to what could have been a second 9/11-sized slaughter - one that was averted only through the vigilance of British officials and the arrest of at least 41 suspected terrorists this week. Even in Britain, some commentators lost no time in blaming . . . well, let the Daily Telegraph, which was typical in this regard, speak in its own words:

"The global loathing for the United States and its ally, the United Kingdom, has helped corrupt the minds of a generation of disaffected young Muslims," the paper argued, "a process speeded by extremist clerics . . . "

The plotters were unhinged by U.S. foreign policy, in other words - a thesis finding echoes in some quarters in this country, too.

According to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for example, "the British increasingly (have) come to question the price they are paying for Prime Minister Tony Blair's support of the United States militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq and with respect to Israeli actions in Lebanon. . . . how far can America expect Great Britain to go along this path as the price rises for its people, not to mention for domestic travelers in the United States and the American airline industry?"

People who write and say such things can't possibly believe that jihadist terror is the product of 4 1/2 years of war waged by the United States in Afghanistan and then Iraq - no matter how counterproductive or stupid they consider those conflicts to have been.

Otherwise, how could they account for 9/11 itself, or for the host of attacks on U.S. facilities here and abroad stretching back two decades earlier? How would they explain Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the infidel West in the 1990s?

Perhaps they mean to blame the virulent movement of Islamic jihad on the existence of Israel and American support for that state - as if radical Muslims terrorizing their neighbors and trying to impose sharia law in such places as Indonesia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria and even the Netherlands genuinely care a fig about the future of the West Bank.

"There is nothing Americans want more," intoned The New York Times on Friday, "than to win the war on terror, to come to a place where people no longer feel it is a fine thing to forfeit their own lives and the lives of innocents in order to make the world notice their anger and frustration." Do Times editors really believe that fanatics around the world are blowing themselves and others up as a personal cry of frustration and not as a deliberate strategy of offensive warfare?

The United States could withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow and declare that, come to think of it, Hezbollah has a legitimate case against Israel, and the West would still face an enduring and serious threat from what President Bush this week called Islamic fascists.

Those fascists do not merely desire all of the West Bank. They seek all of Israel. They do not desire accommodation with the West. They seek an end to its supremacy. And in those European countries where they exist in large numbers, their long-term goal is to transform those societies into Islamic states.

The struggle to defeat the Islamic extremists will be long and difficult - and not every plot they hatch will be foiled. But the West's ultimate success in the endeavor depends in part on understanding what it is the enemy is after.

OLE SARG
08-12-06, 10:06 AM
Most Americans have a "short memory" when it come to 9/11!!!! That mentality is going to catch up with the United States and its forgetful citizens!!!!!!

SEMPER FI,

bigdog43701
08-12-06, 11:11 AM
ole sarege,

right on.. the American people have a very short memory when it comes to 9/11. osma yomoma has time..he figures he can wait and sooner or later the US will let it's guard down and he and his followers can strike again. then these same people that are *****ing about the tight security measures we have in place will be *****ing about why we made them lax again.

more power to president bush..at least we now have a president that acts instead of mouthing the words when we are attacked.