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Originally Posted by Botnst
But like Brian said, they are patient. They will survive the current assault even if we keep pressuring them for decades and kill all of the top leadership. Because the Al Quedistas recognize that they are in a multigenerational conflict and that God is on their side. They view western civilization as just another crusade to defeat in the name of Islam.
But degrading them does allow us (the world) to work on the other side of our strategy--modernization and democratization of the Islamic world. People who are free to choose their own destiny are far less likely to feel powerlessness against The Great Satan.
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That's the point. Despite their much-lauded patient "centuries long war" perspective, radical Islam is a movement of the last 20-30 years, rising at a certain time in response to a specific set of circumstances. The "War on Terrorism" has denied the core funding/training/co-ordinating elements (Bin Laden, Zawahiri, etc.) a hassle-free training zone to pass on the lessons they learned a decade before in Afghanistan, and to teach the specific tools of the terrorist trade. Eventually, the highly trained guys are dead, and the enthusiastic young bucks enraged by Iraq, etc., are sent into battle of whatever sort without much training, and are either arrested or turned into chum for target practice - the same thing happened to the pre-war British regulars in 1914 and the Wehrmacht in 1943. The decentralized nature of Al Qaeda keeps the core leaders safe with no trail to them, but also ensures that junior cells with little training are broken up on a regular basis for making stupid rookie mistakes. In the meantime, times change and so does the middle east. Al Qaeda failed to launch the spontaneous uprisings against "lackey regimes" it planned throughout the region - if the "success" of 9/11 and the Afghan and Iraqi invasions didn't do it, nothing is likely to, since we've put the fear of "Psycho George" (and the jihadis) into a bunch of regimes that were previously fairly tolerant of this crap, and the real WOT has to be waged by those regimes internally, not by us. Within a decade or two, things will change enough that Radical Islam will be as outdated and silly as radical 60s Marxism is today, and old jihadis will be sitting around cafes talking about the good old days and spouting slogans that only they believe.