I think AQ needs to be confronted and defeated; I am just not convinced our current campaign will work.

There’s no doubt our current campaign won’t achieve the GOAL of keeping America safe from terrorist attack.

It is estimated that 5-10% of Muslims are of the radical fundamentalist variety. And there are 1.3 billion Muslims in the world. Do the math. That gives al-Qaeda a pool of at least 65 million Muslims to draw from, to bamboozle and scam into becoming terrorists. With a pool that large, we could be fighting terrorists for 500 years and never finish.

We have to turn off this tap once and for all. I regard the way al-Qaeda sucks young Muslim men into terrorism as analogous to the way that drug pushers suck young men into drug addiction. And we have to deal with it in the same way: Education at a young age; Propaganda campaigns; involving Muslim parents; community action; etc.

During the Cold War, when I was in junior high school, we kids were required to study Das Kapital and other Marxist works. The reason was you had to KNOW YOUR ENEMY, and not be bamboozled by Commie lies. Our teachers taught us the lies and fallacies of Communism.

We haven’t done anything like that for the War on Terror. Our people remain largely ignorant of the enemy we’re fighting.

Using the Taliban metaphor maybe she should have bombed Boston which is where a lot of IRA money came from

Don’t laugh.

If the IRA had killed thousands in a single blow in Britain, Thatcher would have demanded that the U.S. crack down on NORAID, which fulfilled the same role for the IRA that CAIR does for the Muslim Brotherhood: NORAID masqueraded as a charity, but in reality was a front for terrorists. (The local talk-shows here in Boston used to deconstruct NORAID, but the politicians didn’t listen.) And the President (Clinton or Bush) would have acceded to her demand.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAID
And Thatcher would certainly have called out the British army to invest Northern Ireland in force. There’s no way a Prime Minister of Britain could look past an attack of a size comparable to 9-11.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091124/ap_on_re_us/us_census_worker_hanged;_ylt=Ag4n3Lx7LlTF8W9tixB55VqzvtEF;_ylu=X3oDMTJxMWJvN2NmBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkxMTI0L3VzX2NlbnN1c193b3JrZXJfaGFuZ2VkBGNwb3MDNwRwb3MDNwRzZWMDeW5fdG9wX3N0b3JpZXMEc2xrA3BvbGljZWt5Y2Vucw

“Al-Quaida knew they could never confront our conventional forces; so they used terrorism as the only viable tactic. The COIN strategy is to avoid the “asymmetrical war”- to avoid repeating the mistakes of Vietnam where we used a conventional army against a guerilla campaign.

I think AQ needs to be confronted and defeated; I am just not convinced our current campaign will work.”

You are 100% right, you cant fight these people using conventional war. The problem is our military high command seem to be still geared to fight the Cold war Soviets.

In this sort of “dirty” war you use the tactics of the enemy, you fight in short bursts with surprise attacks using good intelligence. I am sure we are doing that in part. However we are also using big armed forces which then tend to be easy targets for an insurgent force to attack.

I was watching a film the other note of the war of independence. Originally the militia was used the same way as the normal foot soldiers, They basically marched toward the enemy engaged and it was a crap shoot with horrible losses. Then they got smart and fought an insurgent campaign. It worked.

In 1939, the US Army was very small, and weak; I think we had less military power than Albania, if I read right.
Germany and Japan raised huge conventional armies, on the reasonable premise that their conventional forces could defeat our conventional forces. We built our conventional war machine specifically to fight theirs. The French for instance, had lost that ability; so they set about a guerilla campaign of bombings and assasination- what we would call terrorism.

Al-Quaida knew they could never confront our conventional forces; so they used terrorism as the only viable tactic. The COIN strategy is to avoid the “asymmetrical war”- to avoid repeating the mistakes of Vietnam where we used a conventional army against a guerilla campaign.

I think AQ needs to be confronted and defeated; I am just not convinced our current campaign will work.