Not really. But your lack of response makes me think you subscribe to the philosophy that “arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics: even if you win, you’re still retarded”. It’s okay; I’m used to getting that as a response.

In the post that you provided as evidence that there is a hero-worship cult of bin Laden among Leftists, you quoted Kos.

In that quite, Kos calls bin Laden a “a mass murderer, a liar, a propagandist, a monster,” and “a sadistic manipulator.”

Sounds like he loves him!

Kos also says that he does not believe that US foreign policy should be formulated solely or explicitly on what bin Laden wants us to do. I agree. The argument that we should be in Iraq because bin Laden doesn’t want us to be there, or that we should vote for Bush because he said not to, are very bad reasons for doing these things. If they’re the only reason for doing things, then Osama bin Laden would, by definition, by running US policy.

Or do you disagree? Do you disagree with the idea that if the only reason we did something was that bin Laden said “don’t do it” that bin Laden would be telling us what to do?

On to Kos…

Disclaimer: I’ve never read Kos. I think I saw him on the Colbert Report for about two seconds, but that’s pretty much the extent of it.

Let’s see…Osama bin Laden releases statements in which he says he wants the US to leave Iraq. Bush cites this as evidence for why we need to stay. Kos is right to attack this. While obviously our policies are a reaction to what bin Laden does, we should never do something simply because bin Laden wants or doesn’t want us to do it.

Case in point: bin Laden releases a statement right before the November 2004 election in which he says that we have our security “in our own hands.”

Conservatives assume this means that bin Laden is threatening them: if you vote for Bush, we will attack you.

Conservatives respond with: well, if bin Laden doesn’t want us voting for Bush, then certainly it is a good idea to vote for Bush!

Even Bush himself has commented on this.

But this is lunacy. If bin Laden came out and said “don’t ever leave Iraq, I want you to stay forever, please?” the appropriate response should be “we’ll do what we want based on our calculations of our interests,” not “bin Laden wants us to stay! Obviously we should leave!”

And, if you want to get technical, yes, it is metaphorical, unless you really believe that US foreign policy is literally in the form of a giant compass.

But Grackle, you’re still doing a really, really bad job of defending your thesis that a cult exists among the Left that worships bin Laden as a hero.

So far, you have one misread op-ed in the Times, and you have a paragraph from Kos in which he argues that we should not do things just because bin Laden doesn’t want us to do them, and vice versa.

Nice cult you have there. Two guys, both of whom you seem to have misread.

Or do you disagree with Kos? Do you think that if bin Laden says “don’t leave Iraq,” that we should leave Iraq?

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/3/20/93219/3253

Spanky, does the above look metaphorical to you?

I take it you haven’t read Pape’s work; you just read about him in blogs, right?

Actually, no, I’ve never even seen Pape mentioned in a blog. I haven’t read his ‘works,’ either, which probably encompasses several books & a boatload of articles. What I read was the NYT op ed article.

WHILE we don’t yet know who organized the terrorist attacks in London on Thursday, it seems likely that they were the latest in a series of bombings, most of them suicide attacks, over the past several years by Al Qaeda and its supporters. Although many Americans had hoped that Al Qaeda has been badly weakened by American counterterrorism efforts since Sept. 11, 2001, the facts indicate otherwise. Since 2002, Al Qaeda has been involved in at least 17 bombings that killed more than 700 people — more attacks and victims than in all the years before 9/11 combined.

To make sense of this campaign, I compiled data on the 71 terrorists who killed themselves between 1995 and 2004 in carrying out attacks sponsored by Osama bin Laden’s network. I was able to collect the names, nationalities and detailed demographic information on 67 of these bombers, data that provides insight into the underlying causes of Al Qaeda’s suicide terrorism and how the group’s strategy has evolved since 2001.

Most important, the figures show that Al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.

As the chart at the upper right shows, the overwhelming majority of attackers are citizens of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries in which the United States has stationed combat troops since 1990. Of the other suicide terrorists, most came from America’s closest allies in the Muslim world — Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco — rather than from those the State Department considers ”state sponsors of terrorism” like Iran, Libya, Sudan and Iraq. Afghanistan produced Qaeda suicide terrorists only after the American-led invasion of the country in 2001. The clear implication is that if Al Qaeda was no longer able to draw recruits from the Muslim countries where there is a heavy American combat presence, it might well collapse.

As the large chart at the center of the page shows, what is common among the attacks is not their location but the identity of the victims killed. Since 2002, the group has killed citizens from 18 of the 20 countries that Osama bin Laden has cited as supporting the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is good evidence that this shift in Al Qaeda’s scheme was the product of deliberate choice. In December 2003, the Norwegian intelligence service found a lengthy Qaeda planning document on a radical Islamic Web site that described a coherent strategy for compelling the United States and its allies to leave Iraq. It made clear that more spectacular attacks against the United States like those of 9/11 would be insufficient, and that it would be more effective to attack America’s European allies, thus coercing them to withdraw their forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and increasing the economic and military burdens that the United States would have to bear.

In particular, the document weighed the advantages of attacking Britain, Poland and Spain, and concluded that Spain in particular, because of the high level of domestic opposition to the Iraq war, was the most vulnerable.

”It is necessary to make utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain in March next year,” the document stated. ”We think that the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows, after which it will have to withdraw as a result of popular pressure. If its troops still remain in Iraq after these blows, then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured, and the withdrawal of the Spanish forces will be on its electoral program.”

That prediction, of course, proved murderously prescient. Yet it was only one step in the plan: ”Lastly, we emphasize that a withdrawal of the Spanish or Italian forces from Iraq would put huge pressure on the British presence, a pressure that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly.”

No matter who took the bombs onto those buses and subways in London, the attacks are clearly of a piece with Al Qaeda’s post-9/11 strategy. And while we don’t know if the claim of responsibility from a group calling itself the Secret Organization of Al Qaeda in Europe was legitimate, an understanding of Al Qaeda’s strategic logic may help explain why that message included a threat of further attacks against Italy and Denmark, both of which contributed troops in Iraq.

The bottom line, then, is that the terrorists have not been fundamentally weakened but have changed course and achieved significant success. The London attacks will only encourage Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders in the belief that they will succeed in their ultimate aim: causing America and its allies to withdraw forces from the Muslim world.

Pape’s arguement is that suicide terrorism, as a tactic, has nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism. He did this by looking at every example of suicide terrorism going back to 1980 and looking for trends.

One trend that he found was that suicide terrorism was mostly commited by non-Muslims and by secular nationalist groups.

Do you understand that this does not imply that al Qaeda is not a fundamentalist jihadi group? Do you understand that when Pape says “suicide terrorism does not have anything to do with Islamic fundamentalism,” that he is not saying “al Qaeda has nothing to do with Islamic fundamentalism?”

I realize that it’s hard, sometimes, to understand that different words mean different things, but it’s true. Pape simply did not say what you are slandering him with.

I’m just really at a loss for words here, Grackle. Do you understand the difference between the cause of an action and the goal of a group?

Pape says: al Qaeda is using suicide terrorism against democracies to compel them to leave Iraq. Their goal is to eject the US from the region.

You read: America causes terrorism.

What? I mean, just…what?

Imagine that you are yelling, and I want you to stop yelling, so I punch you in the face. Did your yelling cause me to punch you in the face? No. Was my goal to get you to stop yelling? Yes.

So if Pape were to say, “Spanky punched Grackle to get him to stop yelling,” this would be fundamentally different from saying “Grackle’s yelling caused Spanky to punch him.”

Maybe this is the core of the problem: Pape has offered an explanation for why al Qaeda is using suicide terrorism that is different from the standard line of “they are Islamofascists who hate freedom and are a death cult and are nihilists and believe in evil Islam and blah blah blah.”

You know what, all that’s true. But it doesn’t explain why they do certain things – explaning things by saying that the actor is evil offers no explanation at all. To say that “X did something evil because X possesses the characteristic of evil” is nothing but a tautology. In attempting to actually understand al Qaeda, it’s worthless.

So Pape offers an explanation based on data analysis rather than truisms, so he’s immediately suspect. And everything else follows from that, doesn’t it? When you begin by approaching Pape with the assumption that Pape loves Osama bin Laden, it becomes a lot easier to misread perfidy into your fantasy version of his article. The reality, though, is different.