Iraq:
Withdraw?
Stay the Course?
Negotiate?
Well, there's no one to negotiate with, is there?
The only choices then are to succeed in establishing a self-sufficient, democratic Iraq or to call an abject retreat that not only gives Iraq over to the tender mercies of people who specialize in blowing up innocents, but makes it a base of operations for worldwide jihad.
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The appeal to imagined grievance and promise of an Islamist utopia made Al Qaeda a regional power in a Middle East where political options were denied by tyrants.
The terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon made Al Qaeda a global power.
9/11/01 was their international advertising campaign.
Now, Al Qaeda remains only a strategic power.
In ever other measure of power and success, Al Qaeda is weak.
Its military limitations are obvious.
Gen. John Abizaid: Al Qaeda has yet to win a military engagement with U.S. forces at or above the platoon level. (A platoon has approximately 30 troops.)
Imagined grievance and the promise of a jihadi Utopia are Al Qaeda’s political platform.
In the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden said Al Qaeda’s main goal was restoring the Islamic caliphate.
Bin Laden expressed hatred for Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who ended the Islamic caliphate in 1924.
History, going wrong for Islamist supremacists at least since the 16th century, really failed when the caliphate dissolved.
Though Al Qaeda’s timeline to Utopia remains deliberately hazy, once the caliphate returns, the decadent modern world will fade, as Western power collapses.
At some point, bin Laden-interpreted Islamic law will bring strict bliss to the entire world.
If this sounds vaguely like a Marxist “Workers Paradise,” that’s no accident —bin ladin was schooled in a Marxist version of Islam and the communists justified the murder of millions pursuing their atheist Utopia.
Terrorism as practiced by Al Qaeda is 21st century information warfare.
Terrorists don’t simply target London and Baghdad, they target the news media.
Al Qaeda understands that our news media craves the spectacular.
But don’t place all the blame on headline writers and TV producers.
Violence sells, (if it bleeds, it leads) and Al Qaeda has suckered audiences by providing hideous violence.
At the moment, the truly biggest story on the planet is democratic political change in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq.
It’s huge history.
It's a looming political disaster for tyrants and terrorists.
If and when Western audiences decide that this is the real news of our era — and it is that — Al Qaeda will be dealt a death blow.
Terrorists are a very small group of people and a politically weak organization.
So what makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong?
In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists’ capabilities.
This suggests that winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately means accomplishing two things: denying the terrorists’ weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is currently Al Qaeda’s greatest strategic capability: media magnification and occasional media enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.