Lando 
Posted on 03/18/2004 11:22:01 AM PST by Lando Lincoln
I have said it many times before: the War on Terrorism cannot be won in a day, but it can be lost in one. There can be no more effective demonstration of this dictum than the recent election results in Spain. For all that we fear it; al-Qaeda’s actual forces are so small that, if they were to attempt to fight a traditional open battle, they would probably be destroyed by a single Spanish brigade. Yet it was al-Qaeda that beat Spain. Already their propagandists are crowing about the “conquest of Madrid” and proclaiming a truce to allow Spain to bend to its will. The cowardly reaction of a plurality of the Spanish people will bring a hundred times as many recruits to the ranks of our enemies as the Iraq War did. Only a very small percentage of people are willing to volunteer to die in a doomed cause. A much larger percentage is willing to fight in a victorious one. The spin-offs of the defeat of Spain will provide more evidence to prove one of Donald Rumsfeld’s famous rules: weakness is provocative.
In one of his post 9-11 missives, Osama Bin Laden explained that, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse.” This is a comment that has never received the attention it truly deserves. It is, in my opinion, the key to answering the question of why 9-11 happened.
September 11th didn’t happen because America was too strong, or because it supported Israel, or because it placed sanctions on Iraq, or because it had troops in Saudi Arabia: it happened because al-Qaeda thought that America was weak. While it is true that all the things I have listed helped to motivate the attackers, they have very little to do with why the attack was planned and took place. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the leaders of Islamism are not insane or irrational. They are, in fact, working towards a very obvious goal: the restoration of Islam to the first rank of powers in the world (and eventually to absolute power) and they are going about that goal in a very specific way.
Step into the mind of Osama Bin Laden for a moment and look at the history of relations between Islam and the West during the 1980’s and 1990’s. When Iranian radicals took the personnel of the US embassy hostage, the United States did not respond with any sort of real force. When Hezbollah bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, the Americans launched a few ineffectual attacks and then withdrew. When they bombed the World Trade Centre, the Khobar Towers, the Embassies in Nairobi and Dars-e-Salaam, and the USS Cole the American response was tepid, at best. When they killed eighteen US servicemen in Somalia, the forces were pulled out.
In fact, only twice in that period did the United States respond seriously to acts of Moslem aggression against the West: in 1986 President Reagan authorized the bombing of Libya and in 1991 President Bush launched Operation Desert Storm. However, both of these actions were incomplete, at best. Qadaffi and Saddam remained in power and the United States failed to support anti-Saddam uprisings. After 1991, with the exception of a few wasted Cruise Missiles in 1998, the United States didn’t respond to terrorism at all, except to run from it in Somalia. The one major war of the Clinton years was waged in such an obsessively casualty-adverse way that it became something of a pathetic spectacle.
Now, if you were Bin Laden, what would you conclude from this? I’d conclude that the United States was weak, unwilling to spill blood. They’d fight if pushed hard enough, but they’d run away after a few deaths. The series of al-Qaeda attacks through the last decade of the 20th century had an obvious purpose: to push America had enough to cause them to cut and run like the Spaniards have. That was the concept of operations on September 11th. Prior attacks, al-Qaeda reasoned, had not made the Americans run because they were so small as to go generally unnoticed by the public at large. So they decided to hit the United States hard, believing that it would respond with vicious rhetoric backed up by a Nerf bat, just as it did during the Clinton years.
The plan is obvious: hit the decadent “Crusaders” enough and they’ll decide that you aren’t worth the trouble of bothering. Once they are gone, you can overthrow all of their puppets in the region and restore the Caliphate. When that is done, Islam can recover its “lost lands” (notably the Kingdom of Andalusia in Spain) and resume its historic march into Europe which was checked at Tours by Charles Martel in 732 and at Vienna by Jan Sobieski in 1683.
Now, this plan may sound a little bit insane, but I’m not so sure. Obviously it sounds foreign but, so far as grand designs go, it seems to be rather simple and well, accomplishable. Certainly, there’s little that would, after a US abandonment of the region, prevent the establishment of a number of Islamist regimes in Middle East. Rising Moslem immigration to Europe would assist in the second part of such a plan. Is it unlikely to be successful? Sure. Impossible? Not particularly. No more impossible than any number of other things which actually happened such as, for example, the original spread of Islam.
The election this November is not between George Bush and John Kerry. Rather, it is between George Walker Bush and Osama Bin Laden. It is blatantly obvious that the major goal of all the enemies of America is the removal of George W. Bush from the White House.
I fully expect to see terror attacks launched, either in the Untied States or aboard, in an effort to unseat the President. I also expect the Democrats to shamelessly seek to capitalize on those attacks as they have already, in the form of Governor Dr. Howard Brush Dean III, attempted to on the attacks in Spain (“it’s all Bush’s fault.”).
But we ought to think back to Rumsfeld’s rules. Weakness is provocative. How could the world take the election of John Forbes Kerry but as a sign of American weakness? How would al-Qaeda take it?
And how did they respond to earlier signs of American weakness? The election of John Kerry would be a boon to terrorist recruiting as Islamists, knowing that they are far less likely to die with that man as President, rush to join what appears to be a victorious cause.
Given this, we must make something clear to the people: a vote for the Democrats this November is a vote for al-Qaeda and all the other enemies of America. By electing a Democrat, you would be sending a signal to the world, “Americans are weak and frightened. Kill us and we will do what you say.” Anyone who votes for, gives money to, or in some other way supports or assists John Kerry will have blood on their hands if he is elected: American blood.
Lando
Lando
Demonicrats are povacative!!! Activists that are never happy with the way America has/is doing things!!!
From GovernMental to EnvironMental!!!
Thanks, Lando ! Excerpt from your jewel of an article:
September 11th didn’t happen because America was too strong, or because it supported Israel, or because it placed sanctions on Iraq, or because it had troops in Saudi Arabia: it happened because al-Qaeda thought that America was weak. While it is true that all the things I have listed helped to motivate the attackers, they have very little to do with why the attack was planned and took place. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the leaders of Islamism are not insane or irrational. They are, in fact, working towards a very obvious goal: the restoration of Islam to the first rank of powers in the world (and eventually to absolute power) and they are going about that goal in a very specific way.
Step into the mind of Osama Bin Laden for a moment and look at the history of relations between Islam and the West during the 1980’s and 1990’s. When Iranian radicals took the personnel of the US embassy hostage, the United States did not respond with any sort of real force. When Hezbollah bombed the Marine barracks in Beirut, the Americans launched a few ineffectual attacks and then withdrew. When they bombed the World Trade Centre, the Khobar Towers, the Embassies in Nairobi and Dars-e-Salaam, and the USS Cole the American response was tepid, at best. When they killed eighteen US servicemen in Somalia, the forces were pulled out.
< snip >
... we must make something clear to the people: a vote for the Democrats this November is a vote for al-Qaeda and all the other enemies of America. By electing a Democrat, you would be sending a signal to the world, “Americans are weak and frightened. Kill us and we will do what you say.”
anarchyUK
Nobody by that name.He's gone !
You bet. I missed him too, but that's ok ...
Poland ? Oh, that's not happy news. I hope they reconsider ...
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