Not sure how the U.K. has a “weak gov’t”, they just finished their elections and the former gov’t was retained, albeit with a smaller majority. I agree with the rest of your analysis though.
While the rate of attacks seems to have increased, I don’t know if they’ve necessarily become less sophisticated/deadly post afgan war, at least if we ignore
9/11 as an outlier. Almost as many people were killed, and more bombs were involved, in the Madrid train bombing of 2004 then in the African Embassy of 1998 for example.
Canada’s are from the 2001 census. It’s likely increased since then since it more than doubled from 1991 to 2001. The rest are US State Dept figures from 2005.
I suspect you’re right. The majority of Muslims I’ve met here are Pakistani.
Non-US Forces in Iraq - 15 March 2005
The size and capabilities of the Coalition forces involved in operations in Iraq has been a subject of much debate, confusion, and at times exageration. As of March 15, 2004, there were 25 non-U.S. military forces participating in the coalition and contributing to the ongoing stability operations throughout Iraq. These countries were Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, United Kingdom, Ukraine. As of March 8, 2004, the MNF-I website incorrectly included Portugal in the list; that country’s troops left Iraq in February. It also omitted Armenia which has about 46 troops in Iraq which it deployed in Jan. 2005. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_orbat_coalition.htm
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Muslims made up **5.8 percent **of the total population on 1 January 2004. Their number will grow in the years to come and is anticipated to exceed 1 million in the course of 2006.
A very good question. And it’s something that’s difficult to measure, to the extent that you’ll get no firm statistics. Some ethnic groups perform above-average, some perform below-average. Some have a severe problem with low achievement of boys, others don’t. It’s all very difficult. But the one thing that is certain is that immigrants generally end up in poor-quality housing, in not-good neighbourhoods, and needing all the support available.
This is something I find interesting…Firstly I’d wonder if the people prepared to move somewhere completely new is comparable as for most people that move to London. Secondly, I suspect ‘assimilation’ is very different between the UK and the US, as it is different in Germany.
I’m speculating to a degree, though, so if anyone has facts that either support that or disprove it, I’d be interested in seeing them. In short, I don’t think raw numbers tell you very much-- you have to look into the nature of the muslim populations and how they fit into the societies where they live.
Note: Please do not take anything in this post to mean muslim = terrorist. When I use the term “recruitment base”, I mean that out of the larger popluation, some small subset is sympathetic to the goals of al Qaeda, not that the populations as a whole would be sympathetic.
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Not sure how the U.K. has a “weak gov’t”, they just finished their elections and the former gov’t was retained, albeit with a smaller majority. I agree with the rest of your analysis though.
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Before this attack, Blair’s popularity was sitting at 35%. He has promised to leave government at the end of this term, making him somewhat of a lame duck. His own party is very wobbly on Iraq, and with a different leader could easily be persuaded to bow out.
I think al-Qaida seriously misjudged the people of Britain. They saw what happened in Spain, and figured an attack in the heart of London would lead to protests against the war and immense pressure on Blair to back away from the U.S. They failed to understand British stoicism and their desire to stick it to the people who hurt them, whether they agreed with the war or not.
I believe the ultimate goal of these bombings is to strengthen the insurgency in Iraq by making the Iraqi people feel insecure and unsure that the coalition is going to hold together long enough to see them through to a point where they can defend themselves. The insurgency terrorizes the people in Iraq, and cuts their support out from under them by bombing the countries that protect them in an attempt to get them to go home or at least weaken their support.
It worked in Spain. It failed miserably in Britain. It would fail in America.
If Al Qaeda were following the media so accuratley, they’d know that the vast majority of Brits opposed the invasion of Iraq in the way it was conducted, and that two million of them marched in protest. ‘British stocicism’ has no relevance - other than not letting any little bomb stop us doing whatever we want to do.
After the bombing, the percentage of Britons who wanted to pull out of Iraq went down, not up. The percentage who said they want closer ties to the U.S. went up. And Blair’s approval rating went up 14 points.
Isn’t Spain still heavily involved in Afghanistan?
I mean, Spain did pull troops out of Iraq. But of course, Iraq wasn’t allied with al-Qaida and wasn’t involved in 9/11. So what did al-Qaida accomplish in Spain that helps them in any way?
I would say that of the visibly Muslim people I see (i.e., women wearing a hijab), there are probably more Indonesians/Malaysians than any other group. I don’t know where we’d go to look for statistics that would provide an ethnic breakdown of Canada’s Muslim population.
Why are you talking about 9/11? What does that have to do with what I talked about?
Regardless of what happened in the past, the fact is that al-Qaida is fighting today in Iraq. Getting Spain to pull out of Iraq was a ‘win’ for al-Qaida and for the insurgency in general. Which I believe was the point of the bombings.
Not really. The point of the bombings was to be seen as having influenced the elections, irrespective of whether they really did. There was a very good chance that the government would have fallen anyways. Then if it did, they could take credit the opposition’s anti-Iraq involvement policy, even if they had nothing to do with it. And people such as yourself continue to give them that credit, even when there’s bugger all evidence that the bombings were instrumental in the election outcome.
More to the point, Spain has, if anything, stepped up its efforts in fighting Al Qaeda. How is that a win for AQ, even if the focus of Spain’s efforts has a different geographical locus? Answer: it’s not, except insofar as people actually believe the myth that the Spanish people caved in to terrorism. That the talking heads supporting the Bush WoT plan have propagated AQ’s own preferred view of the Madrid bombings is a complete disgrace. If they were really interested in fighting terror rather than scoring domestic political points, they’d be trumpeting the increased Spanish presence in Afghanistan to give the lie to this bullshit about Spanish capitulation.
You have a valid point in that it’s probably not helpful to continue repeating what a great success al-Qaida had in Spain. Nonetheless, I think it’s silly to believe that al-Qaida attacked Spain believing it would have no effect, just so they could claim credit. Because if that’s the case, then what if the government had been re-elected? Then it would have looked like al-Qaida was weak and their plans were backfiring. Which is what has happened in Britain so far.
I think the simplest explanation is that al-Qaida, which perceives the west as weak and spineless, felt that the Spanish government was vulnerable and that if they hit Spain just before the election they could scare the public into voting the government out. It makes more sense than your version.
Whether or not there’s evidence that the attacks had a concrete effect on the election, it seems likely that al-Qaida’s intention with that bombing was to influence the election.
I think we’re both making the mistake of ascribing a unified belief system to AQ, when in fact it appears to have morphed into a very diffuse group where individual cells might act from radically different beliefs about what proximate goals to pursue and how to pursue them. Maybe your theory accurately describes the Madrid bombers’ thought process. I don’t know, and of course we can no longer ask them why they did it. My point is not so much about the specific beliefs of those specific terrorists, but comes on a different level of analysis. To a large extent it simply doesn’t make any difference how we respond to any given terrorist attack, so long as there’s some point somewhere to hang some propaganda on. And if there isn’t, make one up. Do you think that AQ thinks 9/11 was a failure because it directly led to the Taliban getting whupped and the disruption of much of AQ’s organization? No. They stuck it to the US, and the US’s response merely verifies its evilness, validating the jihadist ideas. Even if it doesn’t show that AQ is winning, it shows that they’re right. Or at least, it does in their warped little world. They see the world through ideological glasses, and there’s nothing, ever, that’s going to happen that can’t be reconciled with their ideas. Anything the West does can be spun as showing that the jihadists are winning, or that they’re right and the fight must not be in vain. So far as they’re concerned, heads they win, tails we lose.
Ultimately this isn’t about military defeats or victories, or changing Western policies. It’s about a group of fanatics spreading their fanaticism to a wider base in order to acheive political goals in the Middle East, i.e., restoring theocratic rule (nevermind that the Caliphate was nothing like what the Wahabbist wackjobs want to set up - they view history through their ideological glasses too). Their real enemy isn’t the Great Satan so much as it is the legacy of Ataturk. Scoring points against the West doesn’t ultimately matter except insofar as it changes the political dynamic in the Middle East.
Some rational analysis, from today’s Times. It traces the nationality of the victims of Al Qaeda in major incidents from 2002-3. Somebody upthread mentioned Turkey–they’ve been hit pretty badly already, with two synagogue bombings and the British Embassy explosion.
As for Muslims in the US, I think a lot of them are black Americans, who would have no love for AQ’s message, and descendents of immigrants from the older waves of Arab and Asian immigration–third-generation Lebanese, Syrians who landed on Ellis Island in the early 1900s, etc. Plenty of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis too but they seem to be pretty apolitical. The ones I knew from school who were recent immigrants were regular teens except some wore veils (sometimes), as integrated and hard-working as Asian folks. There aren’t any ghettos or projects filled with Arabs that I know about in the US, although of course there’s neighborhoods where they shop and congregate when they first get here.
As for Canada–I don’t know. Don’t you have elections coming up too? (I’m finding the ins and outs of your politics a ride I’m having trouble following right now). I do feel, however, that the next attack in America will NOT be in NYC. And not just because I live here and lost my job after 9/11 and most of 2002 really sucked too, no sir–it’s because if I were AQ I would not want the rest of America to relax, thinking that they’re only after New York.