No surprise there, Jordan is historically one of the most westward-friendly Muslim countries.
Since this refers to the same Pew Research poll cited below, I will address them together:
Do you even read your own cites?
You originally said this about support for Al Qaeda in Iraq:
Yet, you offer no polls on public opinion there, only in Jordan, Pakistan and other Muslim countries with strong ties to the west. Why is that?
My idea of honesty is guoting what people actually say. Neither of your links supports the quote you posted. If you want me to respond to any further posts on this subject, you’ll have to admit that you misquoted Bush first. I don’t see any point in debating with someone who uses false quotes to bolster his arguements.
Well, perhaps you can see them because they were already created for the 2002 Congressional races. I have no doubt that Republicans will again question the patriotism of Democrats, because it is a well-worn tactic that has been used before.
Well, like the stock market that started the year with a boom and has since declined, one cannot base one’s conclusion solely on what has happened most recently. There’s little debate that the invasion of Iraq was a recruiting boom for Al Qaeda.
And it is also widely believed that having bin Laden on the run or scores of insurgents killed in Iraq doesn’t mean we’re winning the war against Al Qaeda, because the bad guys are so decentralized that these battlefield victories are rather ephemeral.
In short, I reject the insinuation that Al Qaeda may be in its “last throes, if you will.” Then again, there appear to be those who will take bin Laden’s message as signs that we are nearing Mission Accomplished.
We offered the Japanese a truce before we bombed Hiroshima. Plus, bin Laden offered the Europeans a truce before both Madrid and London bombings. I’m not saying your assessment doesn’t have merit, I’m just saying there is precedent for offering a truce before a strike.
I have no plans to use it any such way. You’re confusing me with a Republican. I’m simply pointing out the only thing that his message will accomplish-- giving propoganda fodder to the Repulbicans.
Keep in mind that bin Laden’s proposal is political in nature. It’s absurd to even consider responding to it in any operative way. And **Sam **is right about one thing-- offering a truce is a sign of weakness, not of strength.
Bin Ladin offers a truce? Heh. We must be gettin’ close.
I don’t trust him because he’s crazy. But any chance at ending the war is worth a serious and thorough look. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one.
Cite please? The Casablance Conference said that the ONLY grounds for ending the war was “Unconditional Surrender” Casablanca Conference Cite
FDR set the terms and Truman carried them out.
One of the reasons for my OP in this thread is that I think GWB should make a clear, indisuptable statement, now, that the only appropriate fate for Bin Laden, Zawahiri and others is either death or trial - and the venue for the trial should be the US Courthouse in Lower Manhattan. That is as close to “unconditional surrender” as I can think of in this context.
I don’t know how far-fetched this is, but what if we’ve always known where he is? What if it’s dawning on him that we are always going to be after him and he is always going to be “one step ahead of us?”
We’re reducing him to mediocrity, and he’s suffering.
This offer of a truce just makes him look pussy.
Might that have been what we’ve really been after all this time?
It amazes me how you guys see it this way, in light of past communiques that offered truces. They nearly always presage a new attack. You are being used.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. The Jordanian government is friendly to the west. The people, not so much. Support for Bin Laden was, before the wedding bombing, higher in Jordan than any of the other countries listed by Pew.
You are changing the terms of the debate. I never said there was no support for suicide bombing. I said it was DECLINING. For example, in Lebanon it declined from 73% to 39%. In Morocco, from 40% to 13%! And as I pointed out, the data for Jordan in that Pew Report is stale, since opinions there have dramatically shifted in the last few months.
Is that what I said? Let’s go back to the tape:
Now you’re misquoting me. I think I’m done with you - you don’t know how to debate fairly. You’re trying to play ‘gotcha’ instead of actually making a good faith effort to understand the argument and refute it.
I will summarize my points once more, so there can be no confusion:
Yep.
I don’t know if Sam meant it this way, but I do think it is a sign al Qaeda is losing in Iraq. There are signs that even the native insurgency in Iraq is fed up with Zarqawi and his ilk. I have no doubt that Al Qaeda is doing well in terms of recruiting in some other areas of the Muslim world, though.
Who knows what Bin Laden’s relationship with Al Qaeda at this point. Is he able to give any orders? Are people listening to him, or just “inspired” by him? I’m one of the people who thinks AQ has become decentralized and more of a movement than an organization. He’s unable to offer a truce. I think it does show that he’s tired of being on the run, since it’s been more than four years (whether we’re any closer to finding him is beyond me), but that’s not going to change no matter what he offers.
Yeah - recruiting people to go to Iraq and be killed. Actually, you have a point - there’s no doubt that the start of the Iraq War led to an increase in recruiting for al-Qaida. But that was a long time ago (your cite is a year and a half old). Since then, thousands of al-Qaida fighters have been killed in Iraq, and al-Qaida’s support in the middle east has dropped substantially. Overall, the Iraq war has got to be a tremendous loss for al-Qaida. Their man Zarqawi was just a little too bloodthirsty and a little too indiscriminate in who he decided to blow up, and now al-Qaida’s not looking so good. Not only that, but when they did control cities like Fallujah, they treated the people there like animals. Word of that gets around. You don’t want to live in al-Qaida’s idea of paradise, even if you’re a devout muslim.
Which is why I haven’t been measuring success in terms of battlefield victories, but in terms of public opinion. A group like al-Qaida needs popular support. It needs it for recruiting, for fund-raising, to keep its members hidden, etc. When the majority of the country is against you, you never know who’s going to rat you out and cause a cozy little get-together to turn into a missile barrage. It gets hard to raise money and move through society.
I never insinuated that. Let’s keep the scope of what I said clear - al-Qaida has been damaged in the last two years. How close it is to being in its ‘last throes’ is an open question, and one which I don’t believe we can answer. We just don’t know enough about the scope of the organization. It’s hard to even say what ‘last throes’ would even look like. It only took 19 guys and a few million bucks to bring down the World Trade Center. So even a greatly diminished al-Qaida is still a big threat.
This is a fair point, and one worth considering. Offering a truce before a major attack is a good PR move - it makes him look magnanimous.
Why? What evidence do you have for that? Public opinion of al-Qaida in the region is way down.
If recruiting has been increased, my guess is that it would be in disaffected Muslim populations in Europe and elsewhere, not among the average citizen of the Middle East. I don’t think we have any data to draw conclusions on that, though. We know there was a spike in recruiting immediately after the Iraq war, but since then things have changed dramatically.
I believe the Iraq war has hurt al-Qaida overall, and not just in Iraq.
Moi? What about this claim by you:
Are abandoning that statement?
This is a lie. Whenever I have quoted you, it has been copied vertatim from your post. Post this alleged misquote, or retract this scurrilous lie.
Aha! This is a sign of weakness, I must be winning the debate!!
No it isn’t.
That was Zarqawi’s initiative, one that Bin Ladin (according to an intercepted letter) has told him is counter-productive.
Then why does the President not trumpet this from the hilltops, instead of painting Al Qaeda as a major componenet of the insurgency in Iraq?
Dubious.
Whistling past the graveyard.
From your third* cite:
The recruting grounds for ObL that are most troubling are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia (where he still has broad support) and Yemen. Pakistan was the only only one your polling data addressed, and it showed an increase in support for bin Laden. Our recent bombings there will probably make things even worse. I’m not too worried about Lebanese or Turkish suicide bombers attacking the US. It’s great that those countries are showing declining support for ObL, but they weren’t our biggest concern in the first place.
I don’t take this as a sign of weakness. Truce offers from OBL are a precursor to a new attack. The response should be to raise the alert level. We’ll just have to wait and see what their next move is.
I don’t see significant political impact. The US elections are too far away to be influenced by this. A new attack would be another story, whether it inspires another rally round the president surge or blows away the “we’ve not been attacked since 9/11” defense remains to be seen.
Don’t jump to assumptions. We do know that lots and lots of foreign fighters have entered Iraq. We do know that lots of insurgents/terrorists have been killed. We do not always know which flavor of terrorist/insurgents are being killed. Most alarmingly, we have no idea at all how many AQI-trained terrorists – with real operational experience – have left Iraq. That’s an alarming thought, innit?
The degree of support needed is not nearly as great as you make it out to be. AQ trained individuals lived in the US of frickin’ A and carried out 9/11 using what? No popular support here and a couple hundred thousands of dollars, total.
The measure of whether we’re making progress against AQ is not body counts, number of top leaders killed, or results of opinion polls, it is solely the capability of the organization.
You argue that “the strategy of taking the fight to the terrorists is working,” but the London bombings and the Madrid bombings don’t seem to show any evidence that the Iraq war has hindered AQ’s capability to carry out operations. What’s more, it’s clear that the recent Amman bombings were carried out precisely because of the disasterous Iraq war: Zarqawi wouldn’t have been able to pull off such operations before a earned the confidence of AQ leadership. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Al Qaeda is less capable now, or will be less capable anytime soon, so claims that the war in Iraq is producing desired results in fighting Al Qaeda is just plain false.
Again, Jordan’s support for Bin Laden has collapsed since that poll (see my first cite).
I’ll agree with you that Pakistan is a problem, and going forward I think that’s going to be our biggest problem with respect to al-Qaida. There, the U.S. has the same problem that al-Qaida has in other middle-eastern countries - the only way to kill them is to incur civilian casualties and turn the population against the U.S., while al-Qaida is not active in bombing anyone there. The same is probably true of Yemen. Saudi Arabia is a different problem altogether, and one that can hopefully be dealt with diplomatically.