Total War: Inside The New Al-Qaeda

Editorial - February 26, 2006 - The London Times

Bin Laden also explained his long-term anti-American strategy. He told me he knew he would never be able to defeat America on its own soil using conventional weapons. He had another plan, one that would take years to reach fruition.

“We want to bring the Americans to fight us on Muslim land,” he said as we walked through the woods in the high mountains at Tora Bora. “If we can fight them on our own territory we will beat them, because the battle will be on our terms in a land they neither know nor understand.”

We are witnessing part of that plan now, in the battlefields of Iraq, which has become a breeding ground for the most ruthless and militant Al-Qaeda fighters we have seen. In the process we are discovering the new face of Al-Qaeda, as a movement involved in bloody sectarian strife against fellow Muslims.

This is the second important article from today's headlines. It is based on the premise that we have allowed ourselves to be lured into Al-Qaeda's plan to fight America on the ground in the middle east, and that this was always Bin Laden's strategy. I guess my reaction is that I would have been more impressed with this article had it been written 3 years ago, rather than as a hind sight based attack on what we have done. It would have had a little more credibility.

However it does seem consistent with the same liberal premise Steyn discusses in the other article posted below from today's editorials on the war. The liberal democrat premise is that we must not fight these islamofascists. We need to allow them to censor us, to control us, we need to walk away from this fight, to buy some peace now with the assurances that we will ultimately lose anyway. This premise, that if we just leave them alone we will have some time of peace and the ultimate slavery they will inflict will not be on us but on our descendants, is ultimately just another form of appeasement. That seems to me to be the only rational explanation for what the liberals are proposing we do. What frightens me is that even cold warriors like William Buckley are starting to agree with the premise that we should pull out of Iraq.

Does this make sense? What do you think?