We need less Chemo and Surgery and more "Voom."

[Entropy]

Bob,

AQ drew upon the the very high conditions of insurgency in those states and drew upon the sub-populaces who were most dissatisfied with their own governments. They traveled to Iraq not to help make Iraq part of some "Caliphate," but rather to help defeat this source of foreign influence so that they could finally find some success at home.

I think you need to revisit what AQ did in those countries. Yes, they wanted to kill the foreign infidel and drive them out of "Muslim lands." But more than that they wanted to purge the apostates. Look at the actual operations conducted by AQ-in-Iraq - they killed so many Muslim Iraqis that even UBL got pissed off at the carnage they caused. I'm not sure how bombing a market full of Shiites helps to defeat the "foreign influence," but maybe someone can explain it to me.

[Bob's World]

Bob,



I think you need to revisit what AQ did in those countries. Yes, they wanted to kill the foreign infidel and drive them out of "Muslim lands." But more than that they wanted to purge the apostates. Look at the actual operations conducted by AQ-in-Iraq - they killed so many Muslim Iraqis that even UBL got pissed off at the carnage they caused. I'm not sure how bombing a market full of Shiites helps to defeat the "foreign influence," but maybe someone can explain it to me.

AQ did not go to Iraq until we did, and they went there because we were there. It was, for AQ, primarily a battle field against foreign influence in the region. Their battlefields for taking on "apostates" were in all those other Muslim countrie around the region where they were recruiting fighters to come help them against us in Iraq, while at the same time conducting UW to support those insurgent movements at home.

The fact that they killed many Muslim Iraqis is immaterial to their goals there, just as the fact that we killed many Muslim Iraqis was immaterial to ours.

But for our operations to remove Saddam, there would not likely be any AQ in Iraq today, and very little Iranian influence as well. We need to own that.