Insurgent Video Targets Blackwater

[marct]

That and the UK bombings only works if you accept Sageman's thesis of open-source jihad. It runs up on the shoals of certain facts about the bombers, for instance that many of them were hardcore jihadis from before 9/11 with dedicated al-Qaeda links - i.e. they were not principally inspired by IO efforts.

True, although he Edinburgh bombings don't appear, at least from what I have heard, to have had a pre-existing AQ link. Even granting pre-existing links, how were they mobilized? What is the rhetoric/IO used to activate them?

Ignoring the fact that troop decreases were on the agenda before and would have occurred if Blair had continued in office, and was a function more of the rabid unpopularity of the war in Iraq than of any terrorist attack. The change in government was again due to intra-Labour Party politics and Iraq, not any AQ propaganda effort or some sort of bizarre attempt to curry Islamist sympathies.

Hmmm, you might want to check out some of the Labour party Lords on that one. Still and all, the IO is helping to condition the general populace.

This is so generalized an argument as to be useless. How has their IO campaign "raised fears" in a way that led to a sustained price rise in oil? In what way has their IO campaign destabilized a major oil producing country? How much "risk premium" is built in specifically due to AQ's IO campaign, and how much has this affected world oil prices vs. things like a world-historical mass industrialization event such as has taken place in China over the past 15 years?

Mainly because I just don't have time right now to draw out all the linkages (it's tax time here and I have a bunch of contracts that have to be finished ASAP). You asked about a risk premium built in specifically due to AQ IO activities, and my guess would be none that is s specified. What their IO campaign is doing, however, is claiming credit for causing the US (and the West in general) to expend vast sums of money that is notbeing put back into the western economies.

Furthermore, by reducing the international perception of US efficacy, it has encouraged anti-US and anti-globalization movements, including Chavez, and exacerbated tensions in a number of other producing areas (e.g. Nigeria). Direct effect? Very little, but as one component of the overall political "atmosphere" it's been fairly large.

Anyway, back to my taxes