One of the core elements of my position is that the US should not occupy Muslim territory or try to determine the form of governance in any Muslim country. That doesn't sound like what we've been doing.
You keep saying this, but you provide no evidence or reasoning to support the contention. It's simply laid out as revealed truth. The problem with this is that it's not consistent with what we see on the ground. We know that populaces aren't turning to AQ for help in getting rid of their own governments because every attempt by AQ to raise an insurgency against a Muslim government has failed to draw anything close to a critical mass of popular support. What we actually see is that while Muslim populaces are happy to fund and support AQ as long as they're fighting infidels far away, that support stops as soon as AQ tries to bring the jihad to their neighborhood. Interview-based studies on foreign fighter motivations have not revealed any hint that people are traveling to fight in order to affect governance in their home countries: the motivation is consistently to end the oppression of Muslims and expel the infidel in the place where the fight is going on.
The contention that AQ s driven by populaces who oppose their own governments and believe that support for AQ will change those governments has to be supported by convincing evidence and reasoning to be accepted. It can't simply be decreed.
It's good that we don't need to address the "base of energy" that comes from tension between Muslim governments and their populaces, because we can't. That's not about us and it would be self-defeating to try to impose ourselves on those situations. The governments in question do not for the most part depend on us, are not accountable to us, and will not do what we want.
Possibly true, but since AQ is not a revolution and you've shown no evidence to suggest that AQ is driven by revolutionary sentiment, I don't see the relevance to AQ.
This is arguably happening Iraq and Afghanistan, where our (IMO) misguided attempts to install governments left those governments under our protection and dependent on us. That (again IMO) was a bad idea, it shouldn't have been tried and it shouldn't be done again. Other than those cases, which of course occurred after AQ was already established, I can't think of any Muslim government who relies on the US to protect it from its people, or whose oppression of its people is empowered by US support. That contention, again, needs to be supported by specific evidence and examples.
How do you propose to "force governments to listen"? Even if you could, how do you force them to hear what you think you hear, or react as you think they should?
I seem to recall that not long ago the US told the government of Bahrain to listen to its people and implement reforms. I also recall that all we accomplished was to look impotent: they ignored us. I think you overrate the influence we can bring to bear.
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