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

[Dayuhan]

I've never claimed AQ was successful in taking charge of or leading an insurgency anywhere. Most don't want what they are selling. But that does not mean they are not selling it, nor that their primary source of "energy" (funding, sanctuary, recruits, etc) does not come form these many latent and active insurgent populaces. They are, and it does.

The claim that AQ's "primary source of energy" is "these many latent and active insurgent populaces" remains unsupported by evidence or reasoning. It's just a claim. It's also a questionable claim, because we an easily observe that AQ is most effective when they exploit the wides[read anger at western influence in general and "infidel" occupation of Muslim lands specifically. If the primary source of energy was an insurgency dynamic, you would expect AQ to be most effective when hey are trying to rally support against Muslim governments. This is not what we actually see, and that needs to be explained. The explanation has to be specific and not dependent on broad correlations. Observing that bad governance (by our standards) is common in countries where AQ draws support is not sufficient cause to deduce that bad governance causes support for AQ, because many other factors are also present in those environments.

You earlier claimed that foreign fighters travel to fight in order to change conditions in their home countries. I pointed tout that this claim is incompatible with 3 consistent observations about the foreign fighter phenomenon. I've seen no reply. Ignoring inconvenient inconsistencies does not advance your argument.

If your point is yes, but they are failing in taking over these insurgencies and that the whole "Caliphate" paranoia in the West is much more an over reaction to AQ propaganda than anything we really need to worry about, then with that I can totally agree.

I don't think there is any "Caliphate paranoia" in the West, except among professional paranoiacs who are afraid of everything. It's pretty obvious that the Caliphate is a fantasy. There is some not unreasonable concern that those who pursue that fantasy want to kill us in the process: not concern that they'll succeed in creating a caliphate, but concern over their habit of trying to kill us.

Of course many of the responses have been poorly calculated, ineffective, and counterproductive. Not all of these have been "threat-centric". The idea that we can "drain the swamp in the Middle East" or that we can disable AQ by restructuring patterns of governance in Arab Countries is not threat-centric, but it is beyond our capacity and it is the kind of hubris that leads us to places like the one we're in now.