Have we won the War on Terrorism?

[Bauce]

[Indy]

True, but no hearings, no investigations, no criminal charges.

And the principles still give their $50K/a pop lectures to adoring audiences, and you've got all of them on cable news/Sunday talkers constantly offering their opinions on everything--usually along the lines of how Obama is awful--as if we can't remember their record when they were around.

John Bolton I just saw on TV last week. John Bolton!

Oh, the humanity...

[Peter Dow]

[The Dharma Bum]

[Indy]

[eynon81]

[exploited]

They won't get a caliphate... But they are certainly winning. Support for anti-Western action is at an all-time high. The younger generations are drastically more extreme than the older ones. Where democracy once had a foothold in the Middle East, it is now discredited.

Once the US switches to natural gas and American oil and gets off the teat, the extremists will reign supreme. Of course we won't care because we won't need those countries. But I find Spiders analysis to be more hopeful than accurate.

[The Comrade]

[exploited]

Absolutely. What people need to realize about the region is that it is extremely conservative and that people have tried introducing democracy there for well over a century. Whenever they get it, one of two things happens: they either have a democratic system that abandons most justice system functions to Islamic law, or they simply become an extreme autocratic state that inevitably falls to religious groups.

Religion isn't just something they do every Sunday. We are talking about people whose entire life is defined by religion. Health care and social safety nets are provided by mosques. Most if not all of the education is religious. Businesses give tithes. Their automatic response to any crisis, ideological or political or personal, is to seek aid from their social network, which is inevitably religious. We call it tribalism, but that is what defines the Middle East. It also defines terrorism.

"However, the most common image of terrorism is that it is carried out by small and secretive cells, highly motivated to serve a particular cause and many of the most deadly operations in recent times, such as the September 11 attacks, the London underground bombing, and the 2002 Bali bombing were planned and carried out by a close clique, composed of close friends, family members and other strong social networks."

This is how extremists recruit, and they will succeed given an outside enemy. Always have, always will.

In my opinion, the ME will only ever change if it is left to it's own devices. The ME was already starting to change in the early 1900s, but we and the Russians and the Brits f**k it mercilessly just by being douchebags. It will be a long time until it recovers. Easily a half-century or more, assuming we don't keep screwing with them.

[Spider]