"... And I'm the surgeon."

Thanks for that.

If only the sequel to Dark Knight Returns hadn't sucked so badly...

I hope it proves true that our troop's engagement in Iraq will finish off al Qaeda- though I believe we'll also need to step up our objectives in northern Pakistan, including "urging" the government to shut down or reform religious schools that call for the destruction of the West.

Yeah, but Bruce tries to "go it alone" without allies. Mistake!

Everybody needs allies.

Batman has his Robin, the Lone Ranger his Tonto, Holmes his Waton, and Bush the Second may profit from their example.

i'm envisioning Tony Blair in short green pants, sleeveless green tunic and a cute yellow cape ...

"Five years from now the debate will be whether Bush and his "neocon madmen" actually planned this flypaper/mudpit strategy or if they merely blundered into it."

I submit into evidence Bush's much derided statement: "Bring them on". While the left wet their panties about how stupid and macho Bush was being, my military friends were applauding the idea of drawing the fanatics to Bhagdad rather than Boston.

Luck, as they say, is the result of good planning.

Truer words were never spoken. I've long suspected Iraq was the focal pointof a "honeypot" doctrine, making U.S. forces there a focal point dropped smack dab in the middle of the enemy, daring them to a fight.

We used it on a tactical level with the use of firebases in Vietnam (look at the casuality estimates for Khe Sanh (205 KIA, 443 WIA, 2 MIA for the Americans, 15,000+ killed or wounded NVA), and seem to be using Iraq as our strategic firebase in the Middle East.

Surrounded by Saudi, Syrian, and Iranian terrorists, and more than able to destroy all of them once engaged, our military is exactly where they need to be to cause the most damage.

As they say -- "Fortune favors the bold."

You forget, Ace, that we're dealing with religious pathology here. These lunatics aren't worried about rewards for murder in this life, but in the next.

Now, their handlers may be more concerned with temporal matters like kicking the U.S. out of Iraq, or making lots of money smuggling opium.

But the hapless foot soldiers in Al Qaeda's thrall are more than happy to exchange their lives for the innocent.

I'm okay with that-- America's defeated their kind before (can you say Okinawa?), and we'll defeat them again.

Hold out bait to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.

-- Sun Tsu

It's worth remembering what Osama's strategy was: to provoke the US into a violent response, so we would bomb innocent Muslims, inflaming the Islamic world against us and driving them into Osama's camp.

So who's bombing innocent Muslims lately?

I'm so proud of our military, thrilled with their success.
Here's hoping that this is the death blow to the supply line from Syria, and that the terrorists are starved out in short order.

What Dave at GR said. The way I see it, the committed al Qaedist doesn't have any strategy that makes rational sense. They're basically engaged in a form of magical thinking, that:

1. I can prove my devoutness by killing lots of infidels in an impressive way.
2. God will be impressed by our devoutness!
3. Since we've proven ourselves worthy, God will now do the heavy lifting, smite the infidels for us, and Osama will be the new Caliph of the entire planet!

And if their latest attack *doesn't* impress God? Well, then, there's only one conclusion to be drawn - we're not batshit-insanely devout enough!

(Another telling example is the fact that a lot of al Qaedists apparently were quite confident that the destruction of the World Trade Center would actually destroy World Trade. As if destroying the symbol equates with destroying the reality.)

Welcome news! And let's remember to give credit where credit is due and blame where blame is due. Credit the administration and most of all, our military, blame, who else?

I wonder how Liberals will manage to claim they were really for the war, before or after they were against it?

No doubt that the Islamists rely on fanaticism, but the supply of suicidal fanatics, I believe, is quite limited and what few there are are motivated by money more then religion. Case in point would be the sharp reduction in suicide bombings in Israel once 'funding' (Saddam primarily but also Arafat) was sharply reduced. What will be interesting is once the 'insurgency' fails, what do Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Iran do next?

balls nasty

I hope the sky is black with A-10's.

Chicken leg.

Ace don't shiv

The logic of al-Qaeda bombing Iraqi civilians and police by the score is to make them think "Maybe if the Americans weren't here, the Wahabis would leave us alone" and then prompt a popular opposition to the American occupation.

You can only hope Iraqis are made of sterner stuff than say, the Spanish. Or Gulf states that both ally themselves with Washington but pay protection money to al-Qaeda (Qatar, Saudi Arabia)

It's good that our tip of the spear is better than the radical Muslim's tip of the spear, but the larger war is about ideas, not IEDs.

We defeated Soviet communism not by weaponry, but by the superiority of our economic model and their deficiency of ideas.

Radical Islam will be defeated only when the larger construct of Islam rejects terrorism as a worthy vehicle to advance the cause.

The larger problem on the Horizon is China. Which has fashioned a new version of Communism far more successfull than the Soviet model - a model with new ideas that is rapidly advancing the prosperity of the citizenry, their educational attainments and cleaning clock on the American economic model.

Dark Knight was my absolute favorite. God I wish they had made a movie out of it while Charleton Heston was still, you know, Charleton Heston.

PS - Phinn, you fuckin' ROCK man! Frank Miller and Sun Tzsu in the same thread. I love this place!

I dunno about that "limited supply of crazies" thing. I mean, there's still *plenty* of places on this planet where you grow up in shit, live in shit, and die in shit, not to put too fine a point on it. If somebody comes to you and says, "Kill yourself and your family gets as much money as you could ever make in 10 years" there's probably literally millions of people who can be convinced by that. And, there's probably a fair few of those for whom the 10-years-wage amount is in the low thousands of dollars. We might have obliged the majority of people willing to die for Allah, but people willing to die to give their families a good life will probably always be around. Am I wrong?

Now, that's not to say that we have to solve world hunger to get rid of the terrorist threat, but as long as large parts of the world don't like us, and are poor, I think we still stand to have problems.

If you want some facts regarding China, go here.

This "model with new ideas that is rapidly advancing the prosperity of the citizenry" has an unemployment rate of 20%, 10% in the urban areas. Some people really need to do some fact checking before they comment.

Thanks, Dacotti. Ace's site is one of the few places where my areas of "expertise" are appreciated.

James: that's not to say that we have to solve world hunger to get rid of the terrorist threat, but as long as large parts of the world don't like us, and are poor, I think we still stand to have problems.

You are putting the cart before the horse. The violence and oppressive governments that produce terrorists also contribute to the poverty you describe.

While it may be true that poverty contributes to crime, you can't ignore the fact that crime also contributes to poverty. There is nothing more conducive to long-lasting, intractable poverty than having either a government (or a citizenry) that is committed to achieving its ends through force and acts of terror.
(*chough* Palestine)

If you first eliminate the oppressive governments and crack down on the violence , then the peaceful, beneficial business-people can enter and the free market can operate. Only the free market can alleviate the grinding poverty that you describe.

Some writer right after 9/11 wrote that Islam had just gone super-nova. There was this huge bright flash, a tremendous amount of damage, and then nothing would be left of it, but a burnt cinder.
Like the nazis and soviets and french revolutionaries before them, the Islamists can't stop fighting. Their whole faith is predicated on conflict. There's no impulse in Islam to stop, think, and question. In fact you can't question the Koran because its the literal word of God.
Now these guys have been challenged in their own backyard, and instead of being met with a jellied spined Eurocrat have met American Cowboys. The US acts as a magnet for these fanatics (who are actually orthodox by their religion) and kills them, ridding us of an enemy and weakening the Orthodox movement in Islam. We don't have to kill them all, it would be nice granted, but we just have to kill enough.
Their failure in Iraq will, hopefully, embolden those liberal/moderate/heretical voices in Islam to reign it in. It also opens up the middle east to Western ideas, as those ideas will eventually been seen as the key to our victory. And the people in the middle east are notorious for backing winners.

Oh and wasn't that Dark Night Returns the one with the girl Robin?

We defeated Soviet communism not by weaponry, but by the superiority of our economic model and their deficiency of ideas.

I don't think they give it much thought. They are killing just out of rage, not to achieve any political purpose.

the political purpose is headlines. and they have willing media cheerleaders here in the states.

As vietnam taught us, guerilla wars aren't won on the battlefield anymore, they're won on public opinion. If they can kill 50 iraqis and 3 americans a day, they get their 15 minutes a day, every day pounding the US public till, they hope, we finally get tired of it and political pressure pushes our leaders to plan a coitus interruptus.

That's when they win.

We defeated Soviet communism not by weaponry, but by the superiority of our economic model and their deficiency of ideas.

I have this notion, totally unprovable, that our defeat of the Soviet Union was not prinicipally political, economic, or military (although all these made a difference). It was largely cultural. If you travel to enough places, you cannot help but be struck by the cultural hegemony of the United States when it comes to matters such as fashion and music. I'm thinking the USSR was not brought down by nuclear weapon deployments in Europe, free market economics, or the siren song of democracy. It was brought down by Madonna and blue jeans.

The larger problem on the Horizon is China. Which has fashioned a new version of Communism far more successfull than the Soviet model - a model with new ideas that is rapidly advancing the prosperity of the citizenry, their educational attainments and cleaning clock on the American economic model.

Oh please. China does not have any new ideas. They have a capitalist economy masquerading as a communist state . The Chinese have always been intensely entrepreneurial -- so now the Red Army operates like any American company to fund itself.

China has the same thing India and other nations have -- cheap labor. The only slightly new thing is that these countries are offering cheap knowledge workers, not just cheap manual labor. People in India are doing American tax returns. So in a globalized economy, business is migrating to the cheap labor pool. What else is new? These things even out in the long run. The cost of tech workers in Bangalore is rising rapidly, and American businesses are starting to look elsewhere for cheap labor to staff the IT Helpdesk.

We ultimately benefit from this by being able to buy cheaper goods and services. Sure, we lose some jobs in the process. But it has been a looong time since America was the source of cheap labor, and cheap labor will (I fervently hope) never again be the source of America's competitive advantage. Our real competitive advantage comes from creativity. It's the singular feature of our peculiar society. Only America is capable of producing Bill Gates, the internet, Howard Stern, stealth aircraft, and Eminem.

That's our real competitive advantage. We rock.

I don't think they give it much thought. They are killing just out of rage, not to achieve any political purpose.
You've hit the nail on the head. I think that Islamic Jihad is largely angry Arab youth behaving badly. Think of the rage of our young "peace" activists. If it weren't for the rule of law and the fact that Skippy and his pals have to show up for work on Monday, I think we'd see the same senseless mayhem that their Islamic brothers perpetuate.