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July 11, 2005

They stab it with their steely knives...

but they just can't kill the beast

Karl "Benedict Arnold" Rove complains that liberals want to "understand" our attackers. Understanding the enemy, in the eyes of this man who leaked national security secrets for political gain, is a bad thing.

Rove considers the basics of combat to be a "weakness".

No wonder conservatives are losing their war on terror.

Ron of Middle Earth Journal and Running Scared sent me this interview with terrorism expert Robert Pape (If you don't have Middle Earth Journal and Running Scared on your regular reading list..you're doing yourself an injustice).

Pape's interview appears in this month's ironic issue of The American Conservative which includes Pat Buchanan's anti Iraq War "tar baby" references (linked from another source, American Conservative requires a subscription to get Buchanan's piece). I'm amazed that conservatives still support the Republican Party when they've these kind of fundamental disagreements....

Pape unRepublicanly explains why terrorists are attacking us and why they'll continue to attack us:

RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

TAC: That would seem to run contrary to a view that one heard during the American election campaign, put forth by people who favor Bush’s policy. That is, we need to fight the terrorists over there, so we don’t have to fight them here.

RP: Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us (emphasis Carla).

In other words, the Bush Administration is doing exactly the wrong thing when it comes to dealing with terrorists and terrorism.

That is, if their goal is to end terrorist attacks on US and other western nations' soil.

It's not escaped the notice of many the possibility that perpetual war is the Republican Party goal. Keep people scared and uninformed in order to stay in power.

This certainly would match what Rove has indicated he'd like to do.

Update The White House Press Corps is grilling McClellan on a spit over the Rove leak.

Posted by Carla at July 11, 2005 11:58 AM