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:	post by ShadowSD at 2006-03-13 15:35:14

Exactly.

PatMeebles said:

I don't think terrorist recruitment has gone up. The number of suicide bombings in Iraq have plummeted. If there were more terrorists, there would definitely be more suicide bombers, since Zarqawi wouldn't have to worry about losing resources. Plus, the Sunnis in the Anbar province, even after the sectarian "civil war" (I didn't know a week counted as civil war), openly declared war on al qaeda, and are driving them out of western Iraq.

I don't know if you've gotten the chance to go abroad in recent years, Pat, but hatred of America across the board has gone up so much during the Bush administration, it's unreal. And clearly, the more and more people hate America, the more sympathetic they will be to our enemies.

It's true that the increase of sectarian violence in Iraq can go hand in hand with a decrease of suicide bombings by Al Qaeda and other foreign based terrorist groups. And why not? Zarqawi and Bin Laden want chaos in Iraq, they don't care how it happens, and once an internal conflict picks up momentum, they're not going to waste suicide bombers when chaos is already self-sustinent. It may seem hard to understand, since suicide bombers seem to be totally expendable by definition, but their leaders are not going to waste their only weapons when it gains them nothing; they may be crazy, but they're not stupid. After all, Al Qaeda killed 3000 Americans with just 20 terrorists. They could have sent more of course, but they didn't, only as many as they had to.

Also, you assume that Zarqawi would use more suicide bombers if he had enough to spare, but that suggests that the only place he ever intends to use suicide bombers is Iraq; I assure you that is not the case. These people want to bring chaos to the entire world until everyone submits to their dogma, and they will use each suicide bomber only to cause as much damage as possible.

Furthermore, as you yourself suggested, when foreign fighters continue to suicide bomb indiscriminantly once a civil war begins, it eventually backfires to unite citizens against them in force; in fact, a common enemy is the only external force that can stop a civil war once it begins. (I don't think that has happened yet, though, since like you I don't believe that a civil war has even begun yet in earnest - but with the way things are going, civil war does seem more and more imminent). But again, and unfortunately, I don't think that Zarqawi will be stupid enough to attack indiscriminantly and unite Iraqis against him if civil war breaks out; rather he will sit back and watch when it suits him, and only attack in ways that will aggrevate the situation.

Also, at no time in history has the military strength of an army been accurately measured soley based on the level of its military activity at a given moment. In the case of international terrorism, where there is no central organization but rather countless unassociated splinter groups, the current degree of military activity tells us even less about the recruitment and troop levels of our enemies.

PatMeebles said:

Oh, and I forgot to read your last part. The UN team only relied on prisoner testimony. They didn't even bother to get any info from the government.

The UN team didn't go to Guantanamo at all, if you believe our Secretary of Defense. In fact, that was the Rumsfeld complaint I was addressing in the first place; it began with him saying hey we invited the UN Inspectors but they never came to look, so how can they judge? Then, when challenged with the fact that the UN Inspectors didn't see any point in looking if they couldn't talk to the prisoners, Rumsfeld gave the same reasoning as you did earlier: "people in guantanamo lie intentionally just to make us look bad".

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