Via Boing Boing, an article from the RAND Corporation about ‘how terrorist groups end’.
It concludes:
Al Qa’ida’s resilience should trigger a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy…Key to this strategy is replacing the war-on-terrorism orientation with the kind of counterterrorism approach that is employed by most governments facing significant terrorist threats today. Calling the efforts a war on terrorism raises public expectations — both in the United States and elsewhere — that there is a battlefield solution. It also tends to legitimize the terrorists’ view that they are conducting a jihad (holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists should be perceived as criminals, not holy warriors.
Which is exactly what we British had said about PIRA and their chums since 1968, until in 2001 we suddenly changed our tune and started to sing along with the apparently deranged administration of the USA.
The RAND Corporation is well known in the defence world. It is not a limp-wristed, pacifistic, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-everyone-was-nice sort of organisation. If its hawkish theoreticians cannot see any point in an American military deployment, then there probably isn’t one.
