[excholza]

this was a rather poor article considering it was highly slanted, judgemental and disconnected from many realities.
has the author been on ground? have Mueller and Stewart been on the ground?
i dont know about the author but Mueller and Stewart are Professors. and that's about it. even their paper has unprofessional, biased language fit for cheap news channels.

i am not contending that US takes advantage of this situation , many nations use 'fear' to make their people subservient (for eg. Pakistan Army plays the 'if it weren't for us India would tear you to pieces and you won't even get to practice Islam' card to always garner respectful silence for themselves. this is translated in state policy as well).

however what i disagree with is how they are doing their people a disservice by dehumanizing Al-Q@eda, in a most childish fashion, so that their critique on the so-called terrorism experts are justified. the injustice to their people is that Americans (and west) do not get to see what US did wrong to provoke such a fierce backlash. hence the people still will not question their government's policies (such as with israel, oil-hunger , iraq, afg, etc) in a manner that is required.

so all this article does is that it dampens those critical questions regarding american foreign policy. i concede that people might still ask questions about Iraq and Afghanistan after reading this. but what about israel , Palestine and the arab oil? what about presence of non-Muslim troops on arabian peninsula? what about support of US to terrorism against Muslims in countries such as China and Russia? Now see those questions aren't attended to. Because they are not related to 'terrorism' which both the author's side and the so-called 'experts' side mainly ignore.

but these reasons , among others, were why alq@eda began the global J!had. if the americans don't address them, make the blunder of ignoring alq@eda's threat, treat it as an insurgency not as a worthy opponent, deem them as terrorists not Mujahideen fighting for a justified cause, then this war will prolong and it will extend to Hind and to America's own soil. The worst thing one can do is underestimate the enemy.

This was discussed in Saleem Shehzad's book who outlined this as one of the prime reasons why NATO and allies were not able to win against Alq@eda. Now Shahzad travelled far and wide, lived with the Mujahideen, traveled with them. he knew the whole story. One should read his book on AlQ@eda.

Another author I would like to point out is a real expert who has been on ground: Michael Scheuer. He is ex-cia who served for 22 years and was in charge of the hunt for the Sheikh. Here is his book in summarized form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hubris
Read it carefully.
(might also want to read a later review of the reviews of the book by scheuer himself: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/scheuer1.html)

Both Shahzad and Scheuer pointed to the fault of the American foreign policy which resulted in the global J!had. and Sheuer provides a few good rational solutions which implemented can pretty much save millions from dying in future. have a read.