Describing Our Armchairs

Dan Darling takes a step back from the wrangling over terrorism to remind us of the limited perspective that we, as interested citizens, actually have. The following point isn't an adequate summary of the post, but it struck me as important to remember:

One of the tendencies that I've noticed within counterterrorism circles is that in many cases people want to reduce the al-Qaeda threat down to single nexus or pivot that would be utterly devastating if not fatal to the group were it removed. For Mylroie that pivot seems to be Iraq, for Ledeen and others it's Iran, for the SAAG folks it's Pakistan, and for many more people it's bin Laden or al-Zawahiri. Some want to go even further and say that the central pivot is Islam itself, but they don't get too much attention and probably thankfully so.

My own view is that bin Laden deliberately set al-Qaeda up in such a fashion so that there wouldn't be any Achilles Heel that would cripple the group were it ever removed. I've noted this before and I'll say it again - bin Laden was a businessman long before he was ever a terrorist and that the organization he created resembles a giant multi-national corporation more than it does anything else, which is one of the reasons why it's so damned hard to kill.

There aren't many exceptions to the general rule that we all come out swinging in these debates, and often we get so tangled up in our arguments that we lose sight of the fact that our method of thinking and of debate requires the partitioning of reality into addressable segments. That — it should be needless to say (but isn't) — is never an adequate approach to forming broader opinions.