>From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>
>> Well, it took you about four years to recognize what I, as well as
>> about 5% of all Americans and 20% of all Black Americans, said in
>> 2001: invading Afghanistan (or any other nation for that matter) has
>> nothing to do with apprehending the 9/11 terrorists or preventing
>> future acts of terrorism.
>
>I don't see how believing Scheer's descriptions of the purportedly
>decentralized nature of Al Qaeda logically entails also believing that the
>war in Afghanistan "didn't have anything to do" with preventing future acts
>of terrorism, or even believing that doing so wasn't one efficacious (or
>even essential) means to that end.
Here's an excerpt from Raban's piece <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17676>:
>"There is no al-Qaeda organization," asserts one of Curtis's star
>witnesses, Jason Burke, author of Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of
>Terror, in a climactic moment of the final episode-a remark that
>elicited admiring gasps from the tiny American audience to whom I
>showed the series. That may be true as far as it goes, but it does
>not go nearly as far as Burke himself goes in an article in the
>May/June 2004 issue of Foreign Policy, where he writes:
>
>Today, the structure that was built in Afghanistan has been
>destroyed, and bin Laden and his associates have scattered or been
>arrested or killed. There is no longer a central hub for Islamic
>militancy. But the al Qaeda worldview, or "al Qaedaism," is growing
>stronger every day. This radical internationalist ideology-sustained
>by anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic rhetoric -has
>adherents among many individuals and groups, few of whom are
>currently linked in any substantial way to bin Laden or those around
>him. They merely follow his precepts, models, and methods. They act
>in the style of al Qaeda, but they are only part of al Qaeda in the
>very loosest sense. That's why Israeli intelligence services now
>prefer the term "jihadi international" instead of "al Qaeda."