Where were you 9/11/2001?

[Rev. Rye]

This war they're fighting is very real, and this is the type of shit that Jihadists and Islamic extremists want to do to us simply for being who we are (not Muslims). While I'm not championing America as some proud, noble country that's never done anything wrong, we didn't deserve anything like that.

And two points on that note:

1) The US' methods of fighting terrorism couldn't be worse if they tried; One study of how terrorist groups end noted they ended (at least when they didn't splinter) in four different ways: 43% of them adopted non-violent methods and joined part of the political process, 40% died when police took out (whether by arrest or by assassination) key members, 10% when they actually achieved their goals, and 7% when military force took them out. Guess which one was the ONLY WAY the US has bothered to use to fight their terrorists? And because of this, we keep getting more enemies with all the areas we invade. And making this all the more galling, a survey in Afghanistan ten years after 9/11 revealed that 92% of their citizens HAVE NEVER EVEN HEARD OF 9/11. Yes, 11 out of every 12 Afghans KNOW NOTHING ABOUT THE CRUCIAL EVENT WHICH LED US TO INVADE. So, as a result, due to an utter lack of context, they become more convinced of the rightness of their cause.

2) That said, in spite of all this, these Jihadists are barely making a dent in their body count. The total death toll from terror attacks on U.S. Soil that could potentially have been done by Muslim extremists (not counting the perps): 104. And about half of them happened in the Pulse nightclub. If not for that, it would be heavily dwarfed by the toll done by right-wing extremists of the more familiar (to the US) variety. The heartening thing about all this: the same force that's making the War on Terror intractable in the Middle East is ensuring that the Jihadis don't make much headway stateside: Guerrilla Warfare. It's a terrifyingly effective way of defeating a larger enemy, because LITERALLY EVERYONE can be the enemy. It's why the U.S. Army has only won one war after Korea: Saddam had a conventional army. Everyone else didn't. Of course, the catch is that the public has to see the terrorists as (at the very least) the lesser evil compared with the occupying forces. And no matter how many Muslims emigrate to the US, the Jihadi ideology is too fundamentally foreign to Americans to make the sort of headway for guerrilla warfare to be effective. No matter how much people hate the War on Terror, we all still acknowledge the Jihadis are worse.