Jack, I truly think that Bin Laden is inconsequential as anything but a huge propaganada tool to provide an fulltime ongoing excuse for fighting foreign wars in various places. He may even be dead already...but if he is, the system would not want people to know it, because they want their bearded bogeyman out there to justify various actions, and Bin Laden is still useful in that sense, just like Saddam Hussein was useful.

Likewise, Al Queda is largely (though not completely) a mythical bogeyman created in order to justify distant wars and increased domestic surveilance and reduction of civil rights on the homefront. Not that there isn't some real Al Queda out there...there is...but their presence and their strength has been blow totally out of proportion, again for propaganda purposes. The propaganda has been so effective that it has convinced thousands of young Muslims that there is something powerful out there for them to join up with...so the myth helps stoke its own existence merely by its own repetition.

This hunt to destroy "Al Queda" is about as silly, ultimately, as the search for the Holy Grail, and like the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth...Al Queda is never going to truly be found or eliminated. It will simply vanish into the sands of history presently when the world media decide to pick another official bogeyman to promote instead...and then young men who are angry at the great powers will attempt to join something else instead of "Al Queda"...because the media will tell them it's out there to join! Thus will the next conflict be neatly arranged by those who desire it.

Whether or not Al Queda ever existed, there are tremendous reasons why young Muslims would volunteer to fight against American and coalition occupying forces in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else they go...and those reasons are reasons of nationalism and anti-colonialism on the part of those young men.

They're fighting the USA because the USA is messing around in their societies and harming them...NOT because of "Al Queda".

You don't need to "get Bin Laden". In fact, getting him would be a big strategic loss to the PNAC's planners, because they would lose their wild goose...and then they'd have to find another similar one so they could continue the wild goose chase. They'd have to find or invent a new Bin Laden. And they would. I guarantee it. There's always another one.

You will NEVER deny "Al Queda" a safe haven. There will always be another safe haven somewhere, because "Al Queda" isn't the problem. The problem is that the USA, Britain, Canada, and Australia are promoting a huge quasi-colonial (corporate) effort in the world right now, are using their military force and financial power to do it, and are alienating and infuriating millions of Third World people (most of them Muslims) and some of those people are always going to be willing to get a gun or a bomb and fight back. They will fight us wherever we go with our armies and our corporate power. This war will be endless until the Anglo powers stop trying to dominate and rob a very large part of the world of its local strategic resources, particulary oil.

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Faith-based initiatives? A tempest in a teapot. I agree with you there, Jack.