Pirate's Cove

You’re all just hysterical nincompoops who are bent out of shape over the threat of Islamics taking over the world

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat — and it’s already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign — should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head and helps you see the topic in a different light.

Sageman has a résumé that would suit a postmodern John le Carré. He was a case officer running spies in Pakistan and then became a forensic psychiatrist. What distinguishes his new book, “Leaderless Jihad,” is that it peels away the emotional, reflexive responses to terrorism that have grown up since Sept. 11, 2001, and looks instead at scientific data Sageman has collected on more than 500 Islamic terrorists — to understand who they are, why they attack and how to stop them.

The heart of Sageman’s message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat — and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain’s Web site puts it, the United States is facing “a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists” spawned by al-Qaeda.

In other words, it takes the liberal view that terrorism is no big deal, 3,000 deaths in the space of a couple hours not withstanding. And our unwise actions in Iraq, you know, it was just wrong making people who want to kill us and take over the world mad. There are just so many things wrong with this whole line of reasoning, which completely ignores exactly what the Islamics want to do.

Read the rest of the opinion article, and you will get a good measure of the way the Left thinks, just in nice terms.