I’m going to take Andrew Sullivan to task, and not because he can fill his blog with letters that are better than what I write, but because he seems to forget something. Andrew asks “How Dumb Is Al Qaeda” regarding how they released their miserable snuff video without waiting for the furor over Abu Ghraib to die down. And then he goes on to point out that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union as another example of the stupidity of evil.
Well. Let’s remember that killing infidels and thus demonstrating the superiority of Islam is what Al Qaeda is all about. It’s a stupid, vicious, reprehensible program beginning to end. How much strategic sense (or realism) can a movement have that longs for a return of the glories of Andalusia?
And to follow up, Hitler’s goal for WWII was to gain living space in the east, especially the Soviet Union. He wrote about it in Mein Kampf, which he wrote in the days when German authorities had the good sense to put him in jail and long before he came to power. The real example of stupidity was Hitler’s decision to declare war on the US while he was still fighting the USSR and Britain when he had nothing to gain from it.
Both are examples of a person or group staying true to their core values. Al Qaeda will never be anything but an instrument of death and terror. Their only response to any situation is to kill – the only question is one of scale.
