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Feb 10The city on a hill.
From a Newsweek article about the decline of Islamic extremism:
Over the course of 2003 and 2004, Saudi Arabia was rocked by a series of such terrorist attacks, some directed against foreigners, but others at the heart of the Saudi regime—the Ministry of the Interior and compounds within the oil industry. The monarchy recognized that it had spawned dark forces that were now endangering its very existence. In 2005 a man of wisdom and moderation, King Abdullah, formally ascended to the throne and inaugurated a large-scale political and intellectual effort aimed at discrediting the ideology of jihadism. Mullahs were ordered to denounce suicide bombings, and violence more generally. Education was pried out of the hands of the clerics. Terrorists and terror suspects were “rehabilitated” through extensive programs of education, job training, and counseling. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus said to me, “The Saudi role in taking on Al Qaeda, both by force but also using political, social, religious, and educational tools, is one of the most important, least reported positive developments in the war on terror.”
[...]
As Al Qaeda in Iraq gained militarily, it began losing politically. It turned from its broader global ideology to focus on a narrow sectarian agenda, killing Shias and fueling a Sunni-Shia civil war. In doing so, the group also employed a level of brutality and violence that shocked most Iraqis. Where the group gained control, even pious people were repulsed by its reactionary behavior. In Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency, Al Qaeda in Iraq would routinely cut off the fingers of smokers. Even those Sunnis who feared the new Iraq began to prefer Shia rule to such medievalism.
After the jump, another reason that torture is bad practice:
[T]he most important moderates to denounce militants have been the families of radicals. In the case of both the five young American Muslims from Virginia arrested in Pakistan last year and Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, parents were the ones to report their worries about their own children to the U.S. government—an act so stunning that it requires far more examination, and praise, than it has gotten. This is where soft power becomes critical. Were the fathers of these boys convinced that the United States would torture, maim, and execute their children without any sense of justice, they would not have come forward. I doubt that any Chechen father has turned his child over to Vladimir Putin’s regime.
And there’s the fact that fewer Pakistanis than US citizens believe in bombing civilians:
[O]nly 12 percent of Jordanians view suicide attacks as “often or sometimes justified” (down from 57 percent in 2005). In Indonesia, 85 percent of respondents agree that terrorist attacks are “rarely/never justified” (in 2002, by contrast, only 70 percent opposed such attacks). In Pakistan, that figure is 90 percent, up from 43 percent in 2002. Gerges points out that, by comparison, only 46 percent of Americans say that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24 percent believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”
Though this looks bad for us (let’s ignore that the questions are somewhat different for a second–I’ll circle back, though), it actually makes sense for a couple reasons. First, it only takes one bomb in your neighborhood for the non-fanatical to agree that bombing children is unpleasant business, and all the cited countries are small enough that an attack in a major city would be pretty close to home (I would bet that New Yorkers are less okay with attacking civilians than, say, Texans). Second, I think Americans have a weirdly sterile view of blowing things up, since our history (Hiroshima, Vietnam, Kosovo, Predator drones) has been about as push-button as technology has allowed, and in general, we’ve been doing the bombing. I imagine if the eastern seaboard had been hit by Canadian car bombers for a decade and we were powerless to stop it, we’d have some different responses.