Interesting Insight

From Wretchard:

Manwaring's central insight is brilliant: he knows that Al Qaeda is as much about amassing money and power as about any tenet of the Islamic faith. It's is as much about private ambitions as ideology. It's not personal: it's business. George Will, on the other hand, persists in trying to understand the insurgency through nation-state theory. He compare the Iraqi insurgency to the FLN and wonders what they are about.

We should not wait for terrorists to congeal and develop an ideology. We must crush the terrorists before they can evolve their goals into something that could act as a rationale and justification for their heinous crimes against the people of Iraq, the US, and anywhere else they strike.

So far, the terrorists in Iraq have not stated any goals, so one can only conclude that they either have no goals, or that their goals are chaos. Chaos would favor the terrorists in that they would be able to establish private fiefdoms in which to accrete power and use it against other fiefdoms in the area. Nation-states like Iran and Syria would then engage in classical balance of power struggles to dominate the region, by playing the fiefdoms against each other, making sure that no one gets too powerful to challenge them, but sufficiently powerful to prevent other countries from gaining a foothold. The US strategy has to continue thwarting and disrupting the terrorists from operating in the region, as well as dealing with the underlying issues in Saudia Arabia, Iran, and Syria, who all harbor and/or condone terrorists who operate in Iraq.