Daniel Pipes likes to demonize Muslims but he doesn’t like to draw responsible conclusions. For example, the Times Square bomber explained his actions:
The judge asked Shahzad after he announced an intent to plead guilty to all 10 counts of his indictment: “Why do you want to plead guilty?” A reasonable question given the near certainty that guilty pleas will keep him in jail for long years. He replied forthrightly: I want to plead guilty and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times forward because – until the hour the US pulls it forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops killing Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government – we will be attacking [the] US, and I plead guilty to that.”
Shahzad insisted on portraying himself as replying to American actions: “I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing [of] the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks,” adding that “we Muslims are one community.”
Nor was that all; he flatly asserted that his goal had been to damage buildings and “injure people or kill people” because “one has to understand where I’m coming from, because… I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.”
WHEN CEDARBAUM pointed out that pedestrians in Times Square during the early evening of May 1 were not attacking Muslims, Shahzad replied: “Well, the [American] people select the government. We consider them all the same.”
The responsible conclusion is not that all Muslims feel the same way about America and America’s foreign policies as Shahzad does. But a not insignificant minority of Muslims do feel that way and we can expect the threat of terrorism to remain with us for as long as we wage this War on Terrorism. We can’t shut down the threat by bombing and occupying Muslim lands.
That is why it is safer to remove our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan than it is to keep them there. It’s understandable that we’d like to leave those nations more democratic and stable than we found them, but we shouldn’t confuse ourselves by thinking that we get a straight-up benefit in domestic security by continuing to have a military presence there. It should be possible to prevent safe havens from reconstituting themselves in Afghanistan without a military presence on the ground.
I think Joe Biden’s position is the closest to being correct because it does the best job of making a cost/benefit analysis.
