Americans went and joined the military in record number after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and after the 9/11 attacks. This isn't behavior unique to Americans. When people are attacked, they want to fight back. Middle Eastern people are no different. Right now Al-Queda is the only group fighting back, and that is why they are able to recruit so easily.

Did you ever wonder how many Al-Queda there are? It would seem that after 7 years we have killed most of them by now. The reason we don't seem to be making much progress is because new people keep joining the movement.

If any of you have ever studied history, and I know you have Wagner, this should remind you of the KKK in 1870 when Governor Brownlow called for the Union Army to come to Tennessee and eradicate the KKK. Seemed like a good idea at the time. The end result was a number of huge battles between the Union Army and a KKK army of several thousand. The Union Army won each of these battles with ease, but the KKK did not seem to go away. Instead, the opposite happened. The KKK became more popular, and more people joined. Eventually, by the middle of the decade, President Grant realized this strategy wasn't working, and he withdrew the Army from the South.

Lots of lessons to be learned from that bit of history. Lesson #1 was that extremists thrive on violence as it helps them recruit more people to their cause. Lesson #2 is that the only way to defeat extremist groups is to alter the society in which they exist, not to take them on directly. The Civil Rights movement did not fire a single shot or kill a single KKK member, yet it managed to cause this group, that had over 4 million members at its peak, to become small and insignificant.

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my experience on X5world when I spend too much
time posting in political threads in the lounge...