Friday, December 17, 2004
A Coercive Utopian is someone who knows what the ideal society should look like and is willing to kill you to achieve it. Coercive Utopians in pursuit of Fantasy Ideologies range from atheistic Marxists to the most God-obsessed religious-types. Bin Laden is part of this latter group, of course.
The trouble with these "coercive fantasists" is that, even if you want to give them what they want, you may not be able to do it - because what they want may not be achievable, even if it were not abhorrent. In the case of Bin Laden, this means the re-establishment of the Caliphate, the re-conquest of formerly Islamic lands and the establishment of strict Shariah Law therein is what he wants - and he'll stop at nothing to achieve it. It sounds crazy, but it's true. That's what he wants - for starters, and he'll stink up every cave in East Waziristan if he has to in order to get there.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (last linked to here) uses the readily-available evidence of Bin Laden's own statements, his deputies and the authorities he looks to to document what it is Al Qaeda is really after...
FrontPage magazine.com :: Osama's Big Lie by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Al-Zawahiri’s suggestion that the United States could deal with al-Qaeda “on the basis of respect and mutual interests” strongly implied, like bin Laden’s pre-election address encouraging Americans to “look for [9/11’s] causes in order to prevent it from happening again,” that America can buy its security through capitulation to al-Qaeda’s demands...
