If I remember correctly, their counteroffer was surrendering Al-Qaeda leadership for trial in a Muslim court.
It's certainly possible that a Muslim court would have been as biased as an American court, but it's also true that many Muslim governments in the Middle East and elsewhere did oppose and continue to oppose bin Laden's agenda, which was to draw the U.S. into war with the world-wide Islamic community in order to polarise the two sides, strengthen support for the extreme wing of Islamist fundamentalism, and destroy American capacity to interfere with his other agenda, which includes reforming the Islamic world in conformity with his personal view of Islam.
So far, he's has some success in two out of three of his goals, and he may have made some progress with the third.
War was what he wanted. Diplomacy and/or operating from a police/criminalistic/law and justice paradigm rather than a military paradigm might have worked out better, and probably couldn't have worked out worse.
After all, bin Laden (or his successors), Al Qaeda and the various radical Islamist groups it supported remain out there, decentralised and still capable of planning and executing terrorist acts wherever in the world they happen to be.
That hasn't changed, and that was supposedly why the war was started in the first place.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 09:28 pm (UTC)It's certainly possible that a Muslim court would have been as biased as an American court, but it's also true that many Muslim governments in the Middle East and elsewhere did oppose and continue to oppose bin Laden's agenda, which was to draw the U.S. into war with the world-wide Islamic community in order to polarise the two sides, strengthen support for the extreme wing of Islamist fundamentalism, and destroy American capacity to interfere with his other agenda, which includes reforming the Islamic world in conformity with his personal view of Islam.
So far, he's has some success in two out of three of his goals, and he may have made some progress with the third.
War was what he wanted. Diplomacy and/or operating from a police/criminalistic/law and justice paradigm rather than a military paradigm might have worked out better, and probably couldn't have worked out worse.
After all, bin Laden (or his successors), Al Qaeda and the various radical Islamist groups it supported remain out there, decentralised and still capable of planning and executing terrorist acts wherever in the world they happen to be.
That hasn't changed, and that was supposedly why the war was started in the first place.