I despise spit-balling numbers like this. The results are almost guaranteed to bear no resemblence to reality. Its like saying there are 150,000,000 Christians in this country, and if 'just 1/10th of 1%' (totally reasonable right?) believed in bombing abortion clinics, thats 150,000 potential bombers out there! Problem is I just pulled that number out of thin air because it seemed like it would sound reasonable.

Mark:

The problem is that your assumption about American Christians isn't held up by any sort of observation (note the lack of bombings of that sort over here) while the "merely 2%" guesstimate is pretty much in line with how we see people act in many countries.

You're comparing a more "modern" religion with one that's still stuck in the Middle Ages.

I guess that what you call MAD did not work either with the Soviet Union or with any country in the world. For instance do you know how many palaces and luxurious houses Saddam Hussein had?! How many mistresses were loved by his sons? Yet did the MAD work?! Did external pressure bring any internal changes?! Certainly not. Neither internal changes were brought by the external pressure in case of the Soviet Union( internal problems that had nothing to do with external pressure were the real cause of the downfall of this state, in my opinion one should look for the roots of it the 30s, one decade before cold war had started). “ Nazis …wanted to live and feared death” and how many top nazi officials survived after the war?! It looks like they were resolved to destroy the world with the destruction of their power and their state, and many of tem committed suicide and those who did not were hanged by the tribunals latter on. MAD can only work with sane-yes, and one can assure that Iranian official might be hypocritical, extremist yet they are sane. One should just understand their sanity and act according to this understanding in order to attain the success in our efforts to destroy their nuclear weapons arsenal.

"while the "merely 2%" guesstimate is pretty much in line with how we see people act in many countries."

The Christian thing was just an example, im not arguing the politics of it. The point is human beings are notoriously horribly estimators, particularly with big numbers. The biggest muslim populations in the world are outside the middle east and most Americans know virtually nothing about them. To throw around numbers like that is just not helpful. It could be more, it could be less, but its very likely to be far different from the above conclusion, if you are just using a number settled on via intuition.

Anthony, pick up Natan Sharansky's book "The Case for Democracy" sometime...I think you'd be surprised just how much of what happened to the Soviet Union was due to the U.S. (and to a lesser extent, the West) tying its foreign policy to how the USSR treated its own citizens; in other words, external pressure from the U.S. and the west brought about and supported the internal change that happened.

Iraq is a different case primarily because of oil-for-food. Unlike the USSR, which was largely dependent on the West for many vital materials and goods, Iraq was able to get much of what they needed under the table, making a comparison between the two moot.

In any case, MAD isn't about bringing about regime change. It's about preventing whoever has the nukes from using them. And USSR's leaders most definitely wanted to keep on living the good life, so yes, MAD worked with them. Iran is quite obviously a much different case.

The Germans were not large in number. But that was a time when few countries were industrialized, and Germany was. Take Germany alone as a share of world industrial production in 1940 (I know there are numbers on that in Paul Kennedy, rise of the great powers) Now take the entire muslim worlds share of total industrial production in 2006. Now take 10% of that number. Doesnt look quite as threatening.

A big problem, perhaps the biggest at the present time. But not Germany 1940.

"The problem is that your assumption about American Christians isn't held up by any sort of observation (note the lack of bombings of that sort over here) while the "merely 2%" guesstimate is pretty much in line with how we see people act in many countries."

More importantly, estimates like that stand up to the numbers coming out of polls conducted in the Islamic world.

If you polled Americans to name thier hero, the number of people who would spontaneously name Timothy McView or Eric Rudolph would be so low, that not only would it not appear in the top 100 most commonly named figures (because it doesn't, and we could find evidence of that if we wanted), but you'd almost certainly have to poll 100,000's if not millions of people in order to find even one person who would answer in that fashion. Such cannot be said of Osama when asking the same question in Islamic populations, and we can find evidence of that too if we wanted.

Similarly, if you asked Americans whether they had favorable views of Eric Rudolph, they'd probably go 'who?' and when you explained they'd probably think you were nuts. (Compare that obvious fact to asking Americans whether they had favorable views of Che Guevara.) Even among Christian fundamentalists - maybe less than 1/5th of the population - the number of people with a favorable view of Eric Rudolph would be so low as to make the question mute. Thousands of people would need to be polled before you'd find even one that supported him. Yes that is a guess, but its not one I feel unconfident in making.

By contrast, Osama Bin Laden is viewed favorably by between 2% and 60% of the people polled depending on the Islamic nation that you happen to be in, and that's not a guess. Even in Jordan, a place that suffered from Al Queda attacks, Bin Ladin still had a 57% approval rating in the latest poll I'm aware of. Similarly, in places like Jordan and Morrocco, approval for terrorist attacks on US civilians exceeds 70%. I'm not talking about the 'joos' in Israel here, or support for the Palestinian 'resistance', I'm talking about support for attacks on you and your kids. Support for attacks on Israel is even higher.

Pretending that there is some qualitative or quantitative comparison between the support for violent terrorism amongst Christians - or any other group for that matter - and that among Moslems is to stick your head in the sand. If in fact .1 of 1% of all Americans supported bombing abortion clinics, there would be bombs going off daily. Instead they are rare event supported only by a tiny group of fringe wackos. But suggesting that something other than a large percentage of world Moslems support terrorism at least in the abstract doesn't jive with the evidence. Whatever the answer is, it isn't 'just a small group of fringe wackos' and you can't begin to enter into a serious conversation about fixing the problem until you acknowledge that. Yes, the numbers here are being somewhat spitballed, but the important point is that they are demonstratably not close to zero, and that the populations in question are so large (1.6 billion) that anything not close to zero produces enormous numbers.

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Drake's Equation. Drake's equation proports to find out how many intelligent civilizations that thier are in the galaxy. It is the ultimate example of spitballing numbers because thier isn't a single term in the multiterm equation for which we have good numbers for. But, even so, we have a pretty good idea what those numbers can't be. We know that those numbers can't produce a result which indicates less than 1 intelligent species in the universe, because we know we are here. Similarly, we know that the number can't be all that high, or else we'd already be talking to our neighbors. Reality constrains even the widest spitballing, and here we are doing far less wild spitballing than something as silly as the Drake equation. The fact of the matter is that, yes, answering 'How many people believe in religion of suicide bombers?' is always going to involve some spitballing and some numbers yanked out of the air, but based on polling information and observation on the number and extent of terror attacks conducted, 10% would seem to be on the conservative low end of the scale.

And speaking of numbers that "our betters" don't want us to think about, did you know also that it's actually safer -- even using age group adjusted death rates and with a war in progress -- to be in the U.S. military than in the general population?

You just have to love the Goebbels-class propaganda job the MSM is doing on us.

And a sad commentary on the failure of public math and logic education that we are falling for it...

"with a war in progress -- to be in the U.S. military than in the general population? "

And far more people day in traffic accidents in the US every year than died on 9/11. So what? Deaths in war are in a different category, for many good reasons, and everyone knows it.

"The Christian thing was just an example, im not arguing the politics of it. The point is human beings are notoriously horribly estimators, particularly with big numbers. The biggest muslim populations in the world are outside the middle east and most Americans know virtually nothing about them. To throw around numbers like that is just not helpful. It could be more, it could be less, but its very likely to be far different from the above conclusion, if you are just using a number settled on via intuition."

No, you can't escape that way either.

http://www.insideindonesia.org/edit69/osamabincool.htm
http://www.atimes.com/se-asia/DB06Ae01.html
http://www.finfacts.com/irelandbusinessnews/publish/printer_10002589.shtml

Indonesia is not in the Middle East. The estimates aren't based on wild inference or even only ancedotal evidence, but grounded in some measure of fact.

Mike,

Well, certainly I respect Mr Sharansky as a famous dissident and politician; however it does not mean that I agree with his views on this matter. Apart from the short period during détente American policy did not affect internal developments in the Soviet Union. I would rather agree with the views expressed by George Keenan:” the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish…”

You claim that Iraq is a different case because of oil for food program?! In other words one can infer form this comment that Iraq was more self sufficient nation than a Soviet Union, which had all necessary resources and materials, but lacked efficient system to develop it?! It is clear that the USSR was much more self sufficient country than Iraq, and apart from high technological goods that could be used in war industry (which were both unobtainable for Iraq and the USSR), USSR was able to obtain much more goods and equipment from Western countries than pre-war Iraq had ever been able to, either under the table or in the open market (to say nothing that it had all necessary resources and materials). How many times anyone saw TV screens with hungry children at pre war Iraq hospitals (during oil for food program)?! Does anyone remember seeing hungry soviet children?! Why? I guess because the USSR was able to withstand strenuous trade relations with the USA more successfully than Iraq. And if the policy of the USA could not entail the internal changes in much more fragile and weaker state than the Soviet Union-Iraq, than this doctrine of MAD did not work with USSR either.

I am not certain that the leaders of Iran are irrational. They are rational and we should their rationality in order to deal with them. If they did not want to enjoy living in their state, then they either would succumb to the sanctions that the world community tries to impose upon tem or would be totally indifferent to these threats. But this is not the case, and I think this gives us reasons to believe that they also want to preserve their “good life”

Bob, given traffic accident death in absolute numbers, I believe it was "safer" during the Vietnam War as well.

Well, except for the important note that there wer far more people driving cars every day than serving in Vietnam, so making the leap from absolute deaths to adjectives like "safer" wasn't honest. Though discussions re: national priorities and supposed "concern" for casualties would be fair game.

Statistics do need to be used carefully and honestly. I'm inclined to go with Prager's comparison precisely because of the polls, anecdotal evidence, and even electoral patterns in places like Bangladesh & Indonesia that suggest the number is far higher than 2% or even 10%. And yes, this does give some important dimension to the scale of the problem.

I'll close by noting that Liberhawk has a good point re: using other statistics to form a more complete picture. Having said that, radical Islam's principal weapon is the jihadi human bomb. Given that, and given the allegiance of many in the West and elsewhere to its death cult, those kinds of numbers matter in a terrorist war just as much as indistrial production matters to a total war scenario. Wait 20-30 years and add a biotech curve that puts jihadi human germ bombs within far closer reach, and that becomes far more true.

"Yes, the numbers here are being somewhat spitballed, but the important point is that they are demonstratably not close to zero, and that the populations in question are so large (1.6 billion) that anything not close to zero produces enormous numbers. "

Exactly. And any slight shift is a huge amount of people. We cant even figure out how to make professional poll sampling work accurately, and at least there is some quantatative data there. The weight you decide to put on any small component can give you wildly different results.

Again, im not making a political argument, im not arguing the number is anything close to zero. There is no question in my mind this is a significant number, but why not just say that instead of postulating something so apt to be way off. The differnce between 1 million and 10 million jihadi sympathizers is an order of magnitude and will drastically affect how we approach the problem.

"Reality constrains even the widest spitballing, and here we are doing far less wild spitballing than something as silly as the Drake equation."

Drake's equation isnt almost worthless, it is completely worthless with the data at hand. It basically tells us there are between 1 and 100 billion intelligent life worlds in our galaxy. Thanks for the news. You are correct, if all you are trying to demonstrate is the incredibly high likelihood of the number of intelligent lifeforms outside of earth being non-zero, this kind of thinking has validity. But anything beyond that you are playing with probabilities in a silly way. If you have no idea how accurate all of your estimates are you have no idea how accurate your conclusions are. And you cant argue that 9 of the 10 elements are bounded by such and such and hence we are 90% sure of the result... you need to have a reliable number for each element or you cant draw many conclusions. For instance we are clueless what percentage of living planets produce intelligent life. We have a sample size of 1. You could plug in any non-zero number and argue it is viable- all we have is theory. The truth could be that intelligent life isnt just rare, its unique. Then no matter what else is in the equation the answer is 1, Earth. How 'likely' is that? As improbable as every other possible integer.

Isn't asking Muslims if they have a favorable opinion of OBL to determine whether they share his philosophy of Islamic totalitarianism kind of like asking Americans if they favor a reversal of Roe v. Wade to determine whether they favor a constitutional right to late-term, partial birth abortion? When OBL is portrayed as a hero in Islamic societies, do you think they show slides of him standing next to a burkah-clad woman about to be shot in a stadium in Kabul on some trumped up charge?

If it were possible, the best way to deal with those who are true believers of OBL's vision exterminated Jews and a restored Caliphate dominating a dhimmified West would start with getting all of those true believers in one place and end with a mushroom cloud. But life's more complicated than that. Prager's take on this is predictably shallow and utterly useless for anything other than inflaming xenophobia and prejudice.

Mark: "Exactly. And any slight shift is a huge amount of people."

Certainly, but that is not the point. The important point is that the number of people out thier who are terrorist sympathizers and supporters is huge, shifts or no shifts in the numbers.

"We cant even figure out how to make professional poll sampling work accurately, and at least there is some quantatative data there. The weight you decide to put on any small component can give you wildly different results."

Yes, but at least you admit that we have quantative data to go on.

"Again, im not making a political argument, im not arguing the number is anything close to zero."

Good. It's worth noting that alot of people opposed to the war on terror do argue that the number is something close to zero and argue that virtually all support for the terrorists is the result of the war on terror itself. Frankly, I think that that is irrelevant as it is false. The relevant thing is that the problem is huge.

"There is no question in my mind this is a significant number, but why not just say that instead of postulating something so apt to be way off. The differnce between 1 million and 10 million jihadi sympathizers is an order of magnitude and will drastically affect how we approach the problem."

No, not really. That is in fact my point. Whether there are 1 million or 10 million jihadi sympathizers, the scale of that problem dwarfs most governmental resources. If thier are only 1 million jihadist sympathizers, it constrains our options as greatly as if thier are 10 million jihadists. But the fact of the matter is that either number, 1 million or 10 million, is an unsustainably low estimate, if we actually try to estimate the number of jihadist sympathizers with the best available data. If we just considered Indonesia or Pakistan alone, we'd end up with numbers higher than that, and that's to say nothing of actual jihadist states like Iran. Some 50% of Indonesians report that they admire Bin Laden - and this is even after the various bombings in Indonesia.

"Drake's equation isnt almost worthless, it is completely worthless with the data at hand."

That's basically what I said. I said, "It is the ultimate example of spitballing numbers because thier isn't a single term in the multiterm equation for which we have good numbers for." Now you've reflexively regurgitated some spiel at me as if I was a Drake equation supporter instead of a critic. The reason I brought up Drake's equation was to contrast it to some of the spitballing we are doing. Unlike Drake's equation, we do have good numbers for many of the terms in the equation. Counting up "the supporters of Hamas, the Taliban, the Sudanese regime, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, bin Ladin, Islamic Jihad, the Finley Park Mosque in London or Hizbollah" is alot easier to do than counting the number of intelligent species in the galaxy. We DO know where to begin to do that, and we CAN observe the reality of the situation with far better accuracy than we can our possible neighbors in the galaxy.

I brought up Drake's Equation because it seemed to me that you were claiming that it was as impossible to roughly estimate the number of "supporters of Hamas, the Taliban, the Sudanese regime, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, bin Ladin, Islamic Jihad, the Finley Park Mosque in London or Hizbollah" as it was to estimate the number of intelligent species in the universe. And that is quite frankly not at all true.

"If thier are only 1 million jihadist sympathizers, it constrains our options as greatly as if thier are 10 million jihadists."

I dont know that to be true. Its seems more like a problem of coping with the numbers than anything. Lets say it was 1 billion, does that change things any? Like I said, humans are terrible at processing big numbers and their implications. There is good science indicating anything over 1,000 might as well be a google to the human mind. My point is that doesnt mean problems involving big numbers dont pragmatically have solutions dependant on their magnitude. Just because we have trouble imagining the correct solutions doesnt mean objectively there arent differnt (possibly extremely different) implications between dealing with 1 million and 2 million, much less 10 million.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Its plainly obvious if you get in a fight with 2 guys its dramatically more dangerous than 1 guy. 10 guys compared to 5 is harder to imagine. 2 million vs 1 million? hardly seems worth thinking about, but that is double and it is very likely to have very different implications from an objective pov.

"Now you've reflexively regurgitated some spiel at me as if I was a Drake equation supporter instead of a critic"

Sorry, that wasnt aimed at you, it was a rant. The Drake Equation sticks in my craw and i always have to vent about it.

"Isn't asking Muslims if they have a favorable opinion of OBL to determine whether they share his philosophy of Islamic totalitarianism kind of like asking Americans if they favor a reversal of Roe v. Wade to determine whether they favor a constitutional right to late-term, partial birth abortion?"

Are you claiming that there is no relationship at all between supporting Roe v. Wade and favoring a constitutional right to late-term, partial birth abortions?

I think your analogy is apt in a very important way. I don't think that the majority of Americans know exactly what Roe V. Wade says or what principles it enshrines. I think that all the average person knows is that support for Roe V. Wade indicates support for 'abortion rights' and opposition to it indicates oposition to abortion. In practice, support for Roe. v. Wade has effectively been support for a constitutional right to late-term partial birth abortions because the courts have held that Roe V. Wade protects such things and repeatedly overturned all sorts of restrictions on access to abortion using Roe V. Wade as precedent. Whether the average person knows and understands what the consequences of his support are, or whether the average person would support all the consequences of his support are somewhat irrelevant. I would argue that neither the pro-lifers or the pro-choice really understand the consequences of thier views.

Populations do not have to know what the consequences of sweeping a totalitarian ruler into power are in order to support totalitarianism. Heck, people ideologically opposed to totalitarianism can help sweep dictators into power. Arguably, if people knew what the consequences of supporting a dictator's rise to power would be, thier would be a whole lot fewer tyrants in history. But so what. People don't have perfect foresight. You and I might well agree that a global Sharia state would be a horrorshow, but that doesn't keep people from supporting it. If people knew what life would be like in such a theocracy, they might be less likely to support it, but they don't have to know in order to support one. They only have to believe.

"If it were possible, the best way to deal with those who are true believers of OBL's vision exterminated Jews and a restored Caliphate dominating a dhimmified West would start with getting all of those true believers in one place and end with a mushroom cloud...Prager's take on this is predictably shallow and utterly useless for anything other than inflaming xenophobia and prejudice."

I'm always amazed at the bloodthirstyness of people who claim the Hawks are motivated by 'xenophobia', 'prejudice', 'fear', 'hate' and what not. Amongst those 'true believers' you want to purge in fire would almost certainly be 100,000's of children below the age of 12. I'd never call killing people by the millions the best way to deal with anything. Not even the adults, to say nothing of the fact that we are talking about the annihilation of whole communities.

And again, if you don't think we are talking about the annihilation of whole communities and the death of millions of people, then it shows that you are greatly in need of a reality check. And that is Prager's point as best as I can tell.

Celebrim said: "I don't think that the majority of Americans know exactly what Roe V. Wade says or what principles it enshrines."

After a failed first attempt (a wrong turn into the "are you claiming that there's no relationship . . ." etc. dead end), you did get it. Bravo. That was THE point. You didn't do as well with the the second paragraph, though. I'll spell it out for you: 1) Prager draws a broad conclusion from scant evidence, just as he would if he used the data obtained by some silly MSM poll on Roe v. Wade to guess who favors a right to late-term abortion, and 2) the logical conclusion of that sort of overbreadth is indiscriminate violence, if not genocide.

Although I share your aversion to indiscriminate violence or violence against innocents, I have no problem with directed violence against real enemies when it's necessary for self-defense. And self defense includes not just defense of life, but also liberty. For example, any attempt to establish Sharia in the US, even by democratic means, would justify law-abiding, gun owning citizens to take matters into their own hands to nullify the choice of the majority (respect for Democracy ends where the Demos no longer respects fundamental human rights -- democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to protect liberty). And I have no problem with showing extreme intolerance to any viewpoint that justifies honor killings or capital punishment for apostates.

I don't think all cultures deserve equal time -- Anglo-American Enlightenment Values, if universally applied, are the apex of human cultural achievement, not just another alternative, and if another culture, whether Islam or any other, suggests principles that conflict with those values, there's no doubt about which is right and which is wrong (better dead than red is more than just a slogan). But not every person who has expressed, at one time or another, a view supportive of Islamism, or even praise for OBL deserves to be treated like an enemy. If that were true, we could start with a certain US Senator from the State of Washington (hmm, maybe I'll reconsider that one).

Prager is among those who portray the GWOT as a war between Islam and the West, rather than a civil war within Islam in which those seeking to reconcile Islam with Western Enlightenment Values are pitted against those who seek to subjugate those values to Islam. It's an old trick, used by tyrants and would-be tyrants throughout history. The purpose of such rhetoric is to enhance the speaker's own political influence, not to protect our values or way of life. If there's no future for Enlightened Islam, then so be it, but that's far from clear, the Dennis Pragers of the world notwithstanding. The conflict of civilizations demagogues are trying to throw Enlightened Islam (or the hope of it) under the bus merely to earn the modern equivalent of thirty pieces of silver. If we let them -- if we abandon Muslims to 12th century throwbacks, how do we justify our own belief in Creator endowed universal human dignity?

yes, let's talk about the virtues of a modern religion like Christianity. Which has not trouble defining the moral issues of others without confronting their own....

...the portion of Catholics who justify torture is even higher, according to the survey. Twenty-one percent of Catholics surveyed said it is “often” justified and 35 percent said it is “sometimes” justified. Another 16 percent said it is “rarely” justified, meaning that nearly three of four Catholics justify it under some circumstances. Four percent of Catholics “didn’t know” or refused to answer and only 26 percent said it is “never” justified, which is the official teaching of the church.

Torture, according to the International Convention against Torture of 1984, “means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person.”

I'll give the catholic church a pass saying the right thing, but I hear no mention from baptists, mormons, or evangelicals (whose numbers were nearly identical).

I'm not saying Christians are "Jihadi-light", but by these definitions, assuming 77% of the country beleives themselves to be christian, and 10%-15% of them are 'often' in favor of torture, than we have 20-30 million torturers in the united states!

Or does the same bogus math not work against the 'good guys'.

"Or does the same bogus math not work against the 'good guys'."

I don't want to get into the debate of the morality of torture or what constitutes torture again, so lets not hijack the thread. But, it's not at all clear from you post that you think that the math is bogus when you apply it to Catholics, especially since you put 'good guys' in scare quotes.

Exactly what are you saying? Is article you link to intended to be an example of 'bogus math' that we should discount, or is intended to be convincing the Catholics in particular and Christians in general have thier own moral failings to deal with? Do you disagree with the article's 'bogus math'? If you do disagree, are you expecting me to agree with it? If you find the article convincing, why do you find similar math bogus when applied to Islamic populations?

If you think that the critique you link to is damning for showing that Catholics are slightly more likely to think torture is justifiable under some circumstances than the American people as whole, then how can you say that the math is bogus? But if you think that the math is bogus, how can you damn the Catholics - as you seem to do?

Also, what do you mean about "(whose numbers were nearly identical)". Nearly identical to what? The general public opposed torture in all circumstances 32% of the time. The protestants opposed torture in all circumstances 31% of the time. That's a pretty small difference, and probably well within the error margin of such a survey. That relationship is so weak that it leads me to think that perhaps thier is a weak relationship between Protestant and some other demographic factor, and that that other ethnic or social factor is actual the strong casual factor behind the differences in opinion.

Incidently, the fact that Americans think that torture is justifiable in 'some' circumstances or 'rarely' is hardly surprising. If it is, you haven't watched the movie 'Dirty Harry'.

And outside of universities, the arts world or Hollywood, how many people believed in Soviet-style totalitarianism?

Universities, Hollywood, and the Arts World did not have access to nuclear weapons, and did not have enormous standing armies willing to fight and die for their motherlands. The USSR and its allies did, and were a much greater threat to liberty than the Islamofascists are. Whst is it about you guys needing to feel besieged? (Anyone else note that the map of Israel Yehudit linked too includes not only the West Bank and the Golan, but also the Gaza Strip? Obsolete, anyone?)

FormerDem: "...the logical conclusion of that sort of overbreadth is indiscriminate violence, if not genocide."

I'm not sure how you get to here. Using the same sort of logic, the "logical conclusion" of your rant is that Prager and other "tyrants and would-be tyrants throughout history" must be elimenated by any means necessary. I believe that the logical overreach here is yours, as I can't see where you get to Prager advocating genocide. By Prager's own argument, he's refering to only 10% of the population (presumably distributed amongst otherwise non-violent population) that belongs to the violence supporting segment of Islam. But even then, its a logical leap to suggest that Prager is in his argument suggesting that this 10% needs to be wiped out man, woman and child - which I should note you yourself seemed to suggest and continue to seem to suggest.

I don't recall anyone suggesting that everyone associated with the Nazi party be wiped out, or who served in the German army or who voted for Hilte had to die. I don't recall it being policy that every Japanese citizens loyal to the emperor had to die. I don't see Prager suggesting any such thing, either.

What I do see you suggesting is "not every person who has expressed, at one time or another, a view supportive of Islamism, or even praise for OBL deserves to be treated like an enemy.", by which I can only conclude from context that to you 'treated like an enemy' and killed are one and the same thing. I think what you are doing is equating Prager's call for confronting the problem with what appears to me as your own gun-toting kill 'em all mentality. The majority of citizens of Germany - man, woman, and child - were almost certainly enemies of the free world during the period of Hitler's power, but a solution to the problem didn't involve genocide.

Not that I'm opposed to either guns or if necessary killing, or that I get any indication that Prager is. Merely that I get no indication that Prager thinks this is the only solution, while in your own words would be great solution if only we could separate, as it were, the wheat from the chafe.

"Prager is among those who portray the GWOT as a war between Islam and the West, rather than a civil war within Islam in which those seeking to reconcile Islam with Western Enlightenment Values are pitted against those who seek to subjugate those values to Islam."

I agree that fundamentally what is going on is a civil war within Islam, but that being true does not render untrue the fact that the West has been caught up in the war and will remain caught up in the war whether it wishes it or not. Likewise, the distinguishment between a war between Islam and the West, and a war between proponents of traditional Islamic values and proponents Western Enlightenment values is real but in some sense small. And it is not at all clear that if the proponents of Western values within Islam lose, that the war will take on the character of a war between the West and Islam.

It's not at all clear to me that Prager is throwing the proponents of Western values within Islam 'under the bus' or giving up on Islamic civilization quite yet. And it's equally not clear that the result of the West winning such a war would be genocide or that Prager is advocating such an outcome. In my opinion its the current Hawks which are least likely to call for genocide in that unfortunate event. As far as genocide goes, its the Doves I fear because I very much distrust thier gut reaction when and if reality finally hits them in the face. My observation is that the current anti-War faction tends to answer the questions of the form, "Well what do you do if you fail?" with "Nuke 'em all!!!".

"Universities, Hollywood, and the Arts World did not have access to nuclear weapons, and did not have enormous standing armies willing to fight and die for their motherlands. The USSR and its allies did, and were a much greater threat to liberty than the Islamofascists are."

I think that the point is that ultimately, it wasn't the US nuclear arsenal that was dangerous to the USSR. By the same token, it follows wasn't the Soviet nuclear arsenal that was really dangerous to America. Ultimately, the cold war was decided by a combination of economics, propaganda, and ideas - a memetic war if you will. It was the memetic ground that was the strategic center of the war, as hot actions like the Vietnam conflict demonstrate. The USA and the USSR spent alot of money trying to undermine the others social structure with various memetic weapons. In a memetic war, universities, the media, and the arts are among the commanding heights, and although Prager's comment is snarky, you have a problem with reality if you don't think that Hollywood, Universities, and the Arts world weren't havens of communist true believers who really felt that Cuba and the USSR were the good guys.

The masses of Soviet tanks never represented the real existential threat to the free world - as the Gulf War afterwards demonstrated Soviet style conventional armies never really stood a chance. The hosts of nuclear arms pointed at each other by both sides, dangerous as a misstep with them would have been, never really represented that threat either. We know now after the fact that the Soviets were as terrified of those weapons as we were. No, the real threat to both sides always were the producers of the meme weapons. This is why the Pope's 'divisions' were a bigger real threat to Soviet domination of Poland than the US Army actually was.

What I think alot of people looking at the threat of Islam fail to see is that they are dealing with among other threats one of the world's memetic super-powers, and that the West finds its commanding heights still largely crippled and unusable and is still stumbling around in the memetic minefield of the last conflict. Talking about industrial power as if it was the sole measure of warmaking capacity is so last century, and so early last century at that.

You're letting Prager get away with a bait and switch. Fundamentalist Islam of the sort that harbors Islamic fascists is the bait, then he applies his percentage to all of Islam. The leap he's made is that there's no distinction to be made except between Islam and the Islamic fascists, implicitly denying the need to first make a distinction betweeen Fundamentalist Islam that is sympathetic to Islamic fascism and Islam as whole.

And, yes, of course the logical conclusion of Prager's bait and switch is genocide, even if he won't say it out loud. It's not sufficient, all by itself, to cause genocide, of course, but it's the sort of demonization that is necessary for the perpetration of such a horror. In our PC era, the sort of dehumanizing propaganda that will work is that which doesn't portray the other as subhuman, but rather portrays the other as religious fanatics.

It's important also to put this demagoguery in the context of the nuclear age and, more particularly, the age of failure of nuclear non-proliferation. That's the hole in your skepticism regarding the logical conclusion of conflict of civilizations demagoguery. More on that below.

No one suggested that everyone associated with the Nazi party had to be killed, because people understood and acknowledged that not everyone associated with the Nazi party was a true believer. It wasn't concern for the humanity of true believer Nazis that spared their lives; rather, it was the difficulty in distinguishing them from other Germans. Where the distinction could be made (whether or not correctly), otherwise law-abiding people dealt with the Nazis brutally and summarily (as in the executions of SS guards following the liberation of Dachau -- even though those SS were just recently arrived and may not have been involved in the atrocities at the camp -- query, did being SS, in itself, warrant summary execution? Some would probably say yes).

In contrast to the prevailing reluctance to demonize all Germans during WWII, the clash of civilizations demagogues don't concede the innocence of most Muslims. Despite the fact that Prager only explicitly suggests that a minority are certainly true believers, the rest of his argument implies that the numbers may actually be far greater. Consider that the conflict of civilization proposition itself depends heavily on the assumption that Islam as a political movement draws its support from large numbers of people whose faith renders them impervioius to rational argument (for example, the suggestion that MAD won't work).

If you accept that the enemy is so implacable, it is a small step to conclude that the enemy must be destroyed or kept in a state of primitive squalor in order to prevent the enemy from posing a threat. And the failure of nuclear non-proliferation and the realization that border security won't really be be sufficient to prevent an attack, even by a primitive enemy, means that the threat is an existential one. That makes the first option compelling, once the conflict of civilizations model is accepted. That's all the rationalization that a few people need for genocide NOW. Imagine what would happen if AQ was successful in exploding a nuke in the US. Don't forget, it's not necessary that everyone in a society that perpetrates such horror actually understand and advocate it (your words, or close, in a similar context); rather, it's only necessary that the majority accept the rationalization to an extent that they'll stand by and allow it to happen.

I do agree with you that it is the policies favored by anti-war liberals (only a few are truly anti-war and liberal; most seem to be just anti-Western and, above all, anti-American, and most decidedly illiberal, at least in any traditional sense of the word) that are most likely to result in a conflict going nuclear. Their inability to make and act upon moral distinctions prevents them from taking action needed to establish conditions that could permit the Enlightenment of Islam. Exhibit A is the left's opposition to the liberation of Iraq, even to the point of its insistence that we now abandon it to Islamic fascists.

I think former hit my point, but I'll spell it out a little clearer....(sorry, for the confusing sarcasm Celabrim)

My point is that just because a group supports a cause, does not mean that they will go out and kill for that cause. Let's start with the christian argument: many people are in favor of torture for national security, but that doesn't mean that 20% of catholics would torture someone if you told them you had a terrorist. They support someone ELSE doing it.

I think the same is true with these Osama polls. Many people see Osama as a hero, it's true. But that doesn't mean that all of them are going to risk they're own neck out, and fight in Iraq; If Prager's numbers were even remotely right, they're should be Iraqi armies of millions, not thousands in the Iraqi insurgency. I don't buy it, because even though people hate us, they're not willing to die to hate us.

I think the same thing happens in the palestinian state. They're may be a lot of people who dislike Israel. They may throw stones at soldiers, but if 1% of the population attacked israel, you'd have like 100,000 soldiers swamping Israel troops. I'm making large guesses here (since I don't know anything about Palestinian populations), but I think this is right.

"If we just considered Indonesia or Pakistan alone, we'd end up with numbers higher than that, and that's to say nothing of actual jihadist states like Iran."

But most Iranians don't agree with their government, so that's a bad example.

But even 2% of each Muslim nation (it is probably at least that in Iran) would still add up to more than the entire number of Jews in the world.

"Fundamentalist Islam of the sort that harbors Islamic fascists is the bait, then he applies his percentage to all of Islam. The leap he's made is that there's no distinction to be made except between Islam and the Islamic fascists, implicitly denying the need to first make a distinction betweeen Fundamentalist Islam that is sympathetic to Islamic fascism and Islam as whole."

What percentage of Islam is findamentalist, and of those, what percentage are willing to become suicide terrorists or death fatwa enablers or support same?

It's still a hell of a lot of people. Even if it were a tiny fringe minority which were maginalized and shunned by the majority - which it is not - it would still be a hell of a lot of people.

Joe and liberalhawk,

Respectfully, I request that you carefully re-read my post about death RATES before referencing the canard about absolute traffic deaths. My only reference even to absolute numbers was at the end regarding comparative absolute war deaths for further context. I also consider the traffic death argument to be irrelevant -- that's why you can turn my post upside-down and shake it and won't find it in there.

The thesis of my post had nothing to do with either traffic deaths or even absolute numbers. It was about statistical risk for reasonably comparable populations. If you're a 15-44 year old and we randomly pluck you out of the population and plump you down in the military then after we had done that enough times to become statistically significant, our experimental population has a decreased risk of death.

So if you want to criticize me properly you need to explain to me either where my math is wrong or -- if you can't fault my math -- why this isn't news that is quite ruinous to the MSM "story line" about the unsustainability of the war.

alchemist, what's key to this discussion is what that percentage will not do: they will not stop those who they support. You are correct when you say "just because a group supports a cause, does not mean that they will go out and kill for that cause"; the problem, however, is that they will harbor, protect, and fund those who are willing to do so.

Take the example of the Osama polls. If X% of the Muslim population has a favorable view of bin Laden, that does not mean X% will suddenly rise up in a massive army; but it does mean Osama can safely hide in the areas where that X% lives, and they won't betray him to his pursuers. The same is true of the Christians who support torture for national security--they won't do the act themselves, but they will defend and protect the government agents tasked with carrying out the act.

The problem, of course, is that a large segment of the Muslim population is willing to protect killers so that they can kill again. When you hide and protect someone with the full knowledge that they intend to kill someone else, you become an implicit accessory to that later murder.

I really think the point of this article is these people are capable of sustaining a large army that could be devastating against Israel, and devastating against the US. There's another problem with that theory though: these people are spread out among the largest continent on the Earth (ASia), Africa and some Europe. Many of these 100 mill. people who 'pledge support' are also very poor.

They simply do not have access to arms that the Nazi army did, or the Japanese did (or the Russians). They use terrorist tactics, which is all their leadership can afford. Yes, these groups can escape, and hide, and fundraise. But they are basically reduced to single incident attacks, and cannot apply the same damage as a fully equipped german war machine. Now, a single incident attack can be extremely deadly, but it's still not Japan circa 1942.

Yehudit, ok, let's agree that "it's still a hell of a lot of people."

Is that really the right question to ask, though? Particularly when you consider the context in which it comes up? Rather, shouldn't we ask how many Muslims are not fundamentalists inclined to support or at least accept totalitarian political Islam, and then consider how best to ensure that they are the ones whose views prevail? Regardless of what you conclude the numbers are, if you approach this as a conflict between Islam and the West, you're already conceding that the totalitarians will win the internal conflict within Islam (or that they already have), and the consequences of that include writing off the non-totalitarians, or at least those who will continue to identify themselves as Islam. On that point, how many Christians abandoned their faith because of the barbarism committed by some others who self-identify as Christians, as opposed to challenging an interpretation of Christianity that excuses barbarism? Islam has a doctrinal problem that Christianity does not, that is, the Koran is said to be dictated rather than merely inspired by God, but that's a problem that many self-described Muslims seem to have resolved in favor of modernity rather than medieval barbarism.

Unless the part of Islam that rejects totalitarianism is an insignificant minority, the clash of civilizations approach to Western dealings with Islam can't be reconciled with Western notions of individual liberty and free will. Philosophically, accepting that GWOT is a the clash of civilizations with the West on one side and undifferentiated Islam on the other means that the West has rejected the very principles that have distinguished it from totalitarian Islam.

Put the questions in their proper context -- that of the post non-proliferation, post 9-11 world, and consider the implications of a nuclear strike against the West where there's no easy-to-identify return address. Will any Islamic city do as a target for retaliation?

Celebrim touched on an important point earlier in this thread, and it relates to Iraq. He said, in effect, that the left is more likely to pull an indiscriminate nuclear trigger. I agree, and I think the reason is that the left reflexively condemns Western use of military force, regardless of whether it is used to create conditions that allow for the survival and perhaps even the success of Enlightened Islam. Jed Babbin and the "endgame" conservatives don't quite get it either -- the objective can't be merely containment; rather, it has to be rolling back the lines to create ground where modernists within Islam can lead it to shed its medievalism. Iraq was the most likely candidate; Iran or Syria will be next, one way or another (with or without direct external military intervention). With the landscape so changed, the prospects of totalitarian Islam making further advances start to look slim, and your numbercrunching argument less and less persuasive.

"I really think the point of this article is these people are capable of sustaining a large army that could be devastating against Israel, and devastating against the US."

Huh? If you think that that is the point, then you haven't been listening all this time you've been reading this website.

"They simply do not have access to arms that the Nazi army did, or the Japanese did (or the Russians). They use terrorist tactics, which is all their leadership can afford. Yes, these groups can escape, and hide, and fundraise. But they are basically reduced to single incident attacks, and cannot apply the same damage as a fully equipped german war machine. Now, a single incident attack can be extremely deadly, but it's still not Japan circa 1942."

Granted, but this is also not 1942. It's not even Vietnam circa 1968. Measuring the enemies strength in terms of 1942 industrial capacity misses the point entirely. This is something entirely different. No, they don't have a fully equipped German war machine, or rather they do have a German era war machine circa 1942 but that isn't really the threat. If that was the whole problem, the Islamofascists wouldn't be much of a threat worth considering and we could go back to worrying about China's burgeoning imperial ambitions and Russia's inability to fully leave behind its totalitarian instincts. We could take out a fully equipped German war machine circa 1942 in a month or two and be done with it with minimal loss of life.

While we are on the subject of the 'German war machine', you are aware that the 'german war machine' had no fully motorized units outside of Africa and still relied heavily on horse transport for its logistic supply? I'm not dissing the Wehrmacht as a fighting force, I'm merely pointing out to you that your average third world pickup truck and AK-47 and RPG equipped fighting force probably has comparable or superior theoretical firepower. Only the most elite German units in 1944 would have been equipped so well. Today is not 1942.

So far we've been lucky. The terrorists have been stupid, both in thier operational doctrine and thier choice of targets. 9/11 was a wake up call not so much because of all the damage that was done, but because it forced people who think about these sort of things to consider all the damage that could have been done with the same ammount of effort and our continuing vulnerability. Now that the levies in NO have fallen I can say things like, "Imagine if they'd blown three 50 yard wide holes in the levies (river side and lake side both) in the middle of the night while the town was sleeping and unevacuated." Three OKC style truck bombs, properly constructed, could have done it. I discussed the possibility with some friends on 9/12. We brainstormed alot of similarly devastating possibilities which I won't go into here because some of them are ridiculously easy.

And that's not even considering the proliferation of WMD's. The biggest early success of the WoT wasn't driving the Taliban out of power, useful though that was. The biggest early success was clamping down on Pakistan as a center of nuclear proliferation.

The main reason that the WoT features alot of single incident attacks is that the enemy is wedded to the dumb idea of 'martyrdom attacks'. Thier is no such thing as an experienced suicide bomber. The Japanese kamikazi caused alot of damage, but it was a waste of personel. The Japanese airforce was most deadly when it consisted of well trained pilots in the pre-Midway era. Well trained killers trump a willingness to die in the majority of cases.

My grandfather was a counter-insurgancy expert. He used to say that two well-trained men could shut the country down - and this was back before we were as interconnected as we are today.

Yet another reason why the 100 million number is unimportant. All they need is 2, as you said. Are we really going to be able to concentrate on 100 million and not miss 2? No, we so we need to concentrate on the targets most likely to attack, and not on some generic guesswork number.

If we're going to manufacture numbers, just what percentage of Americans would state that they would like nuclear weapons to be used against the Muslim world right now.

1/100 of 1%? My God, we have 30,000 would-be genocidal nuclear terrorists on our own soil!

The number is meaningless without indication of how closely the sentiment is backed up by willingness to take action, and support for that action.

Surely we should focus on real problems without manufacturing scare articles of little worth.