According to the book, Bush says:

"The danger is that the United States won't stay engaged," Bush acknowledged. "The danger is, people come to office and say, 'Let us promote stability—that's more important.' The problem is that in an ideological war, stability isn't the answer to the root cause of why people kill and terrorize."

What do you think? Is he right, or is he wrong? I believe that the Right would take his stance - that the root cause of the current Islamic terrorists is radical Islam itself, and nothing short of cutting the head off of the snake will stop it. In this scenario, invading Afghanistan was the correct move, because the Taliban were promoting a form of Islam that was, by its nature, guaranteed to cause more attacks on the United States. By this philosophy, a confrontation with Iran is more or less inevitable.

Meanwhile, I think that the Left would argue that socioeconomic and political causes are more at fault than Islam. In other words, oppression and poverty created the conditions for terrorism, and Islam is just the means by which it was expressed. Antagonizing angry young men will always provoke a violent response, the thinking goes, and by meddling with the Middle East time after time, we were essentially asking for it. Invading Afghanistan was correct because the Taliban were fostering an environment which was producing killers - but invading Iran wouldn't be, because the people there generally enjoy better living conditions and more social freedom, and so are less likely to attack us.

My thoughts? The answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.

Apologies for the run-on sentences; I'm in a hurry.

I wouldn't say its socioeconomic issues. (Social issues = issues of radical ideology) (Economic issues = I need a job so I will kill people). These are more fringe issues that reinforce terrorists rather than create them.

Its politics. Israel\Palestine the most glaring example, where issues of who owns what land spark both local resistance movements and international paramilitary groups, most of which see America as the reason Israel is able to do what it does. On a more basic level, most middle eastern nations have little standing on the world stage, save for oil resources. Its a region of the world that is more or less excluded from the globalizing world and as such is exceptionally hostile towards outside political influence. Given that most western nations exercise a large amount of influence on most middle-easterners government, they see us as an enemy, and their secularist governments as our puppets.

You can't really fight an ideology, nor can you fight poverty and hope that it fixes terrorism. You can address our relationship with middle-eastern nations in an effort to tone down radicalism over time, while staying on the look out for international criminals and terrorists.

All of these thoughts are interesting and well put, and I believe there is an essence of truth in all of them.

However, as an apartment manager who gets pretty close to many of my residents, I'd like to say that those people who have been in the Middle East (there are admittedly only a handful) are in fact most inclined to insist that the largest problems of radical hatred toward America (not Americans, necessarily) has to do with our helping Israel, and not helping Palestine. They'd have okayed our helping both sides. To help Israel alone, was not. The reasons for their hatred toward Israel for its treatment of them as individuals, hurts to hear of.

Politics is something that is frequently discussed here, and although there may be some who remain silent, I have never heard anyone who didn't say that Afghanistan was a valid target and we should have completed that job.

What possible danger could the Taliban, who are a bunch of illiterate and poor fundamentalists, pose to US security? This is ludicrous on its face. Additionally, so-called Islamic terror is less of a threat than is being touted by the Bush administration and the news media. Anyone who buys into the hoax is just giving Bush and his friends justification to invade Iran. When are people going to stop allowing themselves to be led by the nose? American people? American sheep.

How do you wage an 'ideological war' with bullets, bombs, torture and renditions? Answer: you don't. War is a physical act and it has to be justified in physical terms, if it's to be justified at all. War is either defense or conquest--it's NOT an argument or a message or a protest or, God forbid, a recreational act. If war is not either defense or conquest, than it is simply a wanton act of destruction.

Bush isn't saying what you claim he is. He is NOT rooting out radical Islam, or even saying anything against it. Bush's ACTUAL claim is that the root cause of Islamic terrorism is that there just isn't enough freedom and democracy going around in the Middle East and that we're in Iraq to give them a good helping of some good old fashioned freedom and democracy.

But these assertions are simply ridiculous. What does 'freedom and democracy' have to do with terrorism? Freedom and democracy didn't stop Timothy McViegh in the US or the IRA in Great Britan or the Red Brigade in Europe. Saudia Arabia and Egypt have more freedom and democracy than Iraq ever had, yet the terrorists who hit us on 9/11 didn't come from Iraq, they came from Saudia Arabia and Egypt. In fact, those terrorists were going to school in Europe and traveling freely about the world, enjoying the best that freedom and democracy have to offer--and yet they still hit us. Freedom and democracy probably can only make it EASIER for terrorists to operate, not harder.

The cold, physical reality is that we invaded Iraq, not to spread freedom and democracy, but to get rid of Saddam. Rightly or wrongly, that is what we did. Ever since then our problem has been how to replace Saddam with some government that isn't going to turn out to be FAR WORSE AND MUCH MORE OF A THREAT TO US THAN SADDAM EVER WAS. Because if we can't do that, than the whole exercise was POINTLESS. Which it was.

This is why Bush blathers on about 'freedom and democracy' and 'staying the course.' He doesn't have anything else he could say. He made a mistake and can't get out of it. Once we leave Iraq, the mistake will be proven. Iraq will be in the hands of radical Islam, if not bin Laden himself. And at some point, we will HAVE to leave Iraq, because if we don't, we simply won't have an army. This is what we get for forgetting reality and thinking we can win any war just by wishing to.

Radical Islam gains wide appeal when people feel politically oppressed and economically downtrodden.

REally? Bin Laden is a billionaire and Mohammad Atta and crew were certainly not living in anything close to poverty.

I am confused. This thread is entitled "The Root of Terrorism" and then procedes to quote a book.

The only book, logically anyway, that should be quoted under that heading is the Quran. It doesn't take much reading of that book to see that it is, in fact, the root of terrorism. The subsequent musings of its meanings by imams/caliphs etc. only solidify this stance.

When there are only three options for Infidels under Islamic law: Convert, die, or submit -become a dhimmi (a form of living hell in slave-like conditions), it is plain to understand that even your not-so-radical, not-so-fundamentalist Muslim that has even a modicum of faith could be persuaded to commit to jihad.

All the liberals, apologists, and spin-meisters cannot change this stone cold fact.

I'm talking about the rank-and-file members, not the leaders.

Rank and file members? Most of Mohammad Atta's crew were rank and file members--it's believed they didn't even know what was going to happen that day. However they certainly weren't poor. The rank and file members of Al Qaeda who traveled to Afghanistan to train at bin Laden's camp weren't poor either. And the Saudis who have been crossing over the border of Iraq to join the insurgency are also not poverty striken. Saudis are generally affluent.

Now, many poor people in the Middle East are certainly followers of Islam and very conservative and maybe even hate us. But that doesn't have anything to do with Al Qaeda or their state of poverty. They were that way before Al Qaeda. They were that way hundreds of years ago.

The fact is that poor people are not a terrorist threat to us. Poor people are tied down to trying to eke out a living. Poor people can't get around the world and steal airplanes, for instance. Terrorism is a hobby of the affluent classes, not the lower classes.