One of Ours

...Bin Laden captured dead or alive will have no visible impact on terrorist actions around the world. He will simply step out of mythology into martyrdom.

...Spain has changed al-Qaida’s calculus. Islamists around the world can see major and lasting political and strategic results for their cause. What the Soviet Union failed to achieve during 45 years of Cold War, al-Qaida did in three days — a key European ally was detached from an alliance built by an American president.
The Bush administration rejects any correlation between the grinding, sub-human poverty of large parts of the developing world and transnational terrorism. Its answer to Islamist extremism is a geostrategic vision of a democratized Middle East...

Borchgrave’s answer [i.e. a new Marshall Plan for the Middle East] is impractical. Anything remotely similar to that plan would be hotly resisted as Western imperialism. Any serious program of economic revitalization is necessarily one of modernization which is, by definition, a violation of every tenet of the Islamist creed.