Wingnuts rush to fulfill the terrorists’ dreams

At Obsidian Wings, Publius points out the obvious:

…[O]ne of the goals of modern terrorism (particularly radical Islamic terrorism) is to trigger an overreaction by the victim country. In this respect, al Qaeda was wildly successful. One goal of 9/11 was to trigger a massive invasion of Afghanistan and create a new quagmire. Fortunately, bin Laden underestimated the world’s outrage, along with the success of the initial military operations. Luckily for him though, we fulfilled his wildest dreams by invading and occupying Iraq, a country with far more sacred sites. And we’ll be dealing with the blowback from this war for decades to come.

The wingnuts, as I have said before, have already handed a victory to the terrorists by allowing themselves to be terrorized. And naturally, in their mindless panic, they want to give the terrorists exactly what the terrorists want: an overreaction. Duncan at And Rightly So provides a perfect example:

I say we take a book from the Roman Republic and declare an all out war, without quarter, against these muthas. The time for hand-wringing and navel gazing is over. The time for moral equivocation is over. The Romans realized the hard fact that there comes a time to just eradicate your problem, especially if it continues to raise its ugly head. Lets kill these bastards, lets destroy their sanctuaries, and then lets salt the earth so they never return…

And everyone’s favorite whackaloon deathlover, “Emperor” Misha, chimes in with his own paean to genocide:

Nuke them. Nuke them till they glow. Then nuke them some more, just for the sheer fucking Hell of it.

Death to pisslam, death to the followers of it and everlasting death and torture to anybody who as much as thinks about coming up with excuses for it.

For terror weenies like Duncan and Misha, the terrorists have already won — they and their fellow wingnuts are terrified, and are demanding mass slayings in retribution. That’s the very definition of overreaction, a key goal of the terrorists.

Why are the wingnuts so eager to give the terrorists what they want? It’s called cowardice, and it is fueled by a complete abdication of any moral standards whatsoever. As Publius observes: ”[Y]ou want to get mad, but getting mad is exactly what they want. Indeed, it’s part of the plan.”

Any sane reaction to the Mumbai attacks, by any nation or combination of nations, has to take into account the fact that overreacting will play directly into the terrorists’ hands. But you certainly won’t find signs of sanity in Greater Wingnuttia, a world driven entirely by unreasoning fear.