It may be worth following the career of Ayman al-Zawahiri to understand al Qaeda. The following is from memory so may be a little inaccurate.

Briefly, he was a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. When the Muslim Brotherhood decided to pursue revolution by peaceful means, he split from it. In Pakistan he met bin Laden

After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, there was much debate among the Arab jihadis and some assassinations too, about where the jihad should proceed. Some wanted to attack the near enemy - the supposedly Islamic-in-name-only governments of Muslim countries and others the far enemy - the US of A, for its support of these governments. There were factions, and one that became Al Qaeda chose the far enemy.

As Amity pointed out, the NYT pretty much carried everything but the actual date of the hit on America. If anything, the squabbling over internal politics - over Clinton, and wedge issues, and such - and not paying enough attention to the threat, is our collective fault. We find ourselves in an unpleasant place because of past mistakes. To extricate ourselves will take positive action, not just retreating into Fortress America and lowering our taxes.

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If you read history, you will find that it was by 1970 or so that US domestic oil production no longer covered domestic consumption and the US lost control of oil prices. It is within a few years of that huge amount of dollars started flowing to oil producing countries and some fraction of that started funding fundamentalist Islamic movements. If you don't want to fight wars or have foreign entanglements, find a substitute to the internal combustion engine powered by petroleum. That really, is the most pacifist move that you can make.

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IMO, financing the Afghan jihad was a huge mistake. The Afghan war may have contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union. But it also gave the scattered fundamentalists of many countries the opportunity to congregate, under Western and Pakistani umbrella, and internationalize their individual plans for havoc.

""History does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its loft edifice except with skulls; Honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses" - Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (as per Wikipedia), 1941-1989, mentor to Osama bin Laden.

ondelette:

Because I believe in complex systems, I also believe that the only way to do these things is... to be nimble about changing what isn't working and trying what seems to work... I don't believe in packing it in and letting them rot in hell...

I also believe that there are complex systems. Systems so vast and complex that they are entirely beyond the comprehension of any one man, or even a small group of men. The butterfly effect will doom your efforts to enforce a solution of your own making upon a society. The very vast complexity of a society guarantees that unintended consequences will be the rule of the day. You seem to have misinterpreted the lessons that chaos theory has to offer the social scientist.

You are reaching for the USSR solution ondelette. You are looking for force and a committee to create an ordered society. It did not work then, and it will not work now.

I offer a tip for you. Read an old book by von Mises: Human Action and ask yourself if he is right. If he is, you will have to change your axioms; and if you think he is wrong, you will know how to challenge those of us who have such a different world view than you.

If you leave an addy at you know where, I will mail you my copy.

Take Europe. They are much better off in the modern era of peace than they were at war. Will you argue that?

The peace in Europe was not achieved, nor is it maintained, by application of the libertarian principles that you believe in. You cannot use Europe as an example of what you are trying to show.

"...to be nimble about changing what isn't working and trying what seems to work..." is precisely not trying to force a solution, but rather is changing what one is doing until some solution is reached.

The contours of what a solution would be is an Afghanistan where neither the Taliban nor the warlords hold sway.

I join with the others who are skeptical of the Pottery Barn rule that forms the rationale for sustained and invasive intervention in other people's nations.

It's been so long since I read James Gleick's book that I remember virtually nothing about it.

Lacking competence in the formal study of chaotic systems, I can only speak from the "moron" side of this oxymoronic discipline, and from my experience as a true Child of Chaos. That said, if one strips away the mystification one may find that simple, public-domain rules are at play.

For the moment, two countervailing concepts come to mind:

• Murphy's Law: everything that can go wrong will go wrong. There are many corollaries and variations, but that's the essence of it. History is rife with evidence that military interventions are particularly susceptible to this dictum, regardless of the high moral purpose animating the intervention. http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-laws.html

• Paradoxical binds: there's probably a aphoristic version of this, but I can't think of one offhand. But before I'm driven back to the stacks to repair the rotted foundations of my acquired knowledge, I can simply say that the phenomenon to which I refer has been demonstrated and discussed ad nauseam since the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq; to wit: the putative remedy that is itself a cause for the pathology it purports to remediate.

You know, like vowing to remain in Iraq until the Terrorists are Subdued and Defeated, without regard to the fact that such presence will only generate further terroristic resistance, ad infinitum.

One can't dispute the abstract virtue of devotion to the cause of Taking Responsibility and Making Amends, but the devil's in the details-- not least of which are the pitfalls of tunnel vision and groupthink. And that the highly-principled are particularly susceptible to being exploited and manipulated by nefarious evildoers. (I cite Do-Right v. Whiplash in support of this premise).

Sometimes it's a trick candlestick that rises in proportion to the height of the jump.