"You are a tiny band of nutjobs. You can't kill us all. You can't even kill .00001% of us."
If we're talking about the US population, then 0.0001% is thirty people. They can probably manage that.
However, on your broader point, nouveau-Islamist terrorism differs from more traditional varieties (the IRA et cetera) in that its practitioners are markedly less rational. For them, terrorism isn't a tool which they're applying calmly in the hope of achieving a political goal. Most of them seem to just want to kill infidels, because the existence of people who aren't Muslim makes them angry.
So I don't think the refuse-to-be-terrorized strategy actually works. They don't particularly care whether you're scared of 'em, as long as you die.
No. This is very likely true of the schmucks who blow themselves up, but those people aren't so much Al-Qaeda as they are victims of Al-Qaeda.
Did you ever notice how UBL never participated in any suicide attacks? Not saying he wasn't crazy, of course, but he was crazy like a dictator. Like, say, Hitler, he was shrewd in pursuit of his bizarre ideological objectives. You can't look at him and say Al-Qaeda had no political strategy.
If we're talking about the US population, then 0.0001% is thirty people. They can probably manage that.
However, on your broader point, nouveau-Islamist terrorism differs from more traditional varieties (the IRA et cetera) in that its practitioners are markedly less rational. For them, terrorism isn't a tool which they're applying calmly in the hope of achieving a political goal. Most of them seem to just want to kill infidels, because the existence of people who aren't Muslim makes them angry.
So I don't think the refuse-to-be-terrorized strategy actually works. They don't particularly care whether you're scared of 'em, as long as you die.
(They're not very rational or very nice.)