You’re right, Fat Man (I’ll never stop marveling at the clauses the Internet forces me to write), but I wasn’t comparing AQ to the 1917 event, only trying to show how a roughly unified radical movement — and most of the 19th c. Russian intelligents wanted the same outcome; it was strategy and tactics they debated furiously — can splinter and cleave, and very often over the same practical and ethical concerns. I wouldn’t push my analogy too far either. (There was far more to choose intellectually and morally in Lavrov than there ever will be in Dr. Fadl.) However, these internal divisions can and should be used to our own advantage in weakening Islamism, particularly if the Zawahirist strain only looks moribund and awaits another generation to take it up again.
