Bostonian,
Well, I enjoyed the discussion up until you tried to apply your argument to undermine my point, failed, and then said my argument was unconvicing because it did not fit into the paradigm that you asserted applied. People who try such rhetorical stunts tend to be unconvincable.

Have a good day, all.

You’re the contrarian who showed up here with an utterly unconvincing theory.

You shouldn’t be surprised when you then fail to convince anyone.

Forget Clinton. Would it have made you happier if I had said, “act like we did in the 1980s and the 1990s”? The point is, failing to react to episodes of terrorism — and OBL is essentially proposing that we terminate our current response to 9-11 and its predecessors — was BAD POLICY then and it would be BAD POLICY now.

I was particularly concerned to make this point because I was mind-blown by all the implications built into your claim that all we have to do is “leave Muslims alone.”
Given that the virtually the entire Muslim world, wherever it exists (outside, perhaps, of Mecca and Medina) exists by virtue of conquest on the part of Muslims — and rightly so, in the opinion of Islamist extremists like OBL — its risible to suggest that OBL’s version of “inappropriate interference” in other countries or civilizations amounts to anything other than a self-interested double standard in favor of Muslims.

Now, maybe I’m misreading you. Perhaps all you were doing was channelling OBL, paraphrasing what you took to be his view. If so, apologies.

I will, however, take your dodge to mean you cannot cite any historical cases of a hudna which were conditional upon a high price being met. Seeing as you are the one who is asserting that the historical cocnept of hudna has some bearing on this case, the burden of proof is actually on you to prove this particular assertion. Lacking that, there is no reason to believe your entire historical examination of the hudna has any relevance to the deal offered by Osama bin Laden here. This leaves us with a pure and simple transaction that he is proposing and should be judged as such. Hitchens’ notion that it indicats weakness is fallacious given that OBL is presenting not an offer of peace, but rather an ultimatum that promises more bloodshed if his price is not met.

What in the concept of hudna suggests it can act as an ultimatum in this fashion? If there is nothing, then why is the concept applicable here? If the concept is not applicable, what sort of historical evidence would you suggest I cite?

Cough up some historical precedents and we’ll talk.

Look up “misperception” if you need to.

The thread got so tangled that I had to go back and reread your opening [gambit]post.

Let me get this straight:

We give up Afghanistan and Iraq, throw 50 million people under the bus, permanently destroy our credibility, and render our [expensive, world's-best] military a laughingstock, in exchange for OBL promising to leave us alone?

Q: How often do people roll up a newspaper and try to beat some sense into you in real life?

In any of those hudnas you bring up in which the losing side proposed the hudna, how many of them were offered ONLY IF singificant payment/concessions were made by the other side?

Well, as for whether OBL is reasonable, I misunderstood your feelings. This happens.

Your overall argument is uncompelling because you suggest a kind of situation that has never occurred in history, let alone in the history of Islamic jihad.

Show us one, just ONE, incident in history where the winning side offered a truce like this.

You can’t. There are no such cases. It goes against human nature to act that way, and history shows that.

On the other hand, the history of fighting among or with Muslims is full of cases where the losing side proposed a hudna.