** War on Terror

Salon is running an interview with terrorism expert Jessica Stern about the recent attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The whole interview is worth a read, but I thought it would be worthwhile to reproduce her pithy statement about Al-Queda's goals, since sometimes it's hard to understand exactly what these suicide bombings are hoping to accomplish:

Al-Qaida's goal is to take down the current governments and establish Islamist regimes, to reestablish the Caliphate [a land or country under Islamic rule] throughout the region and [perhaps] throughout the entire world. Because of this they have it in for secular Islamic rule and secular Muslims as much as anything else. What they would call purifying the Islamic world is at least as important an objective to them, I think, as punishing the West.

- posted by David @ 9:59 AM