There is an article today in the NY Times on the Moroccan strategy for handling incarcerated terrorists and radicals.
After reading it, though disgusted by the brutality of both sides, I considered that these terrorists are really a non-threat to the government of Morocco (and most other Islamic nations). In virtually every respect they are marginal types, lacking centralized, coordinated organization and competent leadership. Their relatively high profile is disproportionate to their limited power and absence of a coherent strategy to actually overthrow the King. Yet, they do exert some influence. The question is to what effect. From the government's perspective they're a chronic, but manageable, disease of the body politic. Further, it may be a disease that justifies more severe control over that body, the rest of which may then be pacified by the justification of "disease-control." Most of the Muslim world is a prison, one whose strictures are all the more defensible as a result of certain elements of resistance. In other words, these incompetent extremists (who appear by their actions, as opposed to their words, to be more like anarchists than theocrats) form a (witless) pillar of support for these dictatorial regimes. Anarchism is indeed a game at which the police can beat you. And if the dictators are happy enough to retain their power in despite of the forms of democracy available, the terrorists do not generally seem to view this as a less attractive state of affairs than a democratic option might offer--democratic government poses the threat that it might muster up such a degree of popular legitimacy as a dictator could not sustain in our time and thereby the more effectually block their theocratic ascendance. Thus, the two mortal enemies and the two most powerful forces in many Muslim nations conspire by disparate actions to thwart political and social liberalization.
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