Terrorists like bin Laden don't value their own lives nor those of their follows, so it would seem to a rational person that a strategy of trying to kill terrorists faster than they can be recruited is guaranteed to be a losing strategy.

Of course this is wrong. Terrorist leaders value their own lives VERY highly, and they have all gone to great lengths to save their own skins. You are right that they don't give a rat's ass about their cannon fodder. Destroying terror leaders does help the situation. If you disagree, you have to realize that such an argument would negate the "it would have worked if we'd gotten bin Laden" meme that has been enshrined on the anti-war side.

On the other hand, terrorists succeed or fail based on the willingness of a significant part of the populace to support and shelter them. In bin Laden's case, much of that willingness comes from his success at positioning himself as a defender of the Arab world and the Islamic faith against "American imperialism".

This is also wrong--the famous thesis that an insurgency could not survive without the voluntary support of the people around it. Al Qaeda, and to a lesser extent the Iraqi insurgency, succeeds by fear and intimidation. Most of the recent attacks in Anbar by al Qaeda are directed specifically as Sunnis and other leaders who refuse to knuckle under to the terrorists. A survey in Iraq--the country we invaded--show the overall disapproval rate of al Qaeda in the low 90 percent range. Even Sunnis show a 77 percent disapproval rate. If it's a contest of "hearts and minds" between al Qaeda and the Coalition, so far we're ahead. In another survey, in spite of the crap you're reading here today, only a quarter of Iraqis overall think they were better off before the war. If you limit that to Sunnis, it rises clear to 51 percent.

Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and others thrive on the rule that "you will do as we say or die." You can call this "support" in the same way that you can say someone giving a carjacker a ride is "supporting" the carjacker.

The only person who paints bin Laden as a "defender of the Arab world" is bin Laden and those around the Arabic world who have never had to deal with his goons.

Bin Laden attacked the U.S. when we had no troops in either Afghanistan or Iraq. On the thinnest justification--the few personnel we had in Saudi Arabia to support the U.N. No Fly Zones--he destroyed part of New York and Washington. If it hadn't been troops on "holy ground," it would have been something else. He didn't need an invasion to justify what he did, or any other action.

I've been working too hard on this. The simple answer is that you're wrong. You think you understand this situation, but you actually don't. The "willful ignorance" is in the mirror.