The thing is, I have absolutely no idea how you can read my comment and think I'm defending the group or even that their goals were noble. It's bending the intepretation of what I said so much it hurts.

Maybe let me try again - terrorist group says their goal is X. Terrorist group fails to achieve goal X. Therefore, terrorists didn't "win", by their own definition of winning.

Is that less.....offensive?

I'm not trying to misread you. On reflection, "letting the terrorists win" is a really loaded phrase. So loaded you might be on the same side of an issue and still misunderstand where someone's coming from. As a guy who participated in sometimes violent protests against the Patriot Act, and our initial lockdown and our invasion of Iraq and the general warlike stance in NYC after 9/11, our interpretation of the terrorists "winning" was that they could put America into a posture where we lost our civil liberties as a result of the fear they were able to inculcate in in the populace. Now, at the time, Bush said if we stopped shopping or you know, otherwise engaging in mass capitalist idiocy, that would mean the terrorists won. To me, they won, because they saw a weakness in our free society where by a careful application of very directed force they could open the dam for totalitarian control and a breakdown of open, free, liberal democracy. By that measure, they succeeded remarkably well, but they really only had to use our own inertia against us.

So I don't mean to misread you. I think our society as it stood was a lot more noble than the Taliban. In some ways it still is. They have brought us down a bit toward their level, and that's something worth fighting against.