How are we going to win the long war against Islamic radicalism? The first and most essential step is to understand what we are up against. Part of that effort involves keeping track of the whereabouts and activities of extremist movements and grouplets. But beyond that, it is vitally important to understand how our adversaries think.

We do understand what we are up against and how our adversary thinks. That is no mystery. He keeps telling us every day. Moreover, with that information he has told us how to flip him on his back and make him helpless. The mystery is why we have not done precisely that.

We prefer to assume we must and can “keep track of the whereabouts and activities of extremist movements and grouplets”, and grapple with them as they pop up. We in effect insist on a “long war against Islamic radicalism” that need not be. Why is that? Why do we impose on ourselves a long war that is unnecessary?

It is a failure of imagination, that and the timidity of Jews, and as well as a wariness of Jews. That and an appetite for war, for a safe war we know we won’t lose, but which offers a great adventure, nevermind a whole new industry with hundreds of thousands of well paid jobs.

Consider that in every other war there is a defensive and offensive aspect, a way to retreat and a way to advance, a way to shield against the enemy’s thrusts, and a way of thrusting at him.

But not in this conflict. The Iraqi imbroglio is the result of invading an unfriendly beach, but one lacking the enemy we need to destroy. It is certainly not his key bastion. We didn’t just attack the wrong beach, we attacked with weapons that don’t hurt him. This is virtually an enemy out of science fiction. He cannot be killed.

His home base is not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, or anywhere on earth. It is a vain effort to track him to his countless hiding places in Afghan caves, in Northwest Frontier shanties, to villages in Yemen and Lebanon and Sudan, to the banlieues and ghettos and inner cities of the West. To reach him in his myriad hiding places, we must corner him in his mindset. And we can. We have precisely the weapon wherewith to hurt him in the one way he fears.

He is happy to die while blowing us up. He is prepared to be brave and defy any odds. What he is not up to and what can defeat him is very briefly explained in the
orange nacl link heading this post.

These are the same Western governments who generally refused to recognized black leaders some four decades ago unless that were minimally radical socialists and anti-anti-Communists like Martin Luther King, Jr. Those of a more conservative disposition were deemed “inauthentic.”

I hope we do a better job in WWIV than we did in the Cold War. Winning the Cold War by bankrupting the Soviet Union was an accident, and the Russians managed to poison our society with Marxism.

oao
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/

Dreher’s article is excellent, as always. We should put this in perspective, however, and recognize that the Justice Department is hardly confining itself to manning outreach booths at ISNA conventions. The FBI and Homeland Security investigate and analyze hundreds of leads a day on suspicious Islamic activity in the US. This effort can always be done better, but the fact that Dreher is not aware of the surveillance prominent Muslim clerics activists may be under doesn’t mean the government is turning a blind eye to them.

A more difficult problem is surveillance from the local level. It’s at the level of county sheriffs and city police that complaints of profiling and violation of civil rights are typically heard. These complaints do have the effect of inhibiting surveillance, and keeping it from getting better. That is a real problem, because one of the most important changes since 9/11 — worldwide — has been increased reporting of the suspicious activity of apparent Arabs, south Asians, and Muslims, by citizens and beat cops. Local authorities in the US report whatever they get to Homeland Security/FBI, and reports of this kind — often voluntary and unsolicited — figure in the investigations of every plot detected and broken up before it could carried out.

This form of reporting is not to be dismissed, although I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered ignorant people, who know nothing about intelligence or police work, laughing it off as though it must be unimportant. They are wrong. We stay ahead of terrorists plots today as much because of alert neighbors, merchants, and bank tellers in Nairobi, London, Manila, and Chicago as because of wiretapping, forensic accounting, and covert espionage.

Letting ourselves be deceived about the tameness of Muslim associations in America inhibits the police and neighborhood alertness that produces advance warning. It’s truly a problem for Americans, because we rightly judge that we can’t afford to treat Muslims in our midst differently in terms of civil rights, social suspicion, and innocence until guilt is proven. No open society can long tolerate sequestering one segment of it, and according it fewer rights. But neither can we afford to simply wait until all guilt is proven by bombs and American corpses.