Rush: Get stupid, c'mon, get retarded, c'mon

Yeah, I've been picking on Rush a lot lately.  On the other hand, he's been talking a lot of retarded smack lately, and he's never so out of his depth as when he discusses foreign policy, especially since Rush is in the hopeless muddle of defending Dubya's foreign policy while trying to pick out the miniscule ways it differs from Obama's.  (And Obama's is more murderous and anti-Muslim by just about any objective measure).

See, Obama's killing bin Laden was an al Qaeda conspiracy, I tell ya'.  It was a c-o-n...spiracy!

Barack Obama Is Libya’s Al-Qaida Chief for Hawaii

By Mobuto Sese Seko

September 14, 2012 | Gawker

URL:  http://gawker.com/5943334/barack-obama-is-libyas-al+qaida-chief-for-hawaii

What U.S. 'appeasement'?!

I can't believe anybody still publishes V.D. Hanson.  He should have been chased across the U.S. border by an angry mob years ago.

How in the world has Obama "appeased" radical Islamists?  By killing bin Laden and more Taliban fighters in four years than Dubya did in eight? By increasing drone strikes in sovereign Pakistan 6 times, not to mention Yemen and Somalia? By having not a single Islamist terrorist attack on U.S. soil?  By refusing to close Dubya's Guantanamo Bay detention camp?  By carrying out extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens suspected of Islamist terrorism?  VDH doesn't specify. It's all understood, I guess, if you too reside in his crazy alternate universe where Iraqis are still greeting us with flowers, and we are winning Afghans' hearts and minds as we kill them.

Look, folks, we don't control Egypt, Libya, or Afghanistan and Iraq for that matter. The difference between the first two and the last two countries is pretty significant though: the people of the former two countries decided to overthrow their leaders, and spilled their own blood to make it happen, whereas in the latter two countries, we did it for them and then stuck around way past our welcome as Occupiers.  In Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, the Arab Spring was their idea; it was their revolution, not ours.  Meanwhile, we have spent a few $ billion in Egypt and Libya on arms and aid, and a few $ trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Not to mention 4,486 U.S. troops killed in Iraq and 2114 in Afghanistan.

If Obama's way is "leading from behind," I'll opt for that any day.  Unworldly and ignorant Mitt Romney and the disgraced neocons whispering terrible advice in his ear are living in the illusions of 2002, not the realities of 2012. We're smarter and better than that now.  Forward, indeed!

Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy

By Victor Davis Hanson

September 12, 2012 | National Review

URL: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/316604/storming-embassies-killing-ambassadors-and-smart-diplomacy-victor-davis-hanson

War Nerd: Obama's a better C-in-C than W but a terrible cheerleader

Classic War Nerd.  Glad to see he's back.  

Did you know that the U.S. had no troops killed in action in Iraq in 2011? Zero.  None.  That's f-ing amazing.  As Gary put it: "Once the big US forces left, the Iraqis stopped attacking us. I mean completely."  

Kinda makes all those folks like, um, (cough-cough!), myself look pretty damn smart for saying the Iraqis didn't hate us for who we were or our freedom, they hated the open-ended U.S. occupation.  And it makes all those people who said they were just crazy Muslims look kind of dumb, doesn't it?  I mean, you can't be crazy violent Muslim one year and sane democrat the next.

Still, 'Bama can't get any love from W's erstwhile GWOT-lovers and troop-honorers. He's just too eerily calm and collected about his blood & guts.  And he never spikes the ball in the endzone, even when he nailed the biggest bearded baddy of them all.  He lets others do his bragging for him, like Crazy Old Joe repeating in semi-senile fashion, "GM is alive and bin Laden is dead."  Obama's steady nerves, quiet modesty and self-restraint may be admirable traits in a Clint Eastwood-type film hero, but these are terrible traits in a U.S. president.  

Concludes Gary:

War isn’t about “winning” wars, so much — the 2004 election proved that once and for all. It’s about having something to woof on behalf of, like the NFL squared. Bush was the worst warrior since George Villiers, but he was a pro at cheerleading and we reelected him. Obama’s been a big surprise as a C-in-C, a damn good, cool-headed master of assassins, which is what you need for counterinsurgency … but he’s worse than nothing as a cheerleader.

Obama's Wars: Good Fighter, Can’t Cheerlead Worth A Damn

By Gary Brecher

September 11, 2012 | NSFW Corp

URL:  http://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/war-nerd-obamas-wars

The 'Swift Boating' of Obama underway

Probably these bogus charges will hurt Obama, no matter what.  After all, similar dirty tactics worked well against Sen. John Kerry, retroactively turning a decorated Vietnam war hero into some kind of pompous show-off.  

Anyway what the Romney campaign is doing is Hardball 101: turn your opponent's greatest strength -- in this case, Obama's lonely decision to assassinate bin Laden -- into a liability.  There's a good chance it'll work again.  

Are 'Swift Boat' attacks on Obama bogus?

By Peter Bergen

August 19, 2012 | CNN

URL:  http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/17/opinion/bergen-obama-swift-boat/index.html?iref=obinsite 

Obama can't take credit for killing bin Laden?

First, I'll repeat that I am against Obama's giving the order to assassinate bin Laden.  It sent the wrong message.  They could have taken him prisoner.  Michael Moore summed up my feelings on this pretty well.

That said, Obama definitely has the right to take credit for his decision.  And it was his decision.  His SecDef Robert Gates, who was appointed by Dubya, called it the gutsiest decision he's ever seen a President make.

Moreover, Republicans don't have a leg to stand on, ideologically.  With the exception of Ron Paul, the Right has been in favor of targeted killings in the War on Terra.  And Romney, et al, have criticized Obama's conduct in foreign policy.  (Most notably concerning Iran; but stay tuned for another Obama "victory" when Iran agrees to admit international inspectors and give up its nuclear weapons ambitions, ahead of the November elections -- my prediction.)

David Axelrod, President Obama's Top Adviser, Defends Politicizing Bin Laden Raid

By Sam Stein

May 6, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/06/david-axelrod-bin-laden-raid-romney_n_1489374.html

FBI interrogator: Less Kiefer Sutherland, more Julia Roberts

The book The Black Banners looks like the opposite of "24." The author's anecdote about interrogating bin Laden's personal secretary Ali al-Bahlul is particularly enlightening. From what we're told by hot-headed pundits and two-fisted politicians, the only way to get information out of hardened terrorists is to waterboard, torture, starve and humiliate them. Not so. It's more like: eat, pray, drink. Practically a Julia Roberts movie!

Behind The War On Terror's Dark Curtain

September 12, 2011 | Morning Edition on NPR

On Sept. 12, 2001, Ali H. Soufan, a special agent with the FBI, was handed a secret file. Soufan had spent nearly a decade investigating terrorism cases, like the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. He says that this file was one he had requested before the attacks, and that had it been given to him earlier it may have helped to prevent them.

Following 9/11, Soufan interrogated suspects as one of the few FBI agents at the time who spoke Arabic. In a new book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, out today, he reveals many long-held secrets about both the operations of terrorists as well as the American efforts to find and bring them to justice, including how he was able to elicit confessions from members of al-Qaeda.

According to his book, and as he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, Soufan's interrogations did not involve the physical technique known as waterboarding, but rather involved conversations that hinged on what each man knew.

"You interview a lot of people and the most important thing during interviews is to have the person talk," Soufan says. "And then you can figure out: he's lying here, he's not lying there, maybe he's trying to hide something here."

One of the men he interrogated was Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, and whom the Bush administration thought was a high-ranking al-Qaeda official. Soufan says though assessment was incorrect, Abu Zubaydah did give up valuable information.

"From the very beginning, Abu Zubaydah was very cooperative, and he provided the information that led us to identify the mastermind of 9/11, which is Khalid Sheikh Muhammed," Soufan says. "He also provided significant details about the plot and how the plot came to be."

Why would a terrorist volunteer such information?

"We were nice to him," Soufan says. "I mean, we had a lot of things going on, you know? He knew that we knew everything about him. We knew even what his mother used to call him as a child. He was not providing information just because he wanted to provide information. He was providing information because he's trying to convey to us that, 'Look, I am cooperating with you.' But at the same time, he didn't know what we knew. And we started playing this mental poker game with him, if you want to call it, and [got] more and more information from him."

Soufan says that the information stopped flowing after the arrival of a man he calls Boris.

"At the time, we were really surprised, because we had a good team on the ground and then we found that someone had hired this psychologist who supposedly was an expert. And when I spoke with him about his level of expertise, we were dumbfounded," Soufan says. Boris had not ever conducted an interrogation and lacked the team's depth of knowledge about al-Qaeda. He told Soufan, "I do know human nature."

"Unfortunately, he knew neither," Soufan says.

Boris employed what was referred to by former CIA director George Tenet as "standard interrogation techniques."

"And the standard interrogation techniques at the time was believed to be nudity, was believed to be sleep deprivation, loud noise," Soufan says. "And we had many problems with this technique. First of all, if it's working, why break it? if someone is talking, the best thing you can do is keep him talking. The number two issue is al-Qaeda and their associates, and Islamic extremists in general, they are anticipating to be tortured when they get caught."

Many of these extremists have been through jails in the Middle East, Soufan says, and "expect to be beaten, they expect to be burned, their nails to be pulled out, they expect to be sodomized. I mean, there is a lot of sick things that happens over there. And now we are saying that we're going to take your clothes off, we're going to put some loud music on, and you're going to cooperate. He's not going to cooperate because he's gonna see how long can he endure the treatment that you're giving him. And you know with 'enhanced' interrogation techniques, you hit the last one we have, which is waterboarding. So when you get [to] waterboarding, what do you do? You keep doing it again and again, in the case of Abu Zubaydah 83 times. In the case of KSM, 183 times. You know when do you realize that it's not working? 102nd time? 101st time? When?"

After his retirement from the FBI, Soufan testified before a Senate Administrative Oversight and the Courts subcommittee on the Bush administration's interrogation and detention program. He spoke to the subcommittee from behind a black screen to protect his identity.

"As I mentioned in my Senate statement, Abu Zubaydah stopped talking. So for a few days we didn't get one single piece of information. Just a day before that started, we get that KSM is the mastermind of 9/11," he says.

In The Black Banners, Soufan repeatedly uses a word not usually associated with interrogation to refer to another suspect, a man by the name of Ali al-Bahlul. Soufan visited Bahlul in Guantanamo, where the military explained that the prisoner was cooperative, and that there was no reason to believe that he was dangerous. His story: that he went to Afghanistan to teach the Quran to poor Afghanis.

"So when we had him brought to the interrogation room, I just felt that there is something wrong with this guy," Soufan says. I mean, he is saying all the rhetoric. He is repeating all the counter-narrative of al-Qaeda. He is very knowledgeable about it. But that means he is also very knowledgeable about al-Qaeda's rhetoric. So I was the devil's advocate here."

Soufan says that he began arguing on behalf of al-Qaeda, "from political perspective and from ideological perspective," and that during the debate, he stopped taking notes, which upset Bahlul.

"He asked me, 'So why are you not taking notes?' And I said, you know, 'I respected you this whole time. I never lied to you. I'm telling you who I am and why I'm here, but I don't see the same from you.' And this is the last thing somebody like him, who claims that he is pious, want to hear from someone," Soufan says. "So I explain to him that I know a lot about him, I know who he really is, and then I ask him to go and pray. So he went, he prayed, he came back. I gave him a cookie, if you want to eat a cookie. So he was chewing on the cookie and he was looking down on the floor and then he looked at me and he said, 'I am Anas al Makki. That's my Qaeda name.'"

The man they had known as Bahlul explained that he was actually a leader of al-Qaeda, and a personal secretary of Osama bin Laden. "What do you want to know?" he asked.

"I said, 'Do you want some tea?' He almost spit the cookies from his mouth," Soufan says. "He said, 'I just told you who I am, and you're just asking me if I want tea?' I said, 'Well, I knew that, but now I know you're respecting me, so I'm offering you some tea.' I had no clue who the guy was."

Al Makki eventually revealed that while the Sept. 11 attacks were being carried out, bin Laden was attempting to use a satellite to watch the destruction on television.

"He said that he was not able to get a signal because they were running away and they were hiding in the mountains somewhere," Soufan says. "So they ended up listening to it on the radio. He talked about different individuals in the group. He talked about the structure. And he is now going to be serving his life in jail."

CIA's letter to McCain downplays torture's role in finding Bin Laden

A private letter sent from CIA head Leon Panetta to Senator John McCain destroys the claim that torture ("enhanced interrogation") provided key intelligence on Bin Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan. A copy of this letter was leaked to journalist Greg Sargent and its authenticity was later confirmed by CIA spokesperson Marie Harf.

Wrote Panetta to McCain:

"Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There was no one "essential and indispensible" key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier's role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the "only timely and effective way" to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.

"Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier's nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier's role were alerting.

"In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier's full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means."

On separate but related note, we as a country ought to decide if our safety requires and merits throwing hundreds of people in prison without charges, access to a lawyer or their families, and torturing them for years whether they were originally guilty of anything or not. (Most people involved admit that most detainees at G'itmo were rounded up because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

Let's keep in mind that many Mideast countries like Egypt, Iran and Syria have followed similar practices to ensure their "safety" from "terrorists." The definition of terrorist depends on who is in power. Do those in power deserve extra-legal or illegal means to fight those whom they label terrorists? And do we trust them to use those means wisely? If we're discussing countries like Iran or Syria, the answer is certainly, "No, we don't trust them."

So why do we trust our military and intelligence services with such power? What gives them -- and ultimately, us -- the right? Because we're the "good guys"? Do good guys torture others? People like Sen. John McCain, who was a victim of torture, states clearly that good guys do not practice torture. This is a moral and ethical issue as much as it is a security issue. So I return to the original question: Is our personal security (or in most cases, our peace of mind, since we're not really at risk from terrorism) so precious that it requires imprisoning and torturing possibly innocent people for years if not decades?

Exclusive: Private letter from CIA chief undercuts claim torture was key to killing Bin Laden

By Greg Sargent

May 16, 2011 | The Plum Line - Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/exclusive-private-letter-from-cia-chief-undercuts-claim-torture-was-key-to-killing-bin-laden/2011/03/03/AFLFF04G_blog.html#pagebreak

Moore: Final thoughts on bin Laden's execution

This is worth reading. It also gives the lie to those who say Moore is just a cheerleader for Democrats or Obama. He's principled and he's his own man:

I would like the evildoers to be forced to stand trial in front of that world. I know a lot of people see no need for a trial for these bad guys (just hang 'em from the nearest tree!), and think trials are for sissies. 'They're guilty, off with their heads!' Well, you see, that is the exact description of the Taliban/al Qaeda/Nazi justice system. I don't like their system. I like ours. And I don't want to be like them. In fact, the reason I like a good trial is that I like to show these bastards this is how it's done in a free country that believes in civilized justice. It's good for the rest of the world to see that, too. Sets a good example.

The other thing a trial does is, it establishes a very public and permanent historic record of the crimes against humanity.

Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden
By Michael Moore
May 14, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/some-final-thoughts-on-th_1_b_861071.html

Torture may have delayed Bin Laden's discovery

Yeah, but torturing your enemies for years feels good. As a nation we need revenge on our enemies, especially if they're inconsiderate enough not to wear uniforms and wave a country's flag.

Anyway, waterboarding somebody more than 100 times in 2 weeks is not torture -- neocon Christopher Hitchens did it once, after all, and he was just fine -- it's "enhanced interrogation." These hippy-pacifist journos just don't get it....

Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It
By Dan Froomkin
May 6, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/06/torture-may-have-slowed-h_n_858642.html

Kristof: Bin Laden against 'Ground Zero' mosque, too

That's a funny detail about the strip clubs being closer to Ground Zero than this mosque. Funny that few in our lib'rul media have pointed that out.

Anyway, the argument now is that the mosque builders are showing insensitivity to the 9/11 victims' families. Did they take a poll of the families, I wonder? What about the families of Muslim victims? Is this a majority-rule type situation? ... This is leading to absurdity, I know. That's the point.

But let's think like hard-nosed warriors, which we're all supposed to be post-9/11. Building this mosque is great PR for America; conversely, halting its construction would be awful PR and play to the Islamists' rhetoric that America has declared war on Muslims. Even if you don't like this mosque, think of it as a sacrifice of war. So suck it up and take one for your country. Anyhow, it's not like it's going to hurt anybody, only some people's precious feelings. And since when do we patriots put people's precious feelings -- including our own -- before America's national security?

This mosque will prevent or even reduce the number of terrorist recruits, bottom line. If you don't like that, then by all means, protest the mosque. I hope it makes you feel real good.

Taking Bin Laden's side

By Nicholas D. Kristof
August 21, 2010 | New York Times

Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.

It's striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a "clash of civilizations." Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world's English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition to the community center and mosque to try to recruit more terrorists.

In short, the proposed community center is not just an issue on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden agree. It is also one in which opponents of the center are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda.

These opponents seem to be afflicted by two fundamental misconceptions.

The first is that a huge mosque would rise on hallowed land at ground zero. In fact, the building would be something like a YMCA, and two blocks away and apparently out of view from ground zero. This is a dense neighborhood packed with shops, bars, liquor stores — not to mention the New York Dolls Gentlemen's Club and the Pussycat Lounge (which says that it arranges lap dances in a private room, presumably to celebrate the sanctity of the neighborhood).

Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship? Are lap dances more sanctified than an earnest effort to promote peace?

And this is an earnest effort. I know Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan — the figures behind the Islamic community center — and they are the real thing. Because I have written often about Arab atrocities in Darfur and about the abuse of women in Islamic countries, some Muslim leaders are wary of me. But Imam Feisal and Ms. Khan are open-minded and have been strong advocates for women within Islam.

The second misconception underlying this debate is that Islam is an inherently war-like religion that drives believers to terrorism. Sure, the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent, and mullahs sometimes cite the Koran to incite murder. But don't forget that the worst brutality in the Middle East has often been committed by more secular rulers, like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. And the mastermind of the 1970 Palestinian airline hijackings, George Habash, was a Christian.

Remember also that historically, some of the most shocking brutality in the region was justified by the Bible, not the Koran. Crusaders massacred so many men, women and children in parts of Jerusalem that a Christian chronicler, Fulcher of Chartres, described an area ankle-deep in blood. While burning Jews alive, the crusaders sang, "Christ, We Adore Thee."

My hunch is that the violence in the Islamic world has less to do with the Koran or Islam than with culture, youth bulges in the population, and the marginalization of women. In Pakistan, I know a young woman whose brothers want to kill her for honor — but her family is Christian, not Muslim.

Precisely because Palestinian violence has roots outside of Islam, Israel originally supported the rise of Hamas in Gaza. Israeli officials thought that if Gazans became more religious, they would spend their time praying rather than firing guns.

President George W. Bush was statesmanlike after 9/11 in reaching out to Muslims and speaking of Islam as a religion of peace. Now many Republicans have abandoned that posture and are cynically turning the Islamic center into a nationwide issue in hopes of votes. It is mind-boggling that so many Republicans are prepared to bolster the Al Qaeda narrative, and undermine the brave forces within Islam pushing for moderation.

Some Republicans say that it is not a matter of religious tolerance but of sensitivity to the feelings of relatives to those killed at ground zero. Hmm. They're just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings.

On my last trip to Saudi Arabia, I brought in a Bible to see what would happen (alas, the customs officer searched only my laptop bag). Memo to Ms. Palin: Should we learn from the Saudis and protect ground zero by banning the Koran from Lower Manhattan?

For much of American history, demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews. Many Americans once honestly thought that Catholics could not be true Americans because they bore supreme loyalty to the Vatican.

Today's crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it.

Rep. Polis: 'No good reason to be in Afghanistan'

No good reason to be in Afghanistan
By Jared Polis
December 24, 2009 CNN

Editor's note: Rep. Jared Polis, a Democrat, represents Colorado's 2nd Congressional District and is appearing in CNN.com's "Freshman Year" series along with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah.

I recently attended the White House Christmas tree lighting and congressional holiday party. Christmas is traditionally a time of peace and love, quite a juxtaposition for a nation fighting three wars, one in Iraq, one in Afghanistan, and a global war on terror.

We went into Afghanistan eight years ago to oust the Taliban and capture their guest Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda associates. Eight years later, al Qaeda has largely been driven out of Afghanistan.

When should our nation go to war? Only as a last resort.

That's why I opposed the completely unnecessary invasion of Iraq, and why I now oppose an ongoing occupation of Afghanistan.

In meeting after meeting, I have been shown by generals and statesmen what we are doing in Afghanistan, how it could take decades, might not work, and is fraught with risks. In response, I ask the same repeated question: Why?

With all the ambiguity clouding the outcome, the case has not been conclusively made that the possibilities are more favorable with an increase of 30,000 troops.

The very real war on terror must be fought, not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, but across the globe. The terrorists, most notably al Qaeda and their associates, are a stateless menace.

With the manpower and financial resources we are putting into occupying the nation of Afghanistan, we could improve our port security, increase our intelligence gathering to locate and infiltrate terrorist cells, and increase our special operation capacity.

Three areas of focus -- homeland security, intelligence, and special operations -- are the three best tools in our toolbox to fight the war on terror. Focusing our resources on occupying a small mountainous Asian nation is peripheral at best and a lethal distraction at worst.

On military matters, I frequently turn to my colleagues who have more experience in the area, just as I hope they turn to me as it relates to education or small business issues.
My colleague Eric Massa from New York, one of the highest ranking retired officers now serving in Congress, stated my position far more eloquently and with more credibility than I ever could on a radio show last week: "If our security is at stake to the extent that we must rebuild a nation because there are 100 terrorists in Afghanistan, then we better be willing to occupy every single nation on the face of this planet and do the same.

"Our mission is to identify, locate, kill or capture, with malice of forethought, any terrorist anywhere. That does not call for a standing army of 100,000 people executing an occupational strategy in a foreign nation," Massa continued.

"We have tried this over and over and over again and it has never once worked. You cannot achieve this militarily. Period."

Before we send troops, we should truly know why we are doing it, and what their mission is.

Sending troops to capture bin Laden made sense. Had the intelligence reports indicating that he was acquiring nuclear weapons been accurate, going after Saddam Hussein could even have been justified.

Why are we bogging ourselves down in a country that is not a significant al Qaeda host at such great financial and human cost?

If Afghanistan were to become host to terrorist organizations, the answer would be targeted special operations to seek and destroy the terrorists, not embroiling the entire country in an interminable civil war and occupation.

In addition, our ongoing occupation increases the sympathy among some locals for the very terrorism we are there to fight.

The inevitable innocent casualties can turn neutral families into terrorist collaborators and America-haters.

The people that our soldiers are fighting day-in and day-out in Afghanistan are not terrorists.

It is unclear to me how spending $4 billion per month and putting tens of thousands of American lives at risk in Afghanistan is the best way to keep America safe from terrorist attack.

National security is neither partisan nor ideological. I am confident in saying that there isn't a Democrat or Republican in Congress today who doesn't want to protect our country from terrorists.

There is no conservative way to fight terrorists or liberal way to fight terrorists. Regardless of our party and ideology, every member of Congress needs to use the information we are privileged to receive to reach a conclusion as to the best way to protect our great nation from attack.

It is always difficult to oppose our commander in chief on such a vital national security issue, but I owe it to those who put me in office to use my best judgment using the best information I have.

I have done my due diligence, visited Iraq and Afghanistan, met with officers and statesmen, read the reports, and I cannot support sending a single additional American soldier to Afghanistan, much less 30,000.

LA justice hands anti-US propaganda on a plate to Islamists

Way to go, Louisiana!

Big surprise, freaking Al Jazeera is doing a feature story on that racist Louisiana JOP Keith Bardwell who refused to allow miscegnation (look it up if you don't know the word; it's an oldie but a baddie).

Remember that Syed Qutb, the Egyptian "father of radical Islamism" who inspired Ayman al-Zawahri and Osama bin Ladin, and who lived in the USA in the 1950s, reserved some of his greatest criticism for the way America oppressed its black citizens. Who knows how many Muslims today falsely believe that the America of the 1950s hasn't changed for the better?

Surely anti-U.S. terrorist groups will be eating up this legitimate news story like candy, translating it into Arabic and a dozen other languages, and saying, "See, even with Barack Hussein Obama as President, the United States is still an evil, racist country!" The USG spends millions of dollars a year on PR aimed at the Muslim world, and yet one backwards Southerner with a little bit of power can undo so much progress.

Go take a long walk off a short levee, you racist hick!

Video: US judge rejects inter-racial marriage

Patty Culhane reports

October 18, 2009 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/10/2009101717190799945.html

Bergen: How Bush botched the GWOT

Nothing's below that I haven't said a million times already, but it's coming from an "expert," a guy who interviewed bin Laden, so there you go.

How Bush botched war on terror

By Peter Bergen - CNN National Security Analyst

January 8, 2009  |  CNN.com

 

President-elect Barack Obama and his foreign policy advisers and speechwriters are wrestling with one of the most important speeches of his presidency, his inaugural address.

 

One of their toughest conceptual challenges is how to describe and recast what the Bush administration has consistently termed the "war on terror."

 

The dean of military strategists, Carl von Clausewitz, explains the importance of this decision-making in his treatise "On War": "The first, the supreme, the most decisive act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into something that is alien to its nature."

 

Clausewitz's excellent advice about the absolute necessity of properly defining the war upon which a nation is about to embark was ignored by Bush administration officials who instead declared an open-ended and ambiguous "war on terror" after the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001.

 

Bush took the nation to war against a tactic, rather than a war against a specific enemy, which was obviously al Qaeda and anyone allied to it. When the United States went to war against the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and his congressional supporters did not declare war against U-boats and kamikaze pilots, but on the Nazi state and Imperial Japan.

 

The war on terror, sometimes known as the "Global War on Terror" or by the clunky acronym GWOT, became the lens through which the Bush administration judged almost all of its foreign policy decisions. That proved to be dangerously counterproductive on several levels.

 

The GWOT framework propelled the Bush administration into its disastrous entanglement in Iraq. It had nothing to do with 9/11 but was launched under the rubric of the war on terror and the erroneous claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

 

The theory was that he might give such weapons to terrorists, including al Qaeda to whom he was supposedly allied, and that he therefore threatened American interests. None of this, of course, turned out to be true.

 

The Bush administration's approach to the war on terror collided badly with another of its doctrines, spreading democracy in the Middle East as a panacea to reduce radicalism.

 

It pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories in which, in early 2006, the more radical Hamas won a resounding victory, propelled to power on a wave of popular revulsion for the incompetence and corruption of the Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics since the 1960s.

 

Imprisoned by its war on terror framework, the Bush administration supported Israel in a disastrous war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Hezbollah is not only a terrorist group but is also part of the rickety Lebanese government and runs social welfare services across the country, yet for the Bush administration its involvement in terrorism was all that mattered.

 

As is now widely understood in Israel, the war against Hezbollah was a moral and tactical defeat for the Israeli military and government. Events in the current Israeli incursion in Gaza will determine whether history repeats itself.

 

Under the banner of the war on terror, the Bush administration also tied itself in conceptual knots conflating the threat from al Qaeda with Shiite groups like Hezbollah and the ayatollahs in Iran.

 

In 2006, for instance, President Bush claimed that "the Sunni and Shiite extremist represent different faces of the same threat." In reality, Sunni and Shiite extremists have been killing each other in large numbers for years in countries from Pakistan to Iraq. The groups have differing attitudes toward the United States, which Sunni extremists attacked in 1993 and again on 9/11, while Shiite militants have never done so.

 

So, how to reconceptualize the GWOT?

 

Contrary to a common view among Europeans, who have lived through the bombing campaigns of various nationalist and leftist terror groups for decades, al Qaeda is not just another criminal/terrorist group that can be dealt with by police action and law enforcement alone.

 

After all, a terrorist organization like the Irish Republican Army would call in warnings before its attacks and its single largest massacre killed 29 people. By contrast, al Qaeda has declared war on the United States repeatedly -- as it did for the first time to a Western audience during Osama bin Laden's 1997 interview with CNN.

 

Following that declaration of war, the terror group attacked American embassies, a U.S. warship, the Pentagon and the financial heart of the United States, killing thousands of civilians without warning; acts of war by any standard.

 

Al Qaeda is obviously at war with the United States and so to respond by simply recasting the GWOT as the GPAT, the Global Police Action Against Terrorists, would be foolish and dangerous.

 

What kind of war then should the United States fight against al Qaeda? For that we should learn some lessons from the conceptual errors of the Bush administration.

 

Nine days after 9/11, Bush addressed Congress in a speech watched live by tens of millions of Americans in which he said that al Qaeda followed in the footsteps "of the murderous ideologies of the 20th century...They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism," implying that the fight against al Qaeda would be similar to World War II or the Cold War.

 

For the Bush administration, painting the conflict in such existential terms had the benefit of casting the president as the heroic reincarnation of Winston Churchill and anyone who had the temerity to question him as the reincarnation of Hitler's arch-appeaser, Neville Chamberlain.

 

But this portrayal of the war on terror was massively overwrought. The Nazis occupied and subjugated most of Europe and instigated a global conflict that killed tens of millions. And when the United States fought the Nazis, the country spent 40 percent of its gross domestic product to do so and fielded millions of soldiers.

 

In his inaugural address, Obama should say that the United States is indeed at "war against al Qaeda and its allies," but that as Roosevelt said in his inaugural address in 1933, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. If Americans are not terrorized by terrorists, then the U.S. has won against them.

 

Al Qaeda and its allies are threats to the United States and Americans living and working overseas, but they are far from all-powerful. Barring an exceptional event like September 11, 2001, in any given year Americans are more likely to die of snake bites or lightning strikes than a terrorist attack.

 

Despite the hyperventilating rhetoric of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's amateur investigations into weapons of mass destruction do not compare to the very real possibility of nuclear conflagration that we faced during the Cold War. There are relatively few adherents of Binladen-ism in the West today, while there were tens of millions of devotees of communism and fascism.

 

Obama should also make it clear that instead of the Bush formulation of "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists," the Obama administration doctrine will be, "Anyone who is against the terrorists is with us."

 

After all it is only al Qaeda and its several affiliates in countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Algeria and allied groups such as the Taliban that kill U.S. soldiers and civilians and attack American interests around the globe.

 

Everyone else in the world is a potential or actual ally in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates, because those organizations threaten almost every category of institution, government and ethnic grouping.

 

This is the first of two commentaries on the war on terror.

Bush-McCain: All balls, no brains against terrorists

I've said all of this before, but it bears repeating over and over again, because obviously McCain, like many Americans, doesn't understand the fight we're in. McCain is apparently just like Bush: all balls and no brains.

To say that some bearded loonies hiding in caves pose an existential threat to America, and the most dangerous and sophisticated army in history, is ludicrous. Al Qaeda vs. the United States isn't David vs. Goliath; it's like David vs. the entire Philistine army. As long as the Philistines don't throw down their spears and run for the hills of Judah screaming like girls, they're going to win.

I would get stoned to death for speaking such heresy on FOXNews, but... the truth is, we should treat al Qaeda like the petty nuisance they are. On an official level, we should ignore them, we should hardly mention them; meanwhile, unofficially, we should squash them like the mosquitoes they are wherever we find them. Our entire "war" against al Qaeda should never be publicized or played up. It should all be done on the DL. That's the smart way to fight. The dumb way to fight is to tell every disaffected Muslim the world over that al Qaeda is a worthy foe, a counterweight, to the mighty United States. That's the greatest terrorist recruitment promotion ever, courtesy of Uncle Sam. No, if we must if we talk about al Qaeda at all -- which we shouldn't -- it should only be to make fun of them and diminish them, making it clear to the world that nothing that al Qaeda could possibly dream up would ever move us one inch.

That's the kind of toughness America needs right now, not this constant fear-mongering and nail-biting from the Administration, which always reminds us to be afraid.

McCain: Noun, Verb, Terrorism
By Paul Waldman
July 1, 2008 | American Prospect

John McCain's campaign has a problem: it just doesn't have much to talk about. According to the latest polls by Fortune magazine what the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy is, McCain answered, "Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

Putting aside the question of whether there might be more serious threats to the economy (The housing meltdown? Exploding gas prices?), it's hard to avoid the conclusion that anyone who thinks that Islamic terrorists might succeed in literally destroying America -- "our very existence," as McCain says -- is either a certifiable paranoiac or a complete fool. Given that, it is remarkable how often McCain asserts that Barack Obama "doesn't understand" terrorism, as though unlike McCain, Obama just hasn't spent enough time studying up. And one might forget that McCain himself represents our modern Know-Nothings, the party that pours contempt on intellectuals, that fetishizes the abdication of thought, that for eight years has supported and defended a president who proudly proclaims that he listens only to his gut.

McCain would have you believe that the difference between him and Obama is that he has some wealth of knowledge on which he draws, that his understanding of terrorism is deep and complex, so multi-layered that only he can guide us through the conflict with al-Qaeda. Like Kasparov surveying a chess board, McCain knows what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen, the possibilities and consequences of every potential move spooling across his brain at lightning speed.

So what if he thinks that Iran is training members of al-Qaeda? Details, details. What are you, some kind of pinhead elitist?

When he was campaigning for George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, one of McCain's favorite tricks was to laud Bush for his "moral clarity and firm resolve" in fighting the war on terror. It may seem like a long time ago now, but in the aftermath of September 11, "moral clarity" became an oft-repeated catchphrase among conservatives.

It meant the willingness to cast off nuance (the crutch of weak, pathetic liberals), not worry about whether we might be better able to fight our enemies if we knew as much as possible about them, and get right down to kicking ass. In a world of "moral clarity," there are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys are going to get what's coming to them.

McCain continues to embody Bush's worst impulses on terrorism, not least his stubborn refusal to grasp even the most basic facts about terrorist organizations. So let's ask: What would al-Qaeda like America to do in the next few years? What would serve its goals? A few things are obvious. It would like us to stay in Iraq, both because it offers its members a place to practice planning and carrying out terrorist acts, and because it sustains anti-American feeling in the Muslim world. Al-Qaeda would also like the American government to maintain as bellicose a posture as possible, rattling its sword and threatening further military actions against Muslim countries.

Next, al-Qaeada would like to see the American president continue to proclaim that it is America's top enemy in the world, one so powerful and menacing that if the land of the free doesn't play its cards right, America might actually be destroyed. This kind of rhetoric not only elevates al-Qaeda's importance but guarantees that those who feel bitterness toward America turn toward bin Laden and Zawahiri as, if not their representatives, then at least their allies.

Bush has done all of this, and McCain promises to do more. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which Bush has done Osama bin Laden's bidding over the last seven years -- from allowing him to escape at Tora Bora, to delivering the quagmire bin Laden had hoped to create in Afghanistan (albeit a few hundred miles away in Iraq), to destroying America's moral authority by embracing the use of torture as official policy, to characterizing the conflict as an epic war of civilizations. When bin Laden released a new videotape just before the 2004 election, he knew exactly what he was doing: By shaking his fist at America, he reinforced every argument Bush was making, helping to ensure that their symbiosis would be renewed for another term. The video might as well have ended with, "I'm Osama bin Laden, and I approve this message. Vote Bush!"

When pressed about the fact that the Iraq War is helping al-Qaeda, both Bush and McCain offer some variation of the idea that Iraq is the "central front in the war on terror," the place where the battle will be won or lost. There is no doubt that Iraq is a wound that continues to seep its infected puss over the entirety of our foreign policy and security efforts. But even if we left tomorrow, and even if we caught bin Laden and the rest of the group's leadership, there would still be tremendous work to be done. Al-Qaeda itself has transformed from an organization into a movement, and terrorism in general is becoming more diffuse, as the State Department's latest annual report on the state of global terrorism points out:

2007 witnessed the continuation of the transition from expeditionary to guerilla terrorism highlighted in Country Reports on Terrorism 2006. Through intermediaries, web-based propaganda, exploitation of local grievances, and subversion of immigrant and expatriate populations, terrorists inspired local cells to carry out attacks which they then exploit for propaganda purposes. We have seen a substantial increase in the number of self-identified groups with links (communications, training, and financial) to AQ leadership in Pakistan. These "guerilla" terrorist groups harbor ambitions of a spectacular attack, including acquisition and use of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

One has to wonder whether McCain believes that terrorist groups that operate in Indonesia or Yemen can be defeated in Iraq. Given the propaganda value of the war and the way al-Qaeda has become a franchise operation, it isn't surprising that the last few years have seen a huge increase in terrorist attacks. The best way to see the history of terrorism in the last few years is with a chart:

There was a spike in 2001 because of the September 11 attacks, but in 2002 and 2003 the numbers were only slightly higher than they had been in the years before. Then the number of people killed by terrorists skyrocketed, to 1,907 in 2004; 6,317 in 2005; 6,572 in 2006; and 9,085 in 2007. And these numbers don't include those killed in acts of terrorism within Iraq itself. (Historical data from the State Department may be found here.)

If Bush and McCain are aware of this trend, it doesn't seem to have had much impact on the way they think about this issue. Ever since September 11, the administration and its allies have acted as though the population of anti-American terrorists in the world is fixed, and if we can just find them and kill them, the threat will disappear. That was the idea behind the "flypaper theory" -- terrorists would be drawn to Mesopotamia, where they could be mowed down by American troops. Problem solved.

Of course, just the opposite happened. For every terrorist we caught or killed, many more were created. The key question for the next president's terrorism policy is what he plans to do about the ocean of anti-Americanism in which terrorists swim. Fail to solve that problem, and al-Qaeda will continue to recruit new members, raise money, and carry out operations, and the number of terrorist attacks will continue to rise.

We've had a seven-year test of the theory that it's better to be feared than loved, and we've seen the results. Perhaps John McCain has a plan to win back the esteem of the world. If so, we ought to hear what it is.

Muslims hate our foreign policies

While I don't agree with Scheuer on everything -- most important, I don't agree that Muslim extremists pose an existential threat to the United States -- he is correct that Muslim extremists hate America for its actions, not for its "freedom." Until we accept the truth that popular Muslim hatred is blowback from U.S. foreign policies, we will never be able to stem the tide of extremism.

And it only further enrages Muslims when Bush -- whose "freedom agenda" for the world's oppressed peoples figured so highly in his speeches, and was a major reason (proclaimed ex post facto) for his invasion of Iraq -- picks & chooses which democracies he (i.e. America) will recognize as legitimate. If democracy for the world is our goal, then we must accept the results of free & fair elections everywhere, no matter who gets elected.

Hypocrisy never makes for good foreign policy
By Bernd Debusmann
March 7, 2008 | Reuters

It would be hard to believe if it didn't come from the man who ran the unit charged with capturing Osama bin Laden.

Preparations at one point included lawyers from several branches of the U.S. intelligence community. Their task? "To examine rolls of masking, duct and medical-adhesive tape and determine which had the right amount of stickiness to ensure that bin Laden's face and beard would not be excessively irritated if his mouth had to be taped shut after capture."

This comes in a footnote in an angry book by an angry man, Michael Scheuer, a 20-year veteran of CIA covert-action operations who left the agency in 2004 and became a vocal critic of what he sees as the failure of successive U.S. administrations to take seriously the threat of Islamic terrorism.

The beard-and-tape episode dates back to 1998 when, he says, "CIA engineers were required to produce an ergonomically correct chair for bin Laden to be seated in after he was captured. Likewise, well-padded restraint devices were manufactured to avoid chafing his skin."

So much for the ruthless, brutal, cold-hearted officials of popular lore.

The operation was called off because the Clinton administration feared a huge backlash if bin Laden had been killed by accident in the attempt to snatch him.

Also at play, according to Scheuer, was "the first question always asked by the agency's senior-most managers, 'Will it pass the Washington Post giggle test?' " He added that no "operation could be considered if the Post and other media would ridicule it if it failed and became public knowledge."

The giggle test, Scheuer says, was applied throughout his service with the CIA, which included arming Afghan mujahedeen in their fight against Soviet occupation. He was one of the architects of the CIA's controversial rendition program under which Qaeda suspects are seized and taken to third countries.

Bin Laden is still on the run, more than six years after hijackers under his command rammed airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people.

In his recently published book, "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq," Scheuer argues that the United States faces more trouble because its leaders refuse to recognize what drives terrorism.

President George W. Bush argues that terrorists "hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote." But polls show that the bedrock of support for militancy among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims is the detestation of U.S. foreign policies.

Scheuer faults U.S. leaders for failing to acknowledge the grievances that bin Laden laid out in precise detail, which were adopted by the followers he inspired. They were: (1) the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula; (2) unqualified support for Israel; (3) U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India and Russia; (4) U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil; and (5) U.S. support and financing of authoritarian Arab regimes.

There is no reason to believe that the United States is about to change the foreign policies that motivate Muslim extremists in a region where politics and religion are intertwined and where many believe that the "war on terror" is really a war on Islam.

Foreign policy has not been much of a subject in the U.S. presidential election campaign. The candidates differ over when and how to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them has given any indication of policies that would take the air out of the arguments that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups have used to attract recruits.

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and the rivals for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have all pledged commitment to Israel and none of them is likely to loosen Washington's embrace of Saudi Arabia or push President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt toward greater democracy.

Polls show that radicals - potential suicide bombers and hostage takers - and moderate Muslims are in favor of moving toward more democracy, a process stifled in many places by authoritarian rulers who enjoy the backing of the United States.

America cemented its reputation as the superpower of hypocrites after one of the very few democratic elections in Middle Eastern history, the 2006 vote in which Palestinians opted for the Islamist party Hamas over Fatah, the corrupt ruling bureaucracy built up by Yasser Arafat. The closely monitored election was deemed free and fair.

The United States responded by boycotting Hamas and backing Fatah.

Islam needs a Pope Leo XIII?

Weigel's analysis is all polite & academic, but this kind of thing drives even moderate Muslims batty, because it assumes that the problem lies entirely within the religion of Islam: Islam needs to reform and adapt to the West; the West must make no concessions to Islam. It mentions nothing of the West's colonial legacy in the Middle East (the poorly drawn borders of Iraq being one example), or the continuing political meddling of the West in the Mideast thanks to its oil, or the West's heavy favoring of Israel in the Holy Land.

Unfortunately for us, one of the tenets of their faith is that good Muslims must consider an attack against other Muslims as an attack on all Muslims; and the proper response is jihad in defense of fellow Muslims. We've deliberately stepped on that bear trap in Afghanistan and Iraq; and Muslims' obligation to defend their brethren is Osama bin Laden's #1 theological selling point for jihad, which even moderate Muslim clerics have a hard time refuting theologically, although they can criticize his methods. (Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. employed similar logic, by the way, when he said that a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Replace "justice" with "Islam" and you've got jihad; replace it with "freedom" and you've got the ' Bush Doctrine.')

Not only has the West refused to change its policies in the Mideast, we've invaded two Muslim countries in the past 8 years, and then we've had the gall to say that the problem is with Islam and "Islamofascism" (coining an ugly, illogical term), not us.

"But we weren't in Afghanistan and Iraq before 9/11!" some argue. True enough. But then, wasn't it mighty un-Christian an un-Enlightened of us to hold an entire faith, or an entire region, responsible for the 9/11 hijackers' crimes, and punish and kill people who had no involvement in 9/11 whatsoever? What to call that except Christian jihad?

Maybe if we stopped occupying Muslim countries, supporting corrupt Arab kings who exploit and oppress their people, and stopped propping up Israel, then we would have some moral authority to tell Muslims to reform their religion. But without a change in our policies towards the Muslim world, our calls for their reform are a sanctimonious slap in the face.

Like Jesus said: "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."

An Islamic Leo XIII?
By George Weigel

January 9, 2008 | Denver Catholic Register

There's been a lot of chatter since 9/11 about Islam's need for a Martin Luther, a Muslim reformer who would accelerate this great world religion's acceptance of two key planks in the platform of political modernity: that religious freedom is a basic human right, and that democracy is the form of government most likely to produce a just society. To be candid, this Lutheran imagery has never made much sense to me. It misses large parts of the relationship between the Reformation and the freedom project in the West, and it seems a very dubious scenario for theological development within Islam.

In the mid-1990s, in an essay entitled "Waiting for Augustine," I suggested that resolving the painful encounter between Islam and modernity required a figure of immense intellectual and spiritual authority who could distinguish for Muslims between the earthly city and the City of God, as Augustine had done for Christians in his 5th century masterwork. Now, I must confess, that Augustinian analogy also seems not-quite-right. For as a Muslim colleague, Stephen Schwartz of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, recently suggested to me, what Islam really needs is a Leo XIII: a religious leader who, by retrieving and developing forgotten elements of an ancient faith, can bring that faith into a fruitful engagement with the modern world.

When Leo XIII came to the papacy in 1878, the Catholic Church's official thinking on Church-and-state was frozen in intellectual amber — not least because the Italian destruction of the Papal States had made Leo's predecessor, Pius IX, the "prisoner of the Vatican." Gioacchino Vincenzo Pecci, who would succeed Pius in that gilded and frescoed "prison," had enjoyed a broad pre-papal career in diplomacy, civil governance, and pastoral care; he was also a leader in the revival of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Thanks to those experiences and that intellectual perspective, Pecci suspected that what many Catholics regarded as "traditional" — the insistence that rightly-ordered states must legally and financially support Catholicism as their official religion — did not, in fact, reflect the deepest currents of Catholic thought on the relationship between religious and political authority.

So when he became Leo XIII, Pecci began a careful, lengthy process of retrieval and development that, by drawing on the "perennial philosophy" of Aquinas and looking deeper into the Church's tradition than the self-styled traditionalists were prepared to do, led (over some eighty years) to a positive Catholic engagement with the institutions of political modernity — one result of which was the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom, which in turn led to the Catholic Church's emergence as the world's premier human rights advocate.

Retrieval-and-development, rather than rupture-and-revolution: Is this a model that might be attractive to serious Muslims who want to do something positive to resolve the intra-Islamic civil war that has spilled out from the House of Islam and now affects all world politics — most lethally, through jihadist terrorism? That's one of the large questions I pose in Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism, just published by Doubleday. In this small book, I make several other arguments:

• The great questions of life, including the great political questions, are ultimately theological.

• The notion of "three Abrahamic faiths" obscures more than it illuminates.

• Jihadism, while a lethal distortion of Islam, nonetheless appeals to certain tendencies in Islamic self-understanding that can only be successfully overcome by a re-connection in the Muslim mind between faith and moral reason.

• Genuine interreligious dialogue, acknowledging the theological and anthropological differences between Islam and Christianity, will focus on the development of an Islamic case for religious freedom and the separation of religious and political authority;

• The struggle against jihadism, which may last for generations, is one of the two great contests for the human future in the 21st century (the other being the management of biotechnology).

Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism also includes a host of policy proposals: a modest contribution to the national conversation in this hyper-political season. I hope you find it all of interest.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. Weigel's column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3215.