In his November 3 victory speech, President Bush, sounding the keynote of his second administration, pledged to "fight this war on terror with every resource of our national power." By saying "this" rather than "the" Bush stressed the palpable, near-at-hand quality of the war whose symbols have grown to surround us in the last three years—the tilted barrels of security cameras, BioWatch pathogen-sniffers, and all the rest of the technology of security and surveillance that Matthew Brzezinski somewhat overexcitedly details in Fortress America. Voters, at least, have been impressed. Responding to the exit pollers' question "Which ONE issue mattered most in deciding how you voted for president?" 32 percent of Bush supporters named "Terrorism" (as against 5 percent of Kerry supporters), 85 percent of Bush supporters said that the country was "safer from terrorism" in 2004 than it was in 2000, and 79 percent said that the war in Iraq "has improved the long-term security of the United States." Bush's successful conflation of security at home and military aggression abroad, his insistence that Iraq "is the central front of the war on terror," was the bravura rhetorical gambit that drove much of his electoral strategy.

That's all quite wonderful, and believe me I cheered every bit as much as any other Republican when George Bush won, this time the popular vote as well as the electoral vote, in November 2004. But the perceptions of Bush voters (which many Democrats continue to deride and like to contrast to themselves as members of the "reality-based" community - it is a rare thing indeed when one obtains intellectual satisfaction from seeing their party beaten at the polls) are, from the perspective of people who deal in facts rather than in opinions, irrelevant. If the war in Iraq has increased (or decreased, if you like) the security of the United States as a whole that will remain the case regardless of how many people believe it to be otherwise. It is somewhat similar to the failure of various amulets worn by African mystics to turn bullets into water when put to the test.

But I digress ...

If you live, as I do, in an American city designated as a likely target by the Department of Homeland Security, the sheer proliferation of security apparatus in the streets assures you that there is a war on. Yet the nature and conduct of that war, and the character—and very existence—of our enemy, remain infuriatingly obscure: not because there's any shortage of information, or apparent information, but because so much of it has turned out to be creative guesswork or empty propaganda.

That, Mr. Raban, is your first error. A majority of the contradictory information that exists about the enemy does so not because of creative guesswork or empty propaganda, but rather because there are differences of opinion among a great many people as to what aspects of that information are genuine or should be regarded as factual. This isn't nearly as easy as many of the armchair pundits like to make it out be, which is why there is still disagreement in certain elements of the intelligence community about everything from the Lockerbie bombing to Oklahoma City to Khobar Towers to even 9/11 - even when 90% of the intelligence community still agrees with respect to the generals, there is still a multitude of disagreement when it comes to the particulars. The trick is to take this into account when reading such information and then take away what nuggets you can to try and form a coherent picture - that's called analysis.

To begin with, it wasn't a war.

Yes, it was, we simply weren't conscious of that fact at the time. Listing everything al-Qaeda has done pre-9/11 would take entirely too much time, but my fisking of the 9/11 Commission staff statement should give you a pretty good place to start. Similar, though not exactly parallel overviews (because of the differences in analyses that I mentioned above as well as that 2 years have passed since the publication of each book) can be found in Sections 3 and 4 of Rohan Gunaratna's Inside Al Qaeda as well as Chapter 13 of Anonymous (Mike Scheuer's) Through Our Enemies' Eyes. Bin Laden was even kind enough to make his point of view towards us quite clear in repeated television interviews to American and as well as Arab or Islamic news outlets throughout the 1990s as well as of course his 1998 declaration of war.

So, from the perspective of the attacking powers, it was indeed a war, just one that the overwhelming majority of the American public was ignorant of.

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the attacks were spoken of, like the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, or the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, as acts of criminal atrocity for which those who were responsible could, the President said, "be brought to justice."

Ah, but the principles of the 1993 WTC bombing never were quite brought to justice, were they? Sure, the members of the actual cell that carried out the bombing (with the exception of Abdul Rahman Yassin, who fled to Iraq) were arrested and prosecuted, but the ultimate mastermind Ramzi Yousef escaped and began planning even larger and deadlier terrorist attacks until his capture. There was little if any effort to hunt down Yousef or the various members of his cell and as I type this, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden's brother-in-law and the financier of the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka plot, lives so securely in Saudi Arabia that he can appear on CNN to comment on the recent al-Qaeda attacks in the Kingdom. Another of Yousef's collaborators, Hambali, went on to become Jemaah Islamiyah's operations chief and orchestrated the Bali bombings.

Yeah, that's bringing the guilty to justice, no?

To compare the OKC bombing to the 1993 WTC bombing is more or less a case of apples and oranges, unless one wants to argue that it was perpetrated by a "hidden hand," such as the former Iraqi regime and/or al-Qaeda as various people (Richard Clarke among them) have over the years. Leaving such theories aside, the government claims that it was perpetrated by a small clique of anti-government white supremacists who were likely influenced at least in some fashion by The Turner Diaries that depict a Neo-Nazi revolution in the United States. If we're only talking about a handful people based primarily in the US, such individuals can be easily rounded up and prosecuted through traditional means. This was pretty much the same way that the US dealt with its first domestic bio-terrorist attack in 1984, which was perpetrated by a small cult led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers in Oregon in a bid to influence a local election. Prosecuting members of a sophisticated terrorist organization based in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and southern Philippines just for starters is a little bit more difficult, however, which is why the American public has had to wake up to the realities of war.

But within nine days the war was underway. At the joint session of Congress on September 20, Bush described it as a new brand of war, "unlike any other we have ever known," of "covert operations, secret even in success." In Dick Cheney's words, it was to be fought "in the shadows: this is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business. We have to operate in that arena."

"Major military facilities, such as airfields, fixed communications sites, and large headquarters will become rarities because of their vulnerability; the same may be true of civilian equivalents, such as seats of government, power plants, and industrial sites (including knowledge as well as manufacturing industries). Success will depend heavily on effectiveness in joint operations as lines between responsibility and mission become very blurred."

Unfortunately for Mr. Raban, Mr. Lind and his colleagues weren't the only ones writing about the realities of Fourth Generation Warfare. Take Abu Ubeid al-Qurashi, one of bin Laden's military advisors, for example:

"In 1989, some American military experts⁴ predicted a fundamental change in the future form of warfare... They predicted that the wars of the 21st century would be dominated by a kind of warfare they called 'the fourth generation of wars.' Others called it 'asymmetric warfare…'"

"This new type of war presents significant difficulties for the Western war machine, and it can be expected that [Western] armies will change fundamentally. This forecast did not arise in a vacuum – if only the cowards [among the Muslim clerics] knew that fourth-generation wars have already occurred and that the superiority of the theoretically weaker party has already been proven; in many instances, nation-states have been defeated by stateless nations."

I should mention here, as I have in the past, that a US defeat in Iraq will serve to justify al-Qaeda's combat doctrine in the eyes of a majority of Arab nationalists as well as like-minded Salafists and Wahhabis. It has been argued that the US invasion of Iraq has been a boon to al-Qaeda recruiting efforts, but for those who believe this all I have to say is: let them drive us out of Iraq and then you'll see what a real recruiting boon looks like.

But I digress yet again, apologies.

The first four sentences quoted above seem as smart a description as any I've read of the peculiar situation we find ourselves in at present—a world of chronic blur, full of newly slippery words that mean something different from what they meant before September 2001. Just as John Ashcroft's scheme for Operation TIPS (short for Terrorism Information and Prevention System) raised the question of whether one should treat the neighborhood mailman as a fellow civilian or a Pfc. in military intelligence, so the texture of ordinary life and talk has taken on a disturbingly ambiguous quality, to the point where peace wears the face of war, and war dissimulates as peace. As Admiral Fitzwallace (John Amos), the fictional chairman of the Joint Chiefs on The West Wing, admitted to the White House chief of staff in an episode of the series broadcast in 2002, "I can't tell when it's peacetime and wartime any more."

Welcome to the 21st (or perhaps the post-WW2 20th?) century, Mr. Raban. I myself can't imagine the last time one nation actually declared war on another - the US certainly hasn't in decades, no matter how many "authorizations for use of force" we might pass in Congress. Traditional warfare, at least as its been understood over the last several centuries, has more or less become obselete since the end of WW2 and more recently the Cold War while stateless or trans-state organizations and ideologies have proliferated like mad. As nice as it would be if bin Laden were more like his totalitarian predecessors from the 1920s to the 1930s, the era of such days is over. The African nation of Uganda, for example, is officially at peace with its neighbors yet it has 40,000 rebels, organized into 22 groups that are currently fighting the government, which is rather moderate by African standards. These groups range from the al-Qaeda affiliate Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) headed up by cult leader Joseph Kony that reminds one more of the Taiping Rebellion in 18th century China than anything else. As I said, Uganda is officially at peace with its neighbors and has been for many years, but you'd never know it if you actually lived there.

As with al-Qaeda's war against the US, this phenomenon has been going on for years if not decades beforehand. 9/11, combined with globalization, just helped to bring that reality home to the rest of us. I had hoped that 3/11 would have done the same for Europe, but that sadly doesn't appear to be the case.

In Cheney's "arena" of shadows, one needs to be as suspicious of unattended language as of any other form of baggage. The phrase "war on terror" is a case in point. To isolate it in skeptical quotation marks can be an act of mild, justifiable pedantry: terrorism is a belligerent means, not an object or an enemy, and declaring war on it is like declaring war on tanks, or bows and arrows. It can also be an act of political dissent, identifying the writer's mistrust of the whole enterprise; and the reverse is true.

That's all very nice, Mr. Raban - and all quite irrelevant. "War on terrorism," for all the punditocracy like to snear at it, is at its core a euphemism for the same conflict that Congress recognized shortly after the 9/11 attacks: a conflict against the individuals, organizations, that were involved in perpetrating the events of that day. It was not (likely for reasons of diplomatic expediency and the fact that the US Justice Department had already identified Iraq, Iran, and Sudan as state backers of al-Qaeda in its 1998 indictment of bin Laden) a mere declaration of war against al-Qaeda and its state sponsors. To the best of my knowledge, this is abundantly clear to the vast majority of people who are actually involved in fighting the war on terror - about the only time that questions about just who (in a broad sense) "the terrorists" are seems to come up is among the pundit class and the newspaper columnists.

A puzzling feature of Michael Ignatieff's The Lesser Evil, for instance, is its repeated refusal to flag the phrase with quotes: "The norms that govern a war on terror are not the monopoly of government.... Standards for a war on terror will be set by adversarial moral competition.... A democratic war on terror needs to subject all coercive measures to the dignity test...."² In a book otherwise dedicated to the scrupulous examination of conventional assumptions, one outsized, unexamined assumption squats at the center like the elephant in the living room and opens Ignatieff to the charge that he's not so much a disinterested critic of the terror warriors as their in-house philosopher.

In the immortal words of the Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes, "Vanity!" Whatever Ignatieff's relationship to those Mr. Raban labels "the terror warriors," (and who exactly is that supposed be? Neocons? The Bush administration? Non-isolationists? If Mr. Raban classifies any of these groups as "terror warriors," one cannot help but wonder what label might be given to their opposition ...) a better question might be what relevance this has to the topic of Fourth Generation warfare that he raised above. Fortunately, he seems to recognize that, as he soon comes back to the topic:

But Ignatieff may be right. When so many basic notions, like security, war, enemy, network, chatter, threat, totalitarian, are infected with new and dubious meanings, there's a temptation to reach continually for quotation marks as if they were pairs of rubber gloves. Better to remember Lind and his colleagues: fourth-generation warfare is altering the language in ways that we must learn to live with.

I'm not exactly so sure I agree with that. With the exception of "network" and "chatter," all of the above were pretty much redefined in both 1914 and 1939. The same was likely true of previous conflicts in the past and is likely to be true as long as humans are still living on the planet. To attribute shifts in language during times of conflict to Fourth Generation Warfare is merely to reveal one's historical ignorance.

The war on terror has brought back the sap of youth to the veins of old cold warriors, like Richard Pipes, the historian of Russia, leader of Team B, and staff member of the National Security Council in the Reagan years, who seized on the Beslan school massacre in September to make a vital distinction. In an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times Pipes wrote:

"The attacks on New York and the Pentagon were unprovoked and had no specific objective. Rather, they were part of a general assault of Islamic extremists bent on destroying non-Islamic civilizations. As such, America's war with Al Qaeda is non-negotiable. But the Chechens do not seek to destroy Russia—thus there is always an opportunity for compromise."

I tend to disagree with Pipes on this one. While I doubt that even Shamil Basayev has designs on conquering Russia at the height of his meglomania, the conflict in Chechnya stopped being about Chechnya, at least for Basayev and his acolytes, quite a some time ago. The battle, at least for the al-Qaeda arm of the Chechen insurgency personified by Basayev and the hostage-takers involved in the Beslan school seige, is now for carving out a Wahabbi-ruled emirate stretching throughout the North Caucasus, hence all of the incursions into neighboring Russian republics like North Ossetia, Ingushetia, Dagestan, and Kabarindo-Balkaria. None of this is any great secret, incidentally - you can read it on Kavkaz Center, the official voice of Basayev and his jackboot followers.

That being said, Pipes is probably correct that Russia can reach at least some kind of a negotiated settlement with those Chechen insurgents led by Aslan Maskhadov. But negotiations are not possible with men like Basayev; he doesn't want to talk to Moscow, he wants Russia out of the North Caucasus, followed presumably by undesireable groups such as the Christian inhabitants of places like North Ossetia and any Muslims who don't think the Taliban lifestyle is for them. All of this, as I said, is quite clear if one takes a look at both Basayev and the Wahhabi ideologues that he surrounds himself with. Russia can't negotiate with such people, they can only kill them before they kill more innocents like the hundreds who died in Beslan.

Pipes advised Vladimir Putin to hasten to the negotiating table, parlay with the Chechen rebels, and spare Russia further attacks. It's axiomatic to America's war on terror, as Pipes makes plain, that our enemy—variously known as Islamofascism, Islamist extremism, global jihad—has no rational agenda beyond its desire to destroy the United States out of remorseless, theologically inspired hatred for its values.

I doubt such advice would ever have been made to Israel with respect to Hamas (whom Basayev and his followers should be regarded as a far bloodier version simply in terms of body counts), but then American policy-makers have always regarded Russia under Putin with a more cynical eye due its authoritarian nature. The vast majority of that cynicism seems to have been justified, I should add, given the depths of which President Palpatine Putin has waltzed on the graves of the dead in Beslan to solidify his own power base, crush his opposition, and attempted to poison the opposition in order to retain his little puppet state in Ukraine.

The ideological underpinnings of the enemy that Pipes describes are, like the war on terrorism, euphemisms that have been unconsciously encouraged for fear of naming specific Islamic sects or ideologies that are shared by our enemy. Let me be politically incorrect, however, and define these 3 specific terms in language that we can all understand:

Islamofascism: Most people when they say this probably Qutbism, as in the political philosophy of Sayyid Qutb. Bill Allison of Ideofact was kind to read and summarize (with lengthy excerpts) some of Qutb's writings - if anybody can find a link to the index of Bill's posts on the subject that I believe was drawn up at some point, post it in the comments and I'll link it.

Unfortunately, many commentators tend to use Islamofascism interchangeably with Khomeinism, the political philosophy of Ayatollah Khomeini that serves as the leading light for the current Iranian government. There's a lot of differences between Qutbism and Khomeinism, but I tend not to fault most commentators for ignoring them the same way that many pundits and popular historians ignore the numerous substantial differences between the Japanese militarism leading into WW2 and those of its fascist allies in Europe.

Islamist extremism: Most people when they say this are usually referring to Wahhabism, its South Asian variant of Deobandism, or Salafism. A lot of people are extremely hesitant to attach names to this extremism, however, in large part due to a combination of political correctness, expediency, and the fact that one of the ways that governments in the Middle East and South Asia deal with this extremism wherever it becomes militant is through a "divide and conquer" strategy in which those holding to extremist religious beliefs that translate into extreme political philosophies that are at odds with those of the government are played off against those who are not. This strategy has been employed both successfully (Egypt) and unsuccessfully (Pakistan) from the perspective of the governments who are most threatened by the rise of such sects, but so far "divide and conquer" appears to be the only viable political strategy in place that I've been able to discern, with the only other alternatives being being coopted by the extremists (Saudi Arabia) or a bloody and protracted war of annihilation (Algeria). For variety of reasons, many of which who have been covered by scholars (Bernard Lewis immediately coming to mind) far more intelligent than I, there exists no clear-cut distinctions among a majority of Muslims as to whether these sects are Koranic or heretical. As such, there is a theological vacuum as it were within which extremist views can thrive. The last time that Western culture dealt with anything similar was during the religious wars that came out of the Reformation in Europe, which readers of my own site will know that I regard as being more or less parallel to the current situation in Islam.

Global Jihad: This is actually a bit of lingo from the intelligence world and is one of the terms used by analysts to refer to the huge conglomerate of individuals and terrorist groups that operate under bin Laden's aegis. But whether you call it Jihad International (Spanish), Qaidat al-Jihad (Israel), International Islamic Front (India), etc. it's all pretty much describing the same individuals and groups in an attempt to classify them.

To justify their case, Pipes and his kind treat as beneath their notice the shopping list of causes and demands presented by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and others in their February 1998 declaration of "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders," which is every bit as specific as the complaints of the Chechen rebels.

Ignoring that the only difference between Basayev's followers and those of bin Laden is a matter of semantics, Pipes and others regard the latter's demands as being beneath their notice for the simple fact that they are. The goals that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri enumerated in their declaration of war of have been expanding ever since, which is precisely why bin Laden appears to now include the independence of southern Thailand (presumably under the rule of his minions in the region) as being among the issues he is fighting for. Moreover, as John Reilly noted in his review of Imperial Hubris, al-Qaeda's demands and the causes that it purports to fight for are somewhat self-generating and rather deceptive in their formulation:

Apparently, arresting an aspirant martyr as he tries to smuggle explosives over the Canadian border is not just a disappointment, but a grievance ...

Perhaps an isolated villager in the Hindu Kush could be forgiven for believing that the United States tried to use Serbia to de-Islamize all or part of the Balkans. However, as Anonymous never ceases to remind us, Osama bin Laden is a well-informed man, with a sophisticated understanding of the world. In the case of this grievance, at least, we are not dealing with a culturally different perception. We are dealing with what Joseph Goebbels used to call “The Big Lie.”

Given such realities, Mr. Raban should understand why Pipes and others like him do not take bin Laden or his statements with anything less than a shaker of salt. However, this does appear to have occurred to him at the time he was writing up his article:

There's no mention of American values in bin Laden's call for the removal of US bases from Saudi Arabia (a demand that has since been quietly met) and for an end to "the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post," or in his indictment of the American "endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula."⁴ To fight Richard Pipes's war on terror, one has to take it as read that the Islamists' seeming preoccupation with affairs in the Arab world is merely a smokescreen to cover their pathological loathing of the United States—which could be true, but it'd be nice to see it argued in the open air and not in invisible ink.

I think Mr. Raban is being unduly credulous to take bin Laden at his word here, but that is of course his leisure. That being said, I sincerely doubt that anyone apart from perhaps Mike Scheuer seriously believes that if we give al-Qaeda what they want that they'll go away and leave the US alone. Moreover, I would like to point out that many of those demands as they were written in 1998 have been met: the US military has pulled out of Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi sanctions have been lifted, and the Bush administration has only made tepid progress (I myself think that more can be done and the sooner the better) with respect to the Sudanese-backed genocide in Darfur, an issue that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri view as a Western conspiracy to splinter Sudan. Yet despite all of these actions, the terrorist attacks keep on coming, not because al-Qaeda's preoccupation with the Middle East is a smokescreen but because their long-term goals involve the destruction of our civilization as a tenet of their ideology.

As Rohan Gunaratna wrote in Inside Al Qaeda:

Together with Osama, the shura majlis [al-Qaeda ruling council] formulates Al Qaeda's policies and strategies, which the leader exhorts everyone to follow to the letter ... Although its objectives have altered little since it was founded, its strategies have evolved over the years. As defined by Osama, Al Qaeda has short, mid, and long-term strategies. Before 9/11, its immediate goal was the withdrawl of US troops from Saudi Arabia and the creation there of a Caliphate. Its mid-term strategy is was the ouster of the "apostate rulers" of the Arabian Peninsula and thereafter the Middle East and the creation of true Islamic states. And the long-term strategy was to build a formidable array of Islamic states - including ones with nuclear capability - to wage war on the US (the "Great Satan") and its allies.

So given all that, I would like to ask Mr. Raban whether or not he regards bin Laden and his lieutenants as people we can all sit down and negotiate with. As Gunaratna and others have made quite clear in their serious studies of the organization, al-Qaeda will accept nothing less than ultimate victory for itself and its ideology. Even if the US political establishment were to concede to all of bin Laden's demands, peace would not be ensured. All that would happen would be to push the conflict a little further down the line.

The most rousing call to arms has come from Norman Podhoretz in an enormous article in Commentary titled "World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win." Here, in passing, he nicely disposes of the question whether America's unconditional support for Israel plays any serious part in the global jihadists' thinking. "Hatred of Israel," Podhoretz explains, is "a surrogate for anti-Americanism, rather than the reverse." "If the Jewish state had never come into existence, the United States would still have stood as an embodiment of everything that most of these Arabs considered evil."

I dunno, somehow when I read this I manage to get the distinct impression in reading this that Mr. Raban does regard US support for Israel as being a major factor in why al-Qaeda likes to kill Westerners. That is, after all, the oh-so-trendy belief among the chattering classes throughout Western Europe. All the same, what Podhoretz and others like him are no doubt aware of is that within the ideology of bin Laden and his contemporaries, Israel is regarded as "the Little Satan," a resurrection of the ancient Crusader state of Outremer that has been established by the nefarious Westerners and their presumably Jewish masters as a staging base from which to attack the Islamic world. What actually takes place on the ground in Israel or the Palestinian territories is irrelevant from the perspective of bin Laden, Israel's mere existence constitutes a Western threat against the Islamic world that must be vanquished. It is precisely for that reason that al-Qaeda's opening salvos against the US in both NYC and Somalia occurred in 1993, the very year that the Oslo Accords were signed and any observer would tell you that a Palestinian state was certain to emerge within a few years. In other words, the existence or non-existence of a Palestinian state (which, the way one hears the chattering classes in Europe talk, would be nothing short of a panacea for all forms of Islamist violence) or anything Israel actually does is utterly and completely irrelevant. Similarly, I should mention, is the way that al-Qaeda regards the presence of US forces in Iraq - whatever actually happens on the ground simply does not matter except from a tactical perspective.

Sorry to disappoint Mr. Raban. If he wants any consolation, Podhoretz is dealing with an extremely limited scope of the problem where he says that the issue we're dealing with here is limited solely to Arabs. It's a global threat and as such requires a global response.

For Podhoretz, as for Pipes, it's essential to get rid of the idea that Islamist extremism might spring from causes and concerns within the Middle East, and to insist that the enemy's quarrel is not with America's policies but with the fact of America in and of itself:

Or, as the subterranean monster, the Underliner, announces in the closing frames of The Incredibles, "I declare war on Peace and Happiness."

Here again, I strongly suspect that Mr. Raban feels exactly the opposite to Pipes and Podhoretz in his own personal assessment of the situation. The search for root causes, however, is as much an illusion as it is anything else that is created by those who feel so secure from questions of mere survival that they are only focused on assessing their own culpability in what is occurring. The ideological and religious roots of the current conflict is as much an outgrowth of an Islamic civil war as it is anything else, similar to the religious wars that ravaged Europe following the Reformation. The US can no more influence the outcome of that conflict than it can the internal religious disputes that exist within any other religion. Whether al-Qaeda's views are ultimately decided to be Koranic or heretical is out of our hands in that sense, but what Podhoretz or Pipes do seem to understand is that given al-Qaeda's views towards the US (the ultimate origin of such views being more or less academic) we really have no choice but to fight them now or fight them later, after they have achieved at least some of their objectives. We ignored the threat for nearly a decade and that got us 9/11. All Pipes and Podhoretz seem to be saying is that we need to recognize al-Qaeda's views for what they are and act accordingly.

With Israel conveniently out of the picture, Podhoretz addresses his mighty theme—the nobility of the Bush Doctrine as it confronts the third great totalitarian power of modern times. The hot war against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers and the cold war against Soviet Russia were foreshadowing preludes to the war now in progress, in which George W. Bush, "a passionate democratic idealist of the Reaganite stamp," has heroically personified "a repudiation of moral relativism and an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs," thereby restoring America to its pay-any-price-bear-any-burden internationalist and democratic roots.

My suspicions about Mr. Raban's own views on this subject continue to increase when he uses the word "conveniently" in writing about Podhoretz's view of the war on terrorism. Why not, say, Podhoretz's view of US policy with respect to Kashmir or Algeria or Chechnya, all which bear every bit as much of a factor on influencing bin Laden's actions as do those of Israel, as can be seen in the fact that he actually has his minions fighting in all three of the respective conflicts. As to what Podhoretz, this aspect of his writing as summarized by Mr. Raban seems to have quite adecquately summarized how a majority of Americans regarded the whole endeavor of the war on terrorism up until (at least among the general public) the failure to find WMDs in Iraq, though one could competently argue that the bulk of the international community was prepared to dismiss al-Qaeda as broken and smashed soon into January 2002. As the network's fall and winter offensives in 2002 demonstrated, al-Qaeda had survived the fall of Afghanistan and was already in the process of preparing a counter-stroke every bit as nasty as anything the Axis or the Soviet Bloc had ever cooked up.

Despite Podhoretz's ample retrospective catalog of injuries and humiliations inflicted on the United States by various Muslim groups and individuals (including the PLO, the PFLP, the Tehran students in 1979, Hezbollah, Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and al-Qaeda), it's hard to see how the many people who committed these acts share a single theology, let alone represent a unified totalitarian force comparable with Nazism or Soviet communism.

Unfortunately, people tend to forget that there was a great deal of difference between Nazism and the Italian, Slovakian, Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian schools of fascism that made up Hitler's pantheon of allies in WW2. Much same can be said of various Nazi puppets like Quisling in Norway or Petain in France, to say nothing of Hitler's Japanese allies. Similar divisions existed within the Soviet Bloc, which is why not so long ago it was quite fashionable (and apparently still is) to argue that such divisions completely precluded the existence of any kind of a communist threat. In any case, given his earlier statements I strongly suspect that Podhoretz is basing his categorization of the threat on the basis of geography rather than theology. Since the 1970s, the US has come under attack to one degree on another by Arab terrorists. There has to be an explanation as to why the Middle East is producing these types of individuals, ideologies, and organizations rather than Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America or Eastern Europe.

When Podhoretz giddily announces that a major goal of the war on terror must be "the reform and modernization of the Islamic religion itself," one is sharply reminded that nothing in his essay suggests any serious familiarity with the religion to which he so breezily appoints himself as the new Calvin or Luther.

Mr. Raban's caricature aside, I very much doubt that Podhoretz sees himself as any kind of new reformer within Islam. Rather, he seems to recognize that the marginalization of those schools within Islam that preach violence against the West as a matter of faith as a logical goal of the war on terrorism. This strikes me as quite sensible, no more than one might argue in 1943 that a major goal of WW2 should be the marginalization of Japanese imperialism or the Nazi belief that much of Belarus and Ukraine exist as German "living space."

In his envoi, "History's Call," Podhoretz quotes George F. Kennan, writing in 1947 to welcome the cold war as a challenge sent by Providence to test America's national mettle. Adapting Kennan, Podhoretz says:

Now "our entire security as a nation"—including, to a greater extent than in 1947, our physical security—once more depends on whether we are ready and willing to accept and act upon the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history has yet again so squarely placed upon our shoulders. Are we ready? Are we willing?

Those are questions well worth asking, I should think. Isn't one of the most repeated criticisms of the neocons that they are too idealistic and enter into situations like Iraq without recognizing the consequences of their actions. Because of our post-Cold War status as the world's sole remaining superpower, the US has to take on a unique role in fighting the threat posed by al-Qaeda and it's allies. If we can't do that, then we aren't going to be a superpower much longer, pure and simple.

The gallant tone and dramatic historical sweep of the piece are calculated to make a fellow proud, as Tom Lehrer once sang, to be a soldier, but the questions of just how and where this inspiriting war is to be fought, and against precisely whom, grow increasingly opaque as Podhoretz works his way through some 35,000 words of martial uplift. He spends so much of his time energetically putting to the sword paleoconservatives (anti-Semites to a man), and fainthearted, détente-addicted Democrats and their lackeys in the press and in Europe that one tends to lose sight altogether of the ill-assorted band of Muslims—Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, and, of course, Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—who, presumably, constitute an even graver threat to the US than the combined forces of Michael Moore, Bill Clinton, Brent Scowcroft, Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, and The New York Times.

I think Mr. Raban just answered his own question at the end there as to who Podhoretz feels the US is supposed to be fighting. As noted earlier, Podhoretz seems to picked up on the fact that a lot of people from the Middle East seem to have regarded the US as their enemy for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years and is now returning the favor. The terrorist enemies he wants the US to fight are pretty much the same as those Mr. Raban just enumerated: Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, and al-Qaeda. However, in order to accomplish this goal Podhoretz must first deal with those he regards as being opposed to it on a domestic level, whether it be opposition within the conservative movement (Scowcroft, Buchanan, Novak) or his domestic political enemies (Moore, Clinton, and the New York Times). I suspect that Mr. Raban believes that Podhoretz and other neocons throw around charges of anti-Semitism a little too much as a way of shutting up opposition to their ideas. Maybe they do, but one has to at the absolute least concede on the other hand that there is enough that has been written or said by Buchanan and his various acolytes over the years to strongly leave one with the impression that they harbor views that would be quite easy to fit into an anti-Semitic framework and I think that's being far more charitable to Buchanan than he would be to me if he even knew who I was.

Anywho, what exactly was this article supposed to be about? Oh yes, who the enemy is ...

The name al-Qaeda means something different practically every time it's used. Sometimes it's a synecdoche, intended to conjure shadowy legions of all the various militant Islamist groups around the globe, which is how Podhoretz generally refers to it. Sometimes it's held to be a transnational corporation, like Starbucks, with a spiderweb of sleeper-cell outlets spread worldwide, but controlled from a headquarters somewhere in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Sometimes it's described as a franchise outfit, like 7-Eleven, renting out its name to any small-time independent shopkeeper who's prepared to subscribe to the company program, and sometimes as a single store, or bank, owned and operated by Osama bin Laden.

You know, for people like Mr. Raban and others in the pundit class who pride themselves on being more sophisticated and intelligent than the rest of us plebians with our ignorant, unsophisticated Manichaean worldviews and still is unable to grasp the power of nuance. What I don't think that Mr. Raban is able to grasp here is that each of the characteristics he describes above are held simultaneously by the same organization.

As Dr. Gunaratna writes:

Al Qaeda's organizational and operational infrastructure differs markedly from other guerrilla or terrorist groups ... Al Qaeda is also characterized by a broad-based ideology, a novel structure, a robust capacity for regeneration and a very diverse membership that cuts across ethnic, class and national boundaries. It is neither a single group nor a coalition of groups: it comprised a core base or bases in Afghanistan, satellite terrorist cells worldwide, a conglomerate of Islamist political parties, and other largely independent terrorist groups that it draws on for offensive actions and other responsibilities. Leaders of all the above are co-opted as and when necessary to serve as an integral part of Al Qaeda's high command, which is run via a vertical leadership structure that provides strategic direction and tactical support to its horizontal network of compartmentalized cells and associate organizations ...

To further advance the Islamist project, in 1998 Al Qaeda was reorganized into four distinct but interlinking entities. The first was a pyramidal structure to facilitate strategic and tactical direction; the second was a global terrorist network; the third was a base force for guerrilla warfare inside Afghanistan; and the fourth was a loose coalition of transnational terrorist and guerrilla groups.

I understand that's quite a long and complex definition, but al-Qaeda is a complex subject and if Mr. Raban truly desires to understand the nature of the organization and why there seem to be so many different definitions for it I would suggest that he familiarize himself with it.

This fogginess has been thickened by the political and journalistic habit of using speculative—often wildly speculative—conjunctions to connect particular people to the organization. Terrorist suspects, along with almost anyone temporarily detained under the provisions of the Patriot Act, are said to have alleged ties to, be associated with, or be linked to al-Qaeda. Although most of these associations have subsequently proved to be fictitious (as in the case of Brandon Mayfield, the unfortunate Portland, Oregon, lawyer who was arrested by the FBI for his supposed involvement in the Madrid train bombing), the impression is left that members of al-Qaeda are strewn as thickly over the ground, and in our very midst, as those of the AARP.

In what parallel universe? Maybe back in 2001 or 2002, but these days few Americans seem to spend their days worrying over the threat of al-Qaeda sleeper cells in their midst - one of the downsides of the way the 2004 presidential election shaped out was that it by and large relegated views about terrorism (and Iraq), at least among the politically aware, to the arena of partisan politics. Hell, we've now got more or less a running game being played out in the blogosphere in which the best and the worst news about Iraq are now routinely posted and reposted solely for domestic political gain (far more in the case of the latter than the former, I hope) without any actual regard for the situation on the ground. It's the same bizarro world where Iraqi officials are always right if they say the insurgency is getting worse but always wrong if they mention pre-war Iraqi links with al-Qaeda or the role of foreign fighters from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in the violence. Or, to criticize the other side of the spectrum, where groups like SCIRI or Dawaa are either the Iraqi people standing up against terrorism and violence or part of some sinister Iranian agenda depending on what their leaders are saying at any given point.

In any case, Mr. Raban's parallel universe bears little resemblance to the actual reality of law enforcement. The unfortunate situation with Mr. Mayfield aside (the FBI was investigating the possibility that his fingerprints were on a bag found in the rubble of the 3/11 attacks and he was cleared as soon as it was learned that the fingerprints were not his own), many of those arrested, charged, and in the vast majority of cases convicted in Oregon and Washington state have been rallied around by their local communities. Far from being the subject of police conspiracies, many of those charged have been shown to, at the very least, have kept company with some extremely shady characters who wish the United States and its people a great deal of harm.

Although the interrogation of some captured key figures with proven connections to bin Laden (among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Ramzi Yousef) has produced a great deal of detailed intelligence about past plots, as the 9/11 Commission Report abundantly testifies, it doesn't seem—so far as one can judge from what has been made public—to have revealed much about the organization and structure of al-Qaeda itself, which remains as nebulous as ever.

How nice of Mr. Raban to concede that KSM, Binalshibh, and Yousef have ties to bin Laden, though we actually haven't gotten all that much out of Yousef for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that since he was convicted in January 1998 within the bounds of the criminal justice system, he cannot be interrogated under US law to the degree that KSM or Binalshibh now are. But sadly, here again Mr. Raban is getting his facts wrong. We now have a pretty good idea of what al-Qaeda looks like, what groups make up its coalition, who its leadership is, etc. We know more, for example, about the internal dynamicss of al-Qaeda than we ever did about the internal dynamics of the Third Reich or the USSR throughout much of the Cold War. And every day with every arrest we learn a little more ...

The prevailing view of what al-Qaeda is and does is plausibly and succinctly put by Richard A. Clarke in Against All Enemies. Working from intelligence available to him when he was counterterrorism czar for both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Clarke, connecting every dot (even such faint ones as those that might link Terry Nichols, the Oklahoma City bomber, with Ramzi Yousef and/or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), pieces together a fearsome but limited picture of the organization that he calls "a worldwide political conspiracy masquerading as a religious sect."

The reason that Clarke's view of al-Qaeda is the prevailing one is because it's the one that makes the most sense in light of the available evidence. And as faint as the potential dots between Nichols and al-Qaeda might seem to Mr. Raban, I would point out that the dots between the organization and any Russian mobster who sells them the nuke that is used to annihilate Washington DC are likely to be equally faint.

Interestingly, the picture —though it has gained many more contingent details—differs very little from the one sketched in the spring of 1996, when Jamal al-Fadl, who had embezzled money from bin Laden's entourage in Sudan and was in fear of his life, defected to the Americans. According to Clarke, al-Fadl told his interrogators that al-Qaeda was a

"network...widespread and active, with a presence through affiliate groups and sleeper cells in over fifty countries. Ramzi Yousef and the blind sheikh [Omar Abdel Rahman] had been part of it. Bin Laden was not just its financier, he was its mastermind."

It also differs very little from the picture drawn up by Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi, Abu Zubaydah, Abu Zubair al-Haili, Abd Rahim al-Nashiri, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Tawfiq Attash Khallad, et al. during their interrogations. Same goes with any of the thousands upon thousands of hours of electronic intercepts that the NSA and other governments have picked up just in the last 4 years. You read through the Milan wiretaps, for example, and the issue that comes to mind is not how Clarke came to his definition with respect to al-Qaeda but rather how any sensible person could come to anything but that given the evidence available.

The most revealing moment in Against All Enemies comes near the end, when Clarke is about to shift from his National Security Council job to become presidential adviser on cyberspace security, and his deputy, Roger Cressey, accuses him of reluctance to make the move:

Clarke hoped that the August 1998 missile strikes would mark the beginning of a sustained campaign against Bin Ladin. Clarke was, as he later admitted, "obsessed" with Bin Ladin, and the embassy bombings gave him new scope for pursuing his obsession. Terrorism had moved high up among the President's concerns, and Clarke's position had elevated accordingly.

That's all very nice, but whatever one thinks of Clarke's views on al-Qaeda or anything else for that, he is not exactly the only man to come to this conclusion in the last several years, nor was he the first. ICT, for example, published the following back in 1998 concerning following the embassy bombings:

The confession of Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, the main suspect in the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa, may help to unravel a number of unsolved cases involving terrorism. Odeh reportedly gave Pakistani interrogators a detailed account of an international terrorist network whose activities--orchestrated and financed by Osama bin Ladin--are aimed at American interests worldwide. Odeh's arrest is being heralded as the turning-point in the investigation ...

Odeh explained how operatives are deployed in military actions under a scheme of compartmentalization. Participants in each operation are kept in the dark regarding other parallel actions for reasons of operational secrecy. According to Odeh, American personnel and installations are the primary target of the network's operations. He said the organization has operatives in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although most of Odeh's testimony cannot as yet be independently verified, it ties in well with what is already known of bin Ladin's operations.

So anybody who wants to argue that this is all just the perceptions of Dick Clarke (a figure that most of us had likely never even heard of prior to his appearance at the 9/11 Commission earlier last year) really needs to understand that he wasn't exactly forming that perception in a vacuum, nor were the people around him.

Yet the commission's description of al-Qaeda closely echoes that of Clarke, whose name is footnoted countless times in the report. Though the authors acknowledge that they were dealing with a crazy Ahab, their own version of bin Laden's organization is in very large part Ahab's not-altogether-reliable account of the nature and significance of the white whale.

I'm no fan of either Clarke or the 9/11 Commission for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which being that both have been accorded a quasi-infallible status by the Washington press corps - the latter in particular should never have been conducted with such publicity or finished in either an election year or during a time when both parties were spending much of their time wrangling over pre-war Iraq intelligence. As it was, the Commission was more or less an overly politicized sham, with everything stated in its final report was done so on the basis of political calculations. I certainly learned far more about Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, and other terrorist groups in the US and British intelligence reviews than I did in that Commission report. But hey, even if the Commission didn't really add to our understanding of the enemy, it accomplished what it was intended to do: shut up all the "why didn't we know?" critics, at least until the next time something blows up.

Michael Scheuer, formerly Anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris, is another raging Ahab, but as a CIA analyst and not a White House aide, Scheuer has been able to range more widely, and with greater intellectual dispassion, than Clarke. His white whale is not al-Qaeda but the Bush administration and his own agency bosses, against whom his book is leveled like a harpoon in one long, furious, ironic tirade.

And let us not forget the Israelis, whom Scheuer seems to regard as being only slightly less wicked and damaging to the US than the current administration and his superiors at the CIA judging from his characterization of it in Imperial Hubris.

His fascination with Osama bin Laden verges almost on hero worship as he extols bin Laden's brilliance, eloquence, sanity, religious sincerity, acute tactical skills, and the essential reasonableness of his campaign of "defensive jihad."

It's the willingness with which Scheuer accepts bin Laden's characterization of his actions as being defensive in nature that is one of the reasons why he strikes me as being more than a little loopy. John Reilly noted in his review, according to Scheuer, "When Osama bin Laden says that Muslim lands are under assault all over the world at the behest of the U.S., he is describing reality. That is why the United States was struck on 911." Now I'm all for regarding bin Laden as a ruthless, calculating, and capable adversary who is far more out of the mold of Genghis Khan or Timurlane than he is of Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Shoko Asahara. I am also more than willing to cede him many of the qualities that Scheuer ascribes to him, among them charisma, tactical genius, and a considerable personal intellect. My problems with Scheuer and his analysis stems from the fact that at the end of the day he seems to agree with bin Laden that he is more or less fighting a defensive war.

Scheuer's message, repeated many times in different forms, is best summed up near the end of Imperial Hubris:

The United States is hated across the Islamic world because of specific US government policies and actions. That hatred is concrete not abstract, martial not intellectual, and it will grow for the foreseeable future.... America is hated and attacked because Muslims believe they know precisely what the United States is doing in the Islamic world. They know partly because of bin Laden's words, partly because of satellite television, but mostly because of the tangible reality of US policy. We are at war with an al Qaeda-led, worldwide Islamist insurgency because of and to defend those policies, and not, as President Bush has mistakenly said, "to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world."

Those policies and al-Qaeda's problems with them, as Scheuer enumerates at length in his book, are as I noted above, rather self-generating. They regard the US involvement in Afghanistan and assistance to the Uzbek and Indian government in combating al-Qaeda affiliate groups as yet another attack on Islam, yet those "attacks" can be directly linked back to al-Qaeda's assault against the US on 9/11. The same can be said of the embrace of General Musharraf in Pakistan, whose nation had very nearly been designated a state sponsor of terrorism in the early 1990s precisely because the government was in too tightly with bin Laden and his fellow travelers.

Scheuer warns of huge body counts on both sides that "will include as many or more civilians as combatants," "a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure," land mines to seal borders and passes, "displaced populations, and refugee flows." "This sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world."

I certainly hope, as should all clear-thinking Americans, that Scheuer is wrong in his analysis, since the scenario he paints out involves either the US waging a real war against the Islamic world or an isolationist withdrawl from the Middle East and an assurance that a few decades later our children or grandchildren are likely to encounter a nuclear-armed militaristic Islamic theocracy ruled by al-Qaeda or its successor organizations. And given that the status quo has been shown to be unworkable, I will be quite honest and say that those are the only alternatives that come to mind should some variant of the neocon plans to democratize the Middle East fail.

Scheuer's al-Qaeda is more frightening than the versions offered by ideologues like Norman Podhoretz or by dot-connecting terrorist hunters like Richard Clarke because it is an entirely rational enemy, motivated by causes just as dear as those that drive Americans. It is bent, as we are here, on defending its own liberties in its homelands; it is amply armed, and is equipped with a better understanding of the strategies of fourth-generation warfare than Americans yet possess.

Not really, Mr. Raban. The principle difference is the Scheuer appears to take what al-Qaeda says about itself in video, audio, and written propaganda statements and repeat it more or less uncritically or outside of its proper context. Moreover, while he is quite keen in viewing Israeli anti-terrorism operations within the prism of anti-Arab racism and a theocratic desire for land and conquest, he often fails to do the same to statements by bin Laden and his lieutenants, whose actions if not statements have far more inherent mendacity to them than those of any Israeli official. If nothing else, bin Laden's desire for an empire running from Morocco to the Philippines is sure to rack up a far larger body count than even the looniest Israeli settlers who want the ancient dominions of Israel as they were under Solomon.

Worse, we have no realistic knowledge of its size, its organizational structure, or its plans. Scheuer recently came out of his always-thin anonymity to tell The New York Times: "We still don't know how big it is. We still, today, don't know the battle order of Al Qaeda."

I wouldn't go quite that far, Mr. Raban, nor would Scheuer. We know about the Islamic Army Council, the committees, the affiliate groups, the cell networks, et al. and while we may not have a complete order of battle for the enemy by virtue of its shadowy nature, we do have a fairly good idea as to what its composition looks like from Salafi Jihad and Islamic Combatant Group in Morocco to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. What Scheuer is likely talking about is the sheer size of the beast and on that note our estimates range between some 70 to 110,000 thousands al-Qaeda alumni. There are also probably training facilities in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, northern Yemen, and the Sahel region of North Africa that continue to churn out operatives unnoticed in addition those we are just learning about like the group that just got busted in Kazakhstan back in November. But, by and large, we seem to have a pretty good idea about who's in al-Qaeda.

And with that, Mr. Raban bravely descends into the idiotic lunacy that is the mindset of the British far left:

Alternatively, one might try thinking of al-Qaeda as a figment of our inflamed imaginations, a mirage conjured by a sleeper cell of neoconservative witch doctors in Washington and given suitably terrifying substance by a credulous press. This bracingly contrarian view is argued, with vigor and wit, by Adam Curtis, a well-regarded British documentary filmmaker, in a series of three one-hour programs recently aired on the BBC under the title The Power of Nightmares, and widely discussed in the UK. Fast-moving, full of ingenious musical and cinematic puns, Curtis's series is best watched as an epic political cartoon in the manner of Daumier or Ralph Steadman. It freely bends the facts to fit its vision, it distorts, it overcolors, it grossly—and entertainingly—simplifies, yet, as only a cartoon can, it captures an aspect of its subject that has so far escaped even the most skeptical observers of the war on terror.

I suspect that Curtis's film has been widely discussed in the UK for the same reason that a fair number of Europe's chattering classes regarded 9/11 (now more vocally) as being more or less America's just deserts for its unthinking embrace of Ariel Sharon's policies in the Middle East with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A fair number of them still do, to the point where in conversation with them you get the distinct impression that many a sophisticated European is far more hawkish towards Israel than they ever were towards Iraq under Saddam Hussein. But, in the interest of giving Mr. Curtis a fair hearing, let's take his deluded little exercise in irrelevance to its logical conclusions.

Chronicling the simultaneous rise of militant Islamism and American neoconservatism, Curtis represents the two movements as each other's doppelgängers, both powered by disgust with the moral degeneracy of the liberal West, each under the spell of a founding godfather. As Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the Egyptian literary critic and author of the primer of modern jihad, Milestones, inspired the Islamists, so Leo Strauss (1899–1973) inspired the neoconservatives.

Except that militant Islamism, at least to Curtis and his fellow travelers, were never really a threat, whereas the neocons with their sinister designs and warmongering schemes are. The last time I checked, the neocons don't advocate a totalitarian theocracy (the ecumenical nature of the movement, with all due deferrence to the Kristol and Podhoretz clans, would seem to preclude such a thing) in the US or otherwise. And then there's the small matter (no doubt trivial to Curtis and others, which is why many of their like-minded pundits likes to draw parallels between of say Billy Graham and those of Sayyid Qutb) that the last time I checked the neocons have never killed anybody.

This view of Strauss has been convincingly deconstructed in these pages by Mark Lilla.

That he inspired the neocons or that he's an American parallel to Sayyid Qutb? From what I understand both of Strauss and of Qutb, either position would be erroneous.

Plato's idea of the noble fiction, or useful lie, is here attributed exclusively to Strauss: it was the sinister Strauss, according to Curtis, who taught the neocons how to cynically manufacture myths to persuade the American people that they were on the side of goodness in the perpetual Manichaean struggle against the all-enveloping forces of evil.

To what end? Or just because they can? And I very much doubt that Strauss was the first guy to argue that it's okay to do bad things in a good cause - that's ideas been formulated in a sophisticated way since at least the days of the Italian city-states and crudely thousands of years earlier. Also, for as much as Curtis and his contemporaries like to complain about the simplistic dualist mindset of the American public towards its enemies, I notice that he has little restraint in taking on much the same mindset towards those with whom they disagree.

Curtis's neocons—Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, the Kristols, father and son, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pipes, Michael Ledeen— might as well be equipped with masks, black cloaks, and vampire teeth. Assembling in the darkness of the Ford administration, the conspirators first set out to destroy Henry Kissinger, the arch-pragmatist and advocate of détente, then, with Pipes installed as leader of Team B, they vastly inflate the threat posed to the United States by Soviet Russia. They invent devastating Soviet weaponry so secret that no Western intelligence agency is yet aware of its existence; they spin into being a worldwide terror network, controlled from Moscow, in which the IRA, Black September, the Baader-Meinhof Group, the Red Brigades, and numerous others are all financed and armed by their Russian masters.

There's a former Romanian general out there who might tell Curtis differently, at least on the terrorist aspect of the Soviet threat. The IRA, like its Spanish counterpart ETA, received terrorist training from Soviet Bloc specialists in Libya as well as the PLO (which actually used to be kinda Marxist, though they don't talk about that much anymore) and has more recently supplied aid to the nominally Marxist FARC rebels in Colombia. The organization that Curtis refers to as "Black September" is also known as the Abu Nidal Organization, the Fatah Revolutionary Council, and the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims, with that last moniker in particular giving you some idea as to where their leanings lie. They too would never have been able to raise all the ruckus they did during the 1970s and 1980s if not for all the support, training, and safe havens they got from states like Libya, Syria, and Iraq, all of them Soviet Bloc states to a tyrant, though most folks have probably forgotten about it in Iraq's case. Baader-Meinhof, likewise, was supported and given shelter by East Germany, and so on down the line. None of this is terribly obscure, I should mention, and all of the information that I just cited is generally agreed upon by a majority in the counter-terrorism field. Ironically, despite this fact I suspect it is quite likely that an argument that there never was any kind of terrorist threat emanating from the Soviet Bloc is quite likely to spill forth from the lips (or keyboard) of a member of the self-styled "reality-based" community.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Curtis's neocons turn to the fabrication of domestic noble fictions, and bring down Clinton. David Brock appears on camera to confess that he was employed by the neocons, working from their American Spectator safe house, as a "political terrorist." So the stage is set for the neocons' most ambitious concoction, the enlargement of al-Qaeda from a small group of followers of Osama bin Laden to the vast network, threatening the survival of Western civilization, as portrayed by Podhoretz, Clarke, and President Bush.

I didn't know that the neocons were actively involved in the Clinton impeachment, which I had always kind of seen as Republican payback for what happened to Richard Nixon, but okay. In any case, it strikes me as being a lot more plausible to argue that the neocons attempted to bring down Clinton for domestic political benefits. Then again, Curtis's chronology also strikes me as being kind of off here. If the neocons are supposed to be enemies of the Clinton administration, then how the hell could they have managed to concoct al-Qaeda, which like bin Laden and his role as an international terrorist both appeared and were actively propagated by the Clinton-era Justice Department and CIA? Or were Clinton and members of his administration who now claim to be every bit as concerned about al-Qaeda as Bush is today, just blowing smoke out of their asses? I'll leave the answers to such questions for Curtis to deal with.

In 1996, Jamal al-Fadl, the defecting Sudanese embezzler, had told his American interrogators whatever they wanted to hear. They needed a network; he gave them a network. They needed a mastermind; he gave them bin Laden. Wanting to prosecute bin Laden under US law as it related to organized crime, the Americans required a company name for bin Laden's organization: they called it al-Qaeda, or the base of operations. So, in Curtis's account, al-Qaeda began life as a US-manufactured legal fiction.

Except, and to this I must thank loyal reader Mitch P. for bringing this to my attention, al-Qaeda predated anything al-Fadl ever told the US. I trust he doesn't mind if I reproduce his comment:

It's said that Ramzi Yousef's companion Ahmad Ajaj was carrying a book with the title Al Qaeda when the two of them entered the USA in late 1992. Here's the New York Times, writing in January 2001:

So it seems al Qaeda was the name of something as early as 1992, and maybe even as early as 1982.

Quite right.

Moreover, it isn't just Jamal al-Fadl that told the US what al-Qaeda is, as I hope I demonstrated adequately earlier. The sheer number of government officials (hell, the sheer number of imprisoned people, in some cases indefinitely) who have to be lying in order for al-Qaeda to be nothing more than the phantom that Curtis believes it to be is easily on par with the idea that the US military has a UFO and/or its occupants stashed somewhere out in Nevada. And, as I say, this is coming from people who style themselves as being members of the "reality-based community." For a US-manufactured legal fiction, al-Qaeda sure seems to be killing a hell of a lot of people.

With the neocon mythmakers now in senior government positions, September 11 made it easy to cast al-Qaeda in the Evil Empire role that they had previously scripted for the Soviet Union—same global network, same central control, with a stand-in Kremlin located in the Afghan countryside. Their problem, in Curtis's view, was an almost complete lack of hard evidence.

Funny, that's almost entirely my assessment of Curtis and his little documentary.

In The Power of Nightmares, Donald Rumsfeld, armed with an artist's diagram of a magnificent underground fortress supposedly soon to be found in the mountains of Tora Bora, is shown explaining the wonders of the place to Tim Russert on Meet the Press: the warren of bedrooms and offices, the ventilation, phone, and computer systems, the secret exits, the ground-floor entrances, big enough to drive fleets of tanks in and out of. Rumsfeld says, "And there are not just one of those, there are many of those."

But when Tora Bora is actually reached, its legendary caves turn out to be just caves; small, dark, unimproved, empty except for a few stacks of ammunition boxes.

The problem, Mr. Raban, is that when the Western journalists on whom Curtis relies for his footage reached Tora Bora it had been subject to heavy bombardment for at least several weeks beforehand. I would also like to point out that while Tora Bora was far from the Batcave, there were sleeping quarters, documents, air outlets, and even a makeshift grave site for several al-Qaeda leaders or their family members who were killed during the bombing. Any computers that existed were likely the labtop variety, just as any phones to be found were likely Thuraya satellite phones. The ability to move all the bare necessities of conducting an insurgency is essential in a guerrilla organization, I would have thought Curtis would appreciate such things.

Not long after, Bush appears, telling the nation that "we've thwarted terr'ists in Buffalo—and Seattle—Portland—Detroit—North Carolina—Tampa, Flo-rida.... We're determined to stop the enemy before it can strike our people." But every case on Bush's coast-to-coast list of sleeper cells has either fallen to pieces in the courts or resulted in convictions on relatively trivial charges. The best evidence that the FBI could dig up consisted of such incriminating items as a tourist video of a visit to Disneyland; an e-mail from Mukhta al-Bakri, saying goodbye to his American friends because he was going to Bahrain to get married, which was held by the FBI to be a coded message announcing that al-Bakri was going to mount a suicide-bomb attack on the US Sixth Fleet; and some graceless doodles in a day-planner, made by a long-dead schizophrenic Yemeni, that were interpreted as a terrorist's map of a US air base in Turkey.

Mr. Raban's mocking impersonation of the president's manner of speaking aside, it is interesting that nearly all of Mr. Raban's (or is it Curtis's?) references to the alleged failure to prosecute terror suspects refers to a number of Detroit terrorism cases which, from what I gathered at the counter-terrorism conference I attended recently, was due more to bureaucratic incompetence than anything else. However, Mr. Raban might want to review his facts when claiming failed terrorism or terrorism-related prosecutions in Buffalo, Seattle, Portland, North Carolina (which I didn't know was a city), and Tampa. If he did, he would find quite a lengthy list of effective prosecutions there as well as in other parts of the country.

But hey, let's just ignore the man behind the curtain ...

Curtis argues that al-Qaeda is a "phantom enemy." Its "hidden network of terror" is an illusion assiduously fostered by politicians who, in playing on our fears of an imagined future, have cynically grasped the principle that "those with the darkest imaginations become the most powerful." The argument is well worth putting forward (and it's to be hoped that some brave American network will dare to screen The Power of Nightmares), but it has one crucially disabling flaw.

You mean, apart from the fact that it's a load of crock?

In any case, if Curtis seriously believes that European governments, particularly those with sizeable Muslim populations, are arresting young Muslim youths at random and demonizing Muslim-led insurgencies in places like Kashmir or Chechnya solely for the purpose of building up their own power, I'd sure like to know what kind of ganja he's smoking because you could make a killing reselling it on the streets of any major Western city. Given the wide gaps on just about every other issue that all of the world's governments who agree as to what al-Qaeda is have with one another, for Curtis to propose that they are all now unified together in some neocon-led conspiracy is every bit as kooky as the Learned Elders of Zion variant that gets so much play in the Arab world.

I am sometimes criticized for taking too lenient a view towards all of the wackiness that comes out of Middle Eastern news outlets. Let me just say for one that I don't condone it, but I really don't think that we Westerners can have a man like Curtis arguing that al-Qaeda doesn't exist on British state-funded TV and still claim to ourselves that we are so utterly above the insanities of conspiracy-mongering.

"There is no al-Qaeda organization," asserts one of Curtis's star witnesses, Jason Burke, author of Al Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, in a climactic moment of the final episode—a remark that elicited admiring gasps from the tiny American audience to whom I showed the series. That may be true as far as it goes, but it does not go nearly as far as Burke himself goes in an article in the May/June 2004 issue of Foreign Policy, where he writes:

Today, the structure that was built in Afghanistan has been destroyed, and bin Laden and his associates have scattered or been arrested or killed. There is no longer a central hub for Islamic militancy. But the al Qaeda worldview, or "al Qaedaism," is growing stronger every day. This radical internationalist ideology—sustained by anti-Western, anti-Zionist, and anti-Semitic rhetoric —has adherents among many individuals and groups, few of whom are currently linked in any substantial way to bin Laden or those around him. They merely follow his precepts, models, and methods. They act in the style of al Qaeda, but they are only part of al Qaeda in the very loosest sense. That's why Israeli intelligence services now prefer the term "jihadi international" instead of "al Qaeda."

I would disagree with Burke on a number of points, mainly with regard to the amount of command and control that bin Laden possesses over all these groups that share a lot more than his ideology, but then I would almost certainly never get a job writing for the Guardian either - I'm far too good a Catholic for that. However, let me take issue with Burke as far as why Mossad changed their classification of bin Laden's followers from al-Qaeda to Qaidat al-Jihad.

As this ICT article explains in-depth:

Over the past month, the remains of al-Qa`idah have begun to issue new electronic pamphlets via the web sites of their supporters, under a new name— “Qa`idat al-Jihad” (the Jihad base) ... With the exception Abu Zubaydah and Abu Hafs al-Masri, the hard core leadership of al-Qa`idah has not yet been found or killed, and the war in Afghanistan continues. Thus, it would appear to be imperative to them to get their messages out and prove to their supporters and the Muslim world that they are alive, active, and even engaged in reorganizing their ranks and activities. This has led to the establishment of several tens of personal web sites for various Saudi, Egyptian, and Palestinian radical scholars that grant Islamic legitimacy to global Jihad. Furthermore, some of these web sites are freely registered and run from Western cities, from Saudi Arabia, or from Muslim countries in Asia. For the many Al-Qa`idah supporters in the Muslim world and in Muslim communities in the West, these web sites are an important link. They provide a crucial service in keeping the Islamist supporters in touch with the scholars who developed—and provide Islamist religious legitimacy to—ideological and religious messages in support of attacks against Western culture, the United States, Israel and the Jews in general. Two of the major themes here are the Islamic legitimacy of the September 11th attacks in the United States, and the use of suicide terrorism against every possible Western targets all over the world, and not only against Israel.

Yet, the main source of encouragement for Al-Qa`idah might be the recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the popular anti-Israeli demonstrations in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as among Muslim communities in the West. There is a prominent shift in the justification of the global Jihad against the United States, from its presence in Saudi Arabia and the campaign in Afghanistan, to the present American alliance and support for Israel. The attack on the old synagogue in Tunisia, which has so far claimed the lives of eighteen people, mainly German tourists, might be the first in a series of attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets. The German investigation that followed the attack recently led to the arrest of a group belonging to Al-Tawhid, which may be connected to the two leading Palestinian scholars who support Al-Qa`idah—Abu Qutadah (Omar Mahmoud Abu Omar) in London, and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi in Jordan. The use of the new name—Qa`idat al-Jihad—might also mark a new policy against the “American-Jewish-Israeli entity,” perceived by them as a single united enemy.

There are a number of reasons, many of them indirectly explained in the linked article, as to why the Israelis shifted their classifications to the degree that they did. They are not, however, related to the fact that al-Qaeda and its leadership remain both alive and deadly.

If the next major terrorist attack on the United States takes place, it will not greatly matter if the attackers turn out to have been al-Qaeda or al-Qaedaists: bin Laden survives as an inspiring folk hero.

Yes it will, Mr. Raban: just wait till the body count rolls in and you'll see the difference - it's the difference between Hesham Mohammed Hadayet's little shooting spree at LAX and 3/11. As for bin Laden, he's going to remain a folk hero in the Arab world the same way that Moammar Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein were not so long ago for as long as he is seen to be winning. There's a reason why nobody's polishing Saddam Hussein's statues these days ...

The political causes and theological justifications for jihad are as alive as ever; in such places as the shabby storefront mosque in Harburg, the Hamburg suburb where Mohamed Atta and his colleagues found their suicidal vocation, the toxic dream of wreaking vengeance on the Great Satan will surely continue to exert its hold on the minds of well-heeled and technologically capable young men outraged by US policies and actions in the Middle East, and impassioned by religious beliefs of fresh and furious vitality.

Quite likely, yes. But it ain't just Uncle Sam that is the object of their ire, as can be seen from the murder of Theo Van Gogh or the bombing of the Limburg off the coast of Yemen or al-Zawahiri's little shout-out to Norway not so long ago. If the US were to fall apart tomorrow, the future Mohammed Attas wouldn't lay down their arms and go back to a life of peaceful assimilation but rather would start directing the focus of their attentions at certain regimes (notably the UK and France) of Western Europe and the Middle East.

(As Max Rodenbeck wrote in these pages last April,¹⁰ the fiercely puritanical, Salafist strain of Islam practiced by bin Laden and his followers and competitors is a modern, reformist movement in full bloom, though the reformation is hardly what Norman Podhoretz has in mind for the religion.)

That's because Podhoretz envisions a civilized and tolerant version of Islam in the future, whereas bin Laden's Salafism is neither. Then again, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, both the Protestants (to whom I compare to the Wahhabis) and the Catholics (to whom I compare to the tyrannical and corrupt Muslim regimes fighting them) were pretty savage during all the religious warfare of the Reformation. Maybe the Wahhabis can get past all that the way that the way that Lutherans and Catholics were able to after a couple of centuries, but we don't have the luxury of waiting around to find out at this point. Technology and globalization have given the fanatics of the twentieth century the means and ability to possess power that their predecessors never even dreamed of.

If these constitute a phantom, it's a remarkably close and fleshly one. Throughout the recent campaign, Abu Musab-al Zarkawi's Tawhid and Jihad Group, operating from an undiscoverable fastness somewhere in Iraq, supplied us with a string of almost inconceivably gruesome pictures of terrorism in action, as it beheaded civilian hostages, some of them Americans, on videotape.

Actually, al-Tawhid wal Jihad is a pretty solid thing that until quite recently had offices (complete with a sign!) in the city of Fallujah. I suspect that if you go to Mosul or Ramadi or any of the other areas of Iraq where the group is active these days, you might even find members of the organization and get them to chat about their boss, Zarqawi, and all the Iraqi people he's killed during his terror campaign across the country.

Sadly, none of this seems to have occurred to Mr. Raban:

Yet the Curtis films are persuasive in their exposure of the futility of much of the present conduct of the war on terror—the obsession with smashing imaginary networks, the pretense of fighting terrorists abroad to prevent them from attacking us at home, the notion that a pervasive idea can be decapitated if only its mastermind can be hunted down, and the dangerous relish for promiscuous surveillance.

I dunno about surveillance, but actually most of the points that Mr. Raban seems to find persuasive, well, aren't. The terror networks that Curtis dismisses as imaginary are quite real and if you go manage to read through Judge Garzon's voluminous indictment of bin Laden or get ahold of some of the wiretaps taken by Milan prosecutor's office, their reality becomes quite clear to all but the most paranoid of individuals. As for the feasibility fighting terrorists abroad in order to prevent them from home, if Mr. Raban desires to argue that US intervention in Afghanistan did nothing to dismantle terrorist infrastructure, command and control, and ability to launch further attacks on par with 9/11, that is of course his delusion. He can also labor under the belief that an early warning system would have done nothing to minimize the body count in the recent tsunami disaster. As to the mastermind issue, if he's referring to political ideology, it's been done multiple times this century, which is why neither fascism nor communism aren't forces to be reckoned with these days.

Aided by a federal grant of $5.1 million, the city of Chicago is spending $8.6 million on a system of smart video cameras, equipped with software that will raise the alarm when the cameras spot people loitering, wandering in circles, hanging around outside public buildings, or stopping their cars on the shoulders of highways. "Anyone walking in public is liable to be almost constantly watched," reported Stephen Kinzer in The New York Times.

Sounds like fun. Ever been to Japan? There's security cameras everywhere, but if the people of Chicago want them, that's their choice. If they think it's a waste of money, they can always elect new people who will discontinue the program and plug it somewhere else.

The Department of Homeland Security is the co-sponsor, with the FBI and the Justice Department, of Operation Predator, intended to track down pedophiles via their use of the Inter-net—presumably because pedophiles, whose civil liberties are held in high esteem by almost nobody, are ideal guinea pigs for a more sweeping exercise in cyberspying that might net terrorists.

I consider busting pedophiles to be a pretty worthwhile pursuit in of itself, actually. And if doing so helps us bust terrorists, more power to them. Would Mr. Raban prefer the government test such things out on those they consider more threatening, such as those who say nasty things about President Bush? If a system like Predator has to be tested, doing so on child molesters isn't going to make the hair on my back bristle any time soon.

If Richard A. Clarke's switch from the National Security Council to adviser on cyberspace security looked at first blush like a demotion, it probably wasn't: our e-mails, shared files, and visits to suspect Internet sites are obviously more likely to identify us as al-Qaedaists than any tendency we may exhibit to wander in circles in front of tall buildings.

I dunno, have you ever seen the Iranian UN delegation's idea of sightseeing in NYC? And as for Clarke's shift in careers, perhaps you should sit down and very, very calmly explain that to him, because I very much doubt he regarded it as such.

When FBI director Robert Mueller announced that Operation Predator "sends a clear message that the digital environment will not offer sanctuary to those pedophiles who lurk in peer-to-peer networks. We will identify you. We will pursue you. We will bring you to justice,"¹² it seems improbable, given the DHS's involvement in the scheme, that he had pedophiles only, or mainly, in mind.

Nice to see that telepathy is among Mr. Raban's assets these days, it must come in handy when writing one's books. Actually, given the media-induced frenzy over missing children throughout much of 2002 and 2003 just prior to the introduction of the tabloid trial circuit (children are still missing, but the cable news shows don't regard it as a major issue anymore - perhaps they are all being eaten by the hordes of killer sharks from the summer of 2001), it is quite possible that Predator was launched primarily as a way of addressing the apparent concerns in the public quite apart from any hidden agenda on Mueller's part.

In its present form, the war on terror is a cripplingly expensive, meagerly productive effort to locate, catch, and kill bad guys around the globe. Its successes are hardly less random, or more effective in the long term, than those that might be achieved by a platoon of men armed with flyswatters entering a slaughterhouse whose refrigeration has been off for a week. The US, desperately short of Arabic speakers and translators, lacks the basic intelligence abilities needed to conduct such a threat-based, "go-to-the-source" war, as Stephen Flynn labels it in America the Vulnerable, his brisk, cool, and hearteningly constructive account of how the Bush administration has neglected the defense of our exposed flanks in its headlong, enraged pursuit of hidden enemies.

The war on terrorism may well be expensive, but it also definitely produces a bang for its buck in the form of the actual elimination of the terrorists. The US military, for reasons of its own, has never published any kind of estimate as to just how many combatants they believe they have killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. The same can be said for any of the other governments that grapple with al-Qaeda and its allies on a regular basis, which is one of the reasons why there is not enough information available for observers out of government like Mr. Raban to offer an informed conclusion.

With respect to Flynn's criticism of the Bush administration, it is both sensible and foolish simultaneously. Pointing out the numerous flaws in our national defenses is both constructive and necessary, but to take that critique and use it as an indictment of the desire to pursue our enemies in on their ground rather than our own strikes me as being as wrong-headed as the Buchananite "Fortress America" approach. In my mind at least, both approaches should be pursued simultaneously.

Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander and director for global issues on the NSC staff under Clinton, effectively turns the war on terror on its head, inviting us to concentrate not on covert networks of terrorists, real or imagined, but on the vital and all too permeable networks of trade and communication that connect the US with the rest of the world. "Americans need to grow up," he writes: acts of terrorism —by al-Qaedaists and by others—are a fact of modern life, like airline disasters and car crashes, and are no more susceptible to being eradicated than crime itself. "The best we can do is to keep terrorism within manageable proportions."

While it is certainly true that modern terrorism as it first came into being in the 1960s is likely here to stay for the immediate future, the US government has been battling terrorism for decades, whether it being in the form of the Weathermen, Puerto Rican separatists, Neo-Nazi groups like the Order, pseudo-environmentalists like ELF and ALF, etc. what makes al-Qaeda's brand of it so dangerous is that it tends to focus on massive and indiscriminate casualties and takes on a level of sophistication and scale that has never been seen before outside of Hezbollah. This, combined with al-Qaeda's list of objectives, is one of the reasons why there is a fair case to be made that it isn't actually a terrorist group. Scheuer calls it an insurgency while Clarke describes it as worldwide conspiracy, but no matter what you want to call it I think it's quite clear that we're dealing with something much, much nastier than November 17 or the IRA.

He sketches a credible scenario in which four simultaneous attacks are made on the United States, involving three truck bombs and a bomb in a shipping container, in Newark, Detroit, Long Beach, and Miami. Fatalities are restricted to a few motorists who are incinerated on Detroit's Ambassador Bridge, but because the bombs contain americium-241 and cesium-137 they spread panic out of all proportion to their actual damage. (Terror, not death, is the chief consequence of the much-talked-up but physically ineffective dirty bomb.) People flee the infected cities. America closes its borders, paralyzing world trade. Supermarket shelves are emptying. There's talk of airlifting food to Hawaii. The social, economic, and political costs of the attacks (which in themselves cause no more harm than the average industrial accident) are beyond calculation.

The radiological threat, from what I gathered from both my own experiences in Washington DC as well as when it came up at the counter-terrorism conference in NYC, is that it's basically as Flynn says more of a fear weapon than anything else, based primarily around the fact that Westerners tend to freak out whenever they hear the word "nuclear" or "radiation" in connection with an explosion. I myself like to hope that the general public is educated enough to avoid such a reaction - the fact that numerous appeals by public figures were more than sufficient to prevent any kind of organized violence against Arab or Muslim Americans (in contrast, one might note, to the Dutch reaction in the wake of the Van Gogh killing) should be noted here. But ultimately, we can't calculate anything resembling the social, economic, and political costs of a radiological attack until one is actually detonated. And personally, I suspect that chemical rather than radiological attacks are likely to become more in vogue in the near future than anything else.

America, in Flynn's description, presents itself to terrorists as an enormous sitting duck, and its democratic system is no less at risk than its bridges, ports, agriculture, and chemical plants. The administration, addicted to secrecy, alternates between treating its citizens as children who must be shielded from knowledge of the danger they are in, and as likely suspects who must be continually surveilled. Our greatest and most alarming vulnerability is not to terrorist bombs but to "self-inflicted harm to our liberties and way of life."

Leaving the debate over how best to juggle the issues of counter-terrorism and civil liberties aside from a moment, let me just say that free societies are and likely always will be in danger to terrorist groups, if for no other reason than that it isn't all that difficult to build a bomb these days. We can do things, as the Israelis have, that will sharply curtail the likelihood of a terrorist attack, but that would require sacrifices to our conveniences and civil liberties to the point that we as a society are not ready to accept them - for now.

One criticism that Flynn does make that I think is worthwhile is that the administration tends to regard the majority of the American public as people who must be shielded from the danger they are in, in effect doing everything in their power to create a buffer between the average American citizen and the actual war going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world, often leading to the problem that by operating under such scruples they are unable to make any compelling arguments with respect to responding to critics on the subject of Iraq or much else for that matter. Some of this secrecy, like publicly airing all the evidence of Russian collaboration with Saddam Hussein, is likely done for a reason, but a lot of it strikes me as being at least somewhat unnecessary.

Risk management is Flynn's technical specialty, and much of his book is devoted to practical, cost-effective measures to strengthen and make as safe as is reasonably possible the daily flow of goods and people in and out of the United States. Track the movement of containers around the world with GPS (global positioning system) transponders, and install intrusion sensors within the containers. Establish red and green lanes for cargo, as for passengers. Monitor the food supply chain with electronic tags. Such unexciting-sounding proposals (Flynn makes dozens of them) would go a long way toward making visible and open to inspection the vast circulatory system that is now largely hidden from view, and whose obscurity offers limitless possibilities to be exploited by terrorists.

Flynn argues that most of the cost of building a terrorist-deterrent system of transportation security would be willingly borne by the private sector: shipping companies would latch on to the advantages of joining the green, or fast-track, lane, and the devices they'd have to buy in order to qualify for membership would benefit them by improving inventory control as much as it would aid the national security project. Most of the necessary equipment would quickly pay for itself, and result in smoother, more rapid passage of goods than exists at present.

I'm not a shipping or cargo expert, so I'm probably not the best person to evaluate any of Flynn's proposals. From the perspective of this layman, they sound pretty good, which is no doubt what Mr. Raban intended when he summarized them as such. At the same time, I am also highly skeptical of anything resembling a claim that the implementation of such a system would stop the issue of terrorists from smuggling explosives or other nasty substances in. If al-Qaeda can carry out terrorist attacks in far, far more restrictive societies like Russia, China, or Uzbekistan, it can almost certainly carry out attacks inside the US or any other Western nation.

But Flynn's detailed plans are only the outward and visible signs of the important idea that drives his book— the conviction that American democracy can safely withstand a terrorist attack that is sensibly anticipated and prepared for but could collapse in the panic attending attacks for which the population is physically, emotionally, and intellectually entirely unprepared. In America the Vulnerable, it is not just the movements of American commercial goods that are vulnerable; the Bush administration has failed to safeguard the democratic system, which is its most precious and fragile charge. On one hand, it jiggers with the color-coded alert system, rigs cities with spy cameras, and speaks darkly of secret intelligence that more often than not turns out to have been no real intelligence at all. On the other, it assures us that we are safe in its hands, and that, in Flynn's words, "our marching orders as citizens are to keep shopping and traveling." Government is most to be feared when it treats its people as babies, the way the administration does now.

And here Mr. Raban (or is it Flynn?) was doing so well. American democracy, unless you are one of those who believes that we now exist under a fascist dictatorship and have since the 2000 election, has endured 9/11 and any number of other wars and disasters and, if I may be so bold, is likely to endure even a nuclear exchange with North Korea. The democratic governments of Sri Lanka and Indonesia, where the tradition is far more nascent and brittle than in the United States, have managed to endure the horrendous death toll from the tsunami as well as long-running separatist movements. The American public has been conditioned (and rightly so) that another terrorist attack is all but inevitable - that's what the intelligence says and both candidates acknowledged as much during the campaign. American democracy, in my view, has a lot stronger a tradition than people like Mr. Raban are willing to give it credit for, which is one of the reasons why there was no organized violence here in the US no matter how charged emotions were going into the 2004 presidential election.

Flynn is no alarmist. His writing is even-toned to a fault, his manner still that of the unflappable captain on the bridge of the Coast Guard patrol ship, but his warning is explicit: if the war on terror continues to be waged in its present form, it's likely to put democracy itself in peril.

The secretive, top-down, us-versus-them culture that is pervasive in government security circles must give way to more inclusive processes.... Rather than working assiduously to keep the details of terrorism and our vulnerabilities out of the public domain, the federal government should adopt a new imperative that recognizes that Americans have to be far better informed about the dangers that they face.... How much security is enough? We have done enough when the American people can conclude that a future attack on US soil will be an exceptional event that does not require wholesale changes to how we go about our lives.... We must continue to remind the world that it is not military might that is the source of our strength but our belief that mankind can govern itself in such a way as to secure the blessings of liberty.

I agree that the government should be more open with the general public about the threats we now face, though that would likely result in all manner of nasty leaks should that openness not convey the leakers' preferred worldview. And while I almost certainly agree that the US military is by no means the source of US strength, I don't think that the "peace through strength" approach should be de-emphasized as a means of ensuring the continued protection our liberties. And Flynn had better watch out, that last line looks almost "neocon" or "Wilsonian" if taken to its logical conclusions.

These are temperate, wise, and practical thoughts. What is potentially to be feared more, even, than the prospect of another major attack of 9/11 proportions or worse is that, in the second Bush administration now beginning, voices like Flynn's will go unheard, while those of such intemperate terror warriors as Podhoretz and Pipes will be listened to with a respectful attention they in no way deserve.

Why? Because Podhoretz and Pipes don't share Mr. Raban's thinly-implied belief that US support for Israel is one of the reasons we're being attacked or because they use a regional classification system rather than one based around ideology or organization? If I had to take a stab at it, my guess would be that it's because Mr. Raban subscribes at least in some part or another to view of neocons supplied by Curtis's documentary even if he doesn't necessarily agree with all of the particulars. If Flynn's recommendations are as reasonable to the average man knowledgeable in port operations as they sound, then by all means implement them. But unless Mr. Raban has a substantive reason as to why Podhoretz and Pipes shouldn't be listened to (except, you know, that they're neoconservatives), such a statement strikes me as a tacit admission that his friend/foe indicator is based solely on which side of the domestic political spectrum you happen to be on. That may be all well and good for him as he's hardly the only American that suffers from such views, but it does leave one with a profound distrust towards taking his word as gospel when it comes to national security concerns.