.

Via Thomas Barnett, Daniel Pipes discusses the 751 Zones Urbaines Sensibes (Sensitive Urban zones) demarcated by the French Government, which are “are conveniently listed on one long webpage, complete with street demarcations and map delineations.”

Daniel goes on to state:

What are they? Those places in France that the French state does not control. They range from two zones in the medieval town of Carcassone to twelve in the heavily Muslim town of Marseilles, with hardly a town in France lacking in its ZUS. The ZUS came into existence in late 1996 and according to a 2004 estimate, nearly 5 million people live in them.”

Daniel declares that a more apt description for ZUS would be “Dar al-Islam, the place where Muslims rule”, but I feel that’s more of a provocative statement than an accurate one. A more appropriate description for ZUS would be “Gap Societies”.

In early 2005, I wrote a paper title “In the Midst of the Swarm: Reconceptualizing the (Mislabeled) Global War on Terrorism“, which called for a new framework of focus on the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism), looking to take account the swarm-like phenomena covered by John Robb and a social-level interpretation of Thomas Barnett’s Core v. Gap States.

One aspect of the paper defined “Gap Societies” in areas in Europe like ZUS:

Organizations like Al-Qaeda to Hizb ut-Tahrir are not just “terrorist groups” or “Islamist extremist,” but groups that represent a worldwide social movement that transcend nation-states, Core or Gap states or civilization blocks. Thus, there is a need to focus on different social groups inside Core and Gap states that are disconnected from the larger society and how they related to other states and societies globally.

…Borrowing again from Barnett, one may call these alienated segment of the European Muslim diasporas as being “Gap” societies, which are not fully integrated to where the live as locally to the state and globally to the world. In short, a particular segment of Muslims living in “Gap” societies – be it within the Core or Gap states – are the foundation for the militant Islamist social movement.

These Zones Urbaines Sensibes (Sensitive Urban Zones) sound very much like “Gap Societies” that exist outside the fabric of French society, economy and law, while being physically inside France. Just as the United States and other states must take a lead in helping closing the Gap States where they remain, governments must act to close the gaps (connect “Gap Societies”) that exist within their states. This is the best path to succeed in the Long War.

The arrest, part of Operation Suez, is one a specific evidence of fighters in Iraq returning to Europe, perhaps to start sleeper sells or find more recruits for the War in Iraq. Regardless of the exact reasons, there is now more concrete evidence of the Mujahideen network in Europe and Iraq linking up:

The ring that Operation Suez discovered illustrates the extent to which al-Qaeda satellite support rings have established themselves in Europe. This cell went undetected for two years despite Bousbaa’s previous arrest. The arrests lend more credence to pronouncements by Spanish judge Baltazar Garzon, who has led high-level inquiries into al-Qaeda in Spain, and by Pierre de Bousquet, the head of France’s domestic security service, several months ago that implied that foreign fighters in Iraq are already returning to Europe to re-establish or establish new networks to support terrorist operations in Europe.

Ultimately, Operation Suez demonstrates with hard evidence one of the consequences if Iraq slides to a failed (rather than failing) state. How long before another Madrid or London type bombing occurs brought on by groups with “Iraqi field training”?

The recent arrests in Toronto, aborting a potential attacking, and a recent article by Michael Scheuer (author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War), reinforce the position that Islamic Terrorism is an organic, decentralized beast. Its bigger than Al-Qaida, bigger than Bin Laden and bigger than the now deceased al-Zarqawi. Al-Qaida does have an important role, but as the instigator, the proclaimed vanguard, of a wider Islamist social movement.

Indeed, as StrategyUnit has noted: “As this war is more of cross between an insurgency and a social movement, there maybe no clean cessation of violence in the near or distant future. And in this conflict, there will be no battlefields, but rather our adversaries will be attached as a Global Swarm as Global Guerillas.”

The Toronto 17
The 17 potential terrorists arrested in Tortonto has direct connections to Al-Qaida and were, like the July 7 Londong bombers, homegrown groups. While the details are coming out, the Internet played a major role in communication, indoctrination (recruitment) and training (bombing making).

The suspected terrorists were, luckily for us, inept. A group of “foreign looking” men doing weapons training in the open and later buying three tons of fertilizers (not a fact easy to hide) are not the hallmarks of terrorist masterminds.

Bin Laden – Status: Success or Failure

Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War, notes that many experts have written off Bin Laden as a failure:

Over the past two years, U.S. and Western commentators have concluded that Osama bin Laden is largely irrelevant as the leader of the worldwide Sunni insurgency. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, for example, has said that “by now it is surely clear that al-Qaeda can produce videotapes but not terrorism…And the bad guys are losing” (Newsweek, March 15, 2004). James S. Dobbins at the National Review added that bin Laden “made many threats of course, but was never able to back them up, creating an unbridgeable credibility gap” (National Review Online, September 28, 2005). The new CIA chief, General Michael Hayden, has described bin Laden’s recent audiotapes as a public relations campaign to prove he is still alive. “These attempts,” Hayden said, “may be an attempt on their part [bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri] to kind of re-establish authenticity with their followers” (AP, February 5). Finally, from Sarah Lawrence College, Fawaz Gerges all but dismisses bin Laden’s relevance, arguing that “we are in the throes of the beginning of a new wave [in the Muslim world]–the freedom generation–in which civil society is asserting itself” (Christian Science Monitor, February 4, 2004). In short, these arguments assert that the situation has improved.

But indeed, this is not the case. Scheuer correctly points out that Bin Laden, sees himself and Al-Qaida as the final means, but the “match” to light the Ummah (Islamic World) on fire, motivating it against the West:

“[Bin Laden] has never claimed that al-Qaeda could achieve this goal by itself. Quite the contrary, he has consistently maintained that al-Qaeda is only the vanguard of the large-scale movement that is needed to achieve this goal.”

The recruitment of Europeans to fight in Iraq, the Madrid and London Bombings, the abortive attempt in Toronto, the recent alliance of “”Islamist leaders in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan and Jerusalem” all point to the face that the “flame” is alive and thriving.

Conclusion
The recent Toronto arrests shows that the threat is still very real and is far more diverse than a threat “from over there”, but it is a threat that can be as homegrown as meatloaf and apple pie (for you American readers).

The Observer reports leaks regarding the July 7 London subway bombing inquiry by the British Government:

The official inquiry into the 7 July London bombings will say the attack was planned on a shoestring budget from information on the internet, that there was no ‘fifth-bomber’ and no direct support from al-Qaeda, although two of the bombers had visited Pakistan.

While this is not surprising news in itself (if indeed, these leaks are accurate), this confirms the difficulty and the nature of the threat in this (for a lack of a better name) the Global War on Terror (GWOT). The enemy we face is larger, bigger than Al-Qaida or Bin Laden – it is a worldview, an idea – something that cannot be easily stopped.

According to the report, the attacks were largely motivated by concerns over foreign policy and the perception that it was deliberately anti-Muslim, although the four men were also driven by the promise of immortality.

As mentioned in earlier post, “Global Swarm: Explaining GWOT through Thomas Barnett, Huntington, Global Guerillas “, the threat we face is a cocktail mix of religion and issues of social justice (mix of real/exaggerated/false etc) with an overall feeling of the persecution of Muslims (The Ummah) around the world. Defeating such a “movement” will indeed be a Long War.

On Slate Magazine today, Francis Fukayama’s “Europe vs. Radical Islam” takes to tasks the rash of “decline of Europe, raise of Eurabia” books that have been hitting American shelves lately, specifically “The West’s Last Chance” by Tony Blankley and “While Europe Slept” by Bruce Bawer. However, Fukayama focuses on the most extreme and perhaps even founder of the “decline of the West” crowd: Pat Buchanan’s “Decline of the West”.

Oddly and disappointingly, Fukayama skips over Bat Ye’or “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis “, though he mentions the word. Its a shame because Eurabia is probably the most credible of all four books that addresses the subject with the fullest sense of reason and moderation with no wild scenerios like the type Blankey represents. Why this major omission?

Regardless, I believe Fukayama goes to the heart of the issue of Muslims in Europe and shifts the question on the need for Europeans to redefine what it means to be British, French, Germany…what it means to be European:

The problem that most Europeans face today is that they don’t have a vision of the kinds of positive cultural values their societies stand for and should promote, other than endless tolerance and moral relativism. What each European society needs is to invent an open form of national identity similar to the American creed, an identity that is accessible to newcomers regardless of ethnicity or religion. This was the idea behind Bassam Tibi’s concept of Leitkultur (guiding or reference culture), the notion that the European Enlightenment gave rise to a distinct and positive universalist culture based on the dignity of the individual. Muslims coming to Europe would be minimally expected to accept this perspective as their own. The German Christian Democrats timidly endorsed a version of this five years ago, only to retreat in the face of charges of racism and anti-immigrant prejudice from the left. Interest in a “demokratische Leitkultur” has been revived in the wake of recent events, however, and a vigorous debate has opened up over how to define it. There will be many missteps along the way: The state of Baden-Württemberg, for example, recently introduced a test that would require the respondent to support gay marriage as a condition for citizenship, something deliberately designed to exclude Muslims.

Time is getting short to address these questions. Europeans should have started a discussion about how to integrate their Muslim minorities a generation ago, before the winds of radical Islamism had started to blow. The cartoon controversy, while beginning with a commendable European desire to assert basic liberal values, may constitute a Rubicon that will be very hard to re-cross. We should be alarmed at the scope of the problem, but prudent in responding to it, since escalating cultural conflict throughout the Continent will bring us closer to a showdown between Islamists and secularists that will increasingly look like a clash of civilizations.

Fukayama nails on the head that Europe needs to find out what being European means before they began a process of incorporating other groups into their societies. The threat of a “Clash of Civlizations” in Europe is very real but fortunately has not fully materialized yet. Time is running short, but that doesnt mean its too late.

From Port Call:

Cancelling the port deal could mean the end of U.S. basing rights in the UAE, strained relations with other regional partners, and the potential loss of a key defense contract, all viewed as critical in fighting the War on Terror. Collectively, those factors probably explain why the deal hasn’t already been nixed, and why the Bush Administration may put up a fight–even with political allies.
…
Cancellation of the contract would be viewed as an insult to the UAE and its leadership; regional critics would accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy–anxious to utilize UAE bases and sell its defense hardware to the Dubai, but unwilling to let a UAE company manage operations in U.S. ports. Such criticism, in turn, would cause other Gulf allies to question Washington’s long-term committment to the region, and make it more difficult for the U.S. to sustain basing rights in such countries as Qatar and Bahrain.

In the domestic area, the Bush Administration is in a tightspot as it defends the deal, while the Democrats are taking advantage of the UAE deal to look strong in homeland security. However, as Spook86 mentions, the deal has wide geopolitical implications. There’s a lot at stake for the US, the Middle East and the War on Terror (GWOT). Congress has a right to be concerned, but these concerns must be placed in greater political and international context.

For more on US Military Bases in UAE check out GlobalSecurity.org

Weighing the Concequences: Doing some Bombing v. Just Doing Nothing
Note that the “Doing Some Bombing” concequences are mostly short-term issues, while “Just Doing Nothing” are long term issues.

What’s Realistic from the List Above?
From the “Bomb Iran” column, I believe that the question of how Iranians would react is the most iffy one. The regime has no support, but would attacks really rally Iranian support around their hated government? Or will they blame the government for the war and demonstrate? But everything else – the destabalization of Iraq, Lebanon and Israel (?) to causing oil prices to sky rocket – are definately “on the menu” if the US and its allies strike against Iran.

From the “Leave Iran Alone” column, I think that the first one – “get nukes and use’em” – makes no sense. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may sound crazy but you dont get to be the national leader without being intelligent or at least have a lot of smart and powerful backers that are the real bosses behind the scenes. Also, any open use of nuclear weapons would be suicidal for the Iranian state and as much as suicide bombers like to kill themselves, I dont that everyone in the Iranian military and in other powerful positions believe in putting their own lives on the line like that.

The greatest risk is that a nuclear Iran will spread it know-how and pass a nuclear weapon to a third-party group like Al-Qaida. But how high is this risk? Proliferation, as we have learned via A.Q.Khan virtually unstoppable, so how confident are we that the proper investment in intelligence and WMD detection systems can help tremendously lower the risk of a loose Iranian nuke detonating in Antwerp or anywhere near a cargoship at a Western port city?

Conclusion: No Easy Choice
The fact of the matter is that doing something and doing nothing both lead to very bad outcomes. Strikes against Iran has immediate short-term concequences, but the doing nothing have severe long term concequences. I honestly cannot offer any good recommendations on paths to take – faced with these set of binary choices the U.S. is in a lose-lose situation.

Beyond Binary: Thomas Barnett’s So-Crazy-It-Might-Just-Work Idea

Turning to Thomas Barnett, as StrategyUnit appearingly so often does, we get an interesting third-choice with Iran. He proves that when you dont like either choices, you try to make you own – a third way. Barnett’s recommendation is to try a path towards thoughtful engagement with Iran, but its one long hell of a Hail Mary:

So if Tehran is going to get the bomb no matter what, the question shifts from “What can the United States do to prevent it?” to “What does the United States get out of it?”

If Iran was our natural security partner in the past for a lot of good reasons, then most of those reasons remain today, simply obscured by the continuing dictatorship of the mullahs (of which we have some very bad memories).

Our natural goal with Iran, then, is to marginalize that religious leadership while capturing the same security partnership we once enjoyed.
…
Our grand bargain with Iran is not hard to imagine. Iran gets the bomb, diplomatic recognition, the lifting of sanctions and the opening of trade, and its removal from the axis of evil.

In return, what Iran must offer the United States is long-term support for both the two state solution in Palestine and a stable Iraq dominated by a Shiite majority, the cessation of its support for terrorist groups in the region, joint pressure on Syria for an end to its hegemony over Lebanon (removing their troops is only a nice start) and — most symbolically — its recognition of Israel diplomatically and its formal declaration of that country’s right to exist.
…
Tell me, since Iran is getting the bomb anyway eventually, would you feel less comfortable about this possible scenario if Iran were to open up to the West or if it remained isolated and surrounded by hostile American troops?

In which scenario do you think Tehran might risk it all by sponsoring a terrorist WMD strike against Israel or the West — when it has something to lose or nothing to lose? If America wants Iran to act responsibly in the region, it needs to give Iran some responsibility for regional security.

The downside is that such a path would make the US and the West weak (the paper tiger) in the eyes of the world and without any promise that Iran will fulfill its part of the deal. It hopes to wedge between the conservative Iranians who welcome an economic opening with the West and the non-compromising hardliners. But will such – dare I say “appeasement” - work? If it fails do we still have the opportunity to strike Iran? How do we know when it fails and can we convince the world it has?

Barnett hasnt provided any answers for this yet, but his suggestion is worth a serious look if only because the other two paths we have are so undesireable.

In the Wretchard’s “The Coming of the Bomb” at Belmont Club, he excerpts from the US Army War College’s “Getting Ready For A Nuclear-Ready Iran” monograph:

“[An] ever more nuclear-ready Iran will try to lead the revolutionary Islamic vanguard throughout the Islamic world by becoming the main support for terrorist organizations aimed against Washington’s key regional ally, Israel; America’s key energy source, Saudi Arabia; and Washington’s prospective democratic ally, Iraq.”

The Wretchard extends this analysis to declare, “It could mark the final end of efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and provide Islamic terrorism with a nuclear deterrent.”

If the prediction above holds true than the Iraqi project will fail before it even has a chance to really succeed. The great hope for the Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) was to help galvanize democracy and openness in the Middle East with the chance to be a Shia counterweight to the mullahs in Iran and bring hope to the Iranian people by showing them an alternative route.

An emboldened nuclear Iran that would be able to leverage its nuclear power status to aggressively support Islamic terrorist organizations and would contribute to even more instability to the security environment in the Middle East and many Muslim nations.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intentions for the nuclear weapons are still not quite clear. His extreme rhetoric has caused much alarm and, indeed, the cause of the escalation of the crisis. Here are just some possible motives:
1) Deterrent against the US. The US surrounds Iran on three sides: Iraq in the west, Afghanistan in the south, and in the Persian Gulf where the US superior naval forces can be sent.
2) To generate a crisis that will consolidate Ahmadinejad’s political base? This would be in line with his stark political rhetoric, which has captured the political discourse.
3) Leverage to propel Iranian Republic as the revolutionary vanguard of Islam (despite the Shi’a vs. Sunni differences)?

I don’t think we have enough information on this to move beyond such speculation and until the only logical route with Iran is through engagement, exchanging the world’s acquiesce of Iran’s nuclear development for some sort of economic openness (a way to tie and restrain Tehran’s action). Short of a risky military action or regime change, we sadly have no options left.

PS: As a side note Officer’s Club (via DefenseTech) points to a Washington Post’s article on a “bolt-out-of-the-blue” plan for rapid global strike, a supposed plan called CONPLAN 8022 that deals specifically with Iran and North Korea. Unless the world stands behind the US (with the pen and the sword), such a plan would be very unlikely.

The Premise
In the formulation of my own conceptual framework for understanding GWOT, I submit the following general premises:
1. The need to look beyond the traditional levels of analysis of international relations – personal, state and system level – and to take account local and transnational social cleavages.
2. Instability today is principally caused by the lack of “global connectivity” in certain counties and societies, resulting in local and regional crises and conflicts.
3. Variants of Salafi-Jihadi/Pan-Islamism have conflated these crises and conflicts as a global conflict against Islam and the Ummah by the “Other.”

Of course, there will alway be outlier cases, but the premises serves to cover the vast majority of situations relating to GWOT.

Thomas Barnett v. Samuel Huntington

There is no current theory or framework that can easily match with these premises. However, we can build this framework by synthesizing Barnett and Huntington. Below is a mini-review of their concepts and some of their shortfalls when taken alone.

Thomas Barnett declares that the amount of global “connectivity” in the world defines security issues in the international environment. It is the amount of connectivity a state possesses – in the transnational flow of trade, media, finances, information, culture et cetera – that distinguish between a peaceful, integrated “Core” state and a hostile or unstable “Gap” state. As Barnett states, the “new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root [the Core] and where it has not [the Gap].”(1) In short, the level of strategic regional and global security is directly linked to the level of globalization. This is no difference.

While Thomas Barnett presents a long term “big picture” framework for understanding the source of instability in the world, it cannot alone fully describe the nature of GWOT. It does not explain why certain peoples in certain regions are engaging in a confrontation against the members of the Core. In other words, if the international security environment is defined by those in the Gap and those in the Core, why were the majority of the 9/11 hijackers from Saudi Arabia, and not shamans from Indonesia or Orthodox Christians from Belarus?

The essential variables that need to be added to Barnett’s framework are those of religious and ultimately of socio-cultural factors.

While Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” goes to the extreme in treating cultural regions as nearly monolithic political blocks (that is, civilizations), Huntington does well in thrusting cultural, religious, social, and historical as variables in the calculus that influences the foreign policy orientations of states and non-state organizations. Indeed, Huntington must be acknowledged as prescient in declaring the revival of religions, particularly non-Western religions, as remerging as an important cultural and political force in the world.(2)

Huntington-Barnett with a Social Level of Analysis: Gap Societies?
I agree with Barnett on the instability of regions lacking “global connectivity” and Huntington’s emphasis on cultural and religions as important variables in international politics and his concept of “civilization faultlines.” Barnett’s builds a framework for understanding all global and local conflicts in the long term. Huntington emphasizes culture as the central factor.

Barnett and Huntington’s frameworks are not mutually exclusive and this paper builds on their scholarship and research to explain the nature of this war. Both Huntington and Barnett rely on system – Civilization vs. Civilization, Core vs. Gap – and state level of analysis, where does one place non-state groups like Al-Qaeda, Al Takfir Wal Hijra, Hizb ut-Tahrir and including their support structures and sympathizers? Additionally, how we explain the presence of such groups in the Core states of Western Europe or within the Western Civilization?

An elegant solution to this problem is applying social cleavages as another level of analysis complementing the state and system level of analysis. Organizations like Al-Qaeda to Hizb ut-Tahrir are not just “terrorist groups” or “Islamist extremist,” but groups that represent a worldwide social movement that transcend nation-states, Core or Gap states or civilization blocks. Thus, there is a need to focus on different social groups inside Core and Gap states that are disconnected from the larger society and how they related to other states and societies globally.

Towards a More Total Concept of Warfare
Beyond abandoning the Western concept of state-to-state warfare, this is conflict where the enemy employs a new “combined arms” strategy beyond the traditional means of Western warfare and follows John Robb’s “Global Guerilla” on the more tactical and operational level.

In traditional military usage, the term “combined arms” is defined by the U.S. Department of Defense as “The full integration and application of two or more arms or elements of one Military Service into an operation”(3) -such as the integrated and coordinated use of infantry, tank, precision bombers, and reconnaissance under one unified command. As war on the social level against the states and other societies, we see “combined arms” taking not only a purely military dimension but the integration of a full spectrum of human concerns – political issues, social issues, cultural issues, religious issues, etc – under the banner of a unifying ideology. In this case, this ideology is religious in nature.

GWOT as a Radical, Global and Muslim Social Movement
The use of social, cultural and religious issues as important dimensions of the war has it roots in the religious nature of this war – that is, religious as defined by the enemy. Stemming from its roots from Islam, Salafi-Jihadist share the tradition of embracing religion as a totality inseparable from any social sphere. In contrasts with the Peace of Westphalia that helped brought about the separation of the Christian church away from the state in the West, Islam has kept itself as the sole truth for all totality – it applies to and encompasses all aspects of human activity. In the West, the Muslim Brotherhood was most famous in emphasizing this fact of Islam, with its statement of recognizing “Islam as a total system” and the “final arbiter of life in all of its categories.” The most famous quote by the Muslim Brotherhood was its founder’s, Hassan al-Banna, proclamation that “Islam is a faith and a ritual, a nation and a nationality, a religion and a state, spirit and deed, holy text and sword.”(4) Indeed, other Muslim scholars, such as Sayyid Qutb, have criticized the West for its corruption of Christianity with its “schizophrenic” separation between the secular and the sacred, between church and state.(5) In contrasts to Christianity today, he declares Islam as a “system [that] extend into all aspects of life; it discusses all minor and major affairs of mankind.”(6)

Indeed, by actively uniting and linking all human activities to a single religious belief, it is easy to see how local conflicts affecting Muslims can be exploited to be seen as an attack on the entire global Muslim community – the Ummah. This combined with the concept of jihad al-asghar (lesser jihad) explains the confluence of local conflicts involving Muslims – Chechnya, Palestinian Issue, Moro in the Philippines – to being seen as a global conflict against Muslims.(7) And borrowing from John Robb, we see how quickly the conflict can become a social movement and a “Global Swarm”.

The relationship between social conflict and the fanatical organizations that exploit these conflicts are not only self-reinforcing, but help export and spread instability in the region and internationally (as illustrated above). In the primary link, each local conflict begins to be linked to a cause (Islamist jihad) and is transformed to being seen as one of many conflicts (reaching towards secondary linkage). This conflation of the socio-political and socio-economic issues with the Islamist movement reaches the point that, in some cases, it is difficult to distinguish between what are social problems and what is part of the war.

Conclusion
As this war is more of cross between an insurgency and a social movement, there maybe no clean cessation of violence in the near or distant future. And in this conflict, there will be no battlefield,s, but rather our adversaries will be attached as a Global Swarm as Global Guerillas.

If the U.S. and it allies achive victory (how can we even defien this?), there will be neither a ceremony on USS Missouri nor televised collapse of an “Evil Empire”. In the words of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, “Some people see war and peace as a light switch. When the lights are off, it’s peacetime. When the lights go on, it’s wartime. I see more of a dimmer switch. We’ll see the intensity wax and wane, but there will always be some level of conflict going on.” (8) Let us hope that the United States and its allies dims that switch, least it will be a long hard slog.

—–
Sources
1. Barnett, Thomas P.M. “The Pentagon’s New Map.” Esquire. March 2003. (17 November 2003).
2. Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 95-101.
3. United States of America. Defense Department. DOD Dictionary of Military and 3. Associated Terms, 30 November 2004, (04 September 2004).
4. Daniel Pipes, “Fundamentalist Muslims Between America and Russia”, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1986, Accessed Online: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/279 (04 February 2004).
5. Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 89.
6. Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, (New Jersey: Islamic Publications International, 2000), 32.
7. For a comparative to the Islamic concept of jihad al-asghar within the Abrahamic religions, see the Judaic concept of milchemet mitzvah (obligatory war) and the Christian concept of Just War as described in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.
8. No Author. “Changing and Fighting, Simultaneously”, 30 October, 2004, National Journal, Available at (03 January 2005).

Its easy to hate and focus on someone when you have a nice quick, short name for them. Lashing out against “Nationalist Socialist”, “Total Socialist System under Centralized Planning” and “Free Spirited non-Conformist” is not easy to do. (And yes, I know some of my descriptions are not absolutely accurate and I included hippies as a joke.)

But same goes for what we are fighting against in this “Global War on Terrorism”. Just who are the bad guys? And what makes them different from the other past bad guys?

I think there is a true strategic and psychological weakness on our side to accurately name our adversary. The guys on the other side can do it easily, condemning us as secular, western, infidels, non-believers and so on. But what are they? How can we fight an enemy when we cant even describe them.

Islamists? “Those that hate our freedom”? Salafist? Global Guerillas?

Islamist or Muslim Fundamentalist sound fine, but we are not fighting some national Muslim Brotherhood movement. We are fighting 1000s of Islamicly inspired groups with a diverse range of immediate goals, motivation, tactics, doctrines…but a common enemy – the West.

There is a constant struggle to define our enemy (which is more of a “swarm” than a singular organizational entity) and we are unable to even define a name for it. This leaves us intellectual and conceptual vulnerable to the enemy.

In my future postings, I’ll dive through this issue deeper and try to offer some suggestions. It will definitely take some time for me to write on this.

This posting was inspired by a commenter on this blog who asked me why I used the word “Islamofacist” and by Dan Darling and John Robb who touched on this issue this week.