Shanksville Joins Gettysburg

Pennsylvania is home to the eternal resting places of many American heroes.  The most recent to join that honored company are the passengers and crew of United flight 93.  Forty Americans, randomly selected by the vagaries of travel and schedules.  Forty men and women thrown together by blind and impartial fate.  Forty fellow citizens who in a few minutes of life, a few minutes for which nothing in their collective experience could have prepared them, made a collective decision of magnificent courage.

These Americans decided to die not on their knees as fearful captives but as free people fighting.  Free people fighting--whether literally as was the case of those who died at Gettysburg or metaphorically as is the reality for so many of us and our ancestors seeking to do more than simply survive in the face of adversity--has defined the American nation and its collective character since our beginning.

Amid the saccharine, multi-cultural, interfaith, touchy-feely drivel which spread as a sentimental and cheapening miasma through the Tenth Anniversary commemorations, the stark bravery of the Flight 93 Forty shines as the real torch of humanity.  Their sacrifice, taken freely after a democratic vote, offsets the evil of the Muslim terrorists and mass murderers.  They, like the first responders who entered the Twin Towers while all who could leave were doing so, redeem humanity from the stain placed upon it by the Muslims who killed with the words "Allah akbar" on their lips.

Contemplating the forty who died on the remote field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, one can only wonder, "Would I have been so brave?  Would I have chosen to die on my feet fighting rather than on my knees in fear?"  One can only be thankful not to have had the dreadful necessity of making this choice.

The ceremony at Shanksville as well as those at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon made the Geek think about the tenth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  The Geek was alive and sentient at the time of the tenth anniversary, 7 December 51.  He was an avid follower of the to and fro movement of the war the US was fighting at the time, the "police action" in Korea.  His memories were quickly confirmed: There was no particular commemoration of the Japanese strike.  Certainly, there were no high profile events involving past and present presidents of the US as has been the case this weekend.    Headlines focused on the war in Korea, the economy, and even crime but not on any marking of the anniversary of the event which did well and truly change both the US and the world.

It has been said with nauseating frequency that 9/11 changed the US and the world in ways both profound and impossible to describe.  The Geek remembers saying just that to Her Geekness as the first reports came over the radio.  (Ten years ago there was no satellite Internet or television available in the canyon.)  The Geek and the many pundits were wrong.  At least the Geek is willing to admit that.

The events of 9/11/01 did not change the world.  The changes, particularly the open warfare between advocates of violent political Islam and the civilized states of the world, had been underway since the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Muslim based resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, both dating from 1979.  Al-Qaeda had been in existence for years before the manned cruise missiles hit New York, Washington, and the field outside of Shanksville.  Osama bin Laden's declaration of war was six years old.  The US had already been attacked both at home (World Trade Center 1993) and abroad, in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kenya, and Tanzania.

9/11 made the war unmistakable and inescapable.  While the strategy and tactics employed by the US in response may well have been faulty and counterproductive, the war was not of our making or wanting.  While the idea of a "global war on terror" is both logically flawed and impossible in the real world, the continuation of the war and the threats of terror behind it are not of our making, our desire, our policy.  The "war" both past and future is the sole creation of those who espouse and practice violent political Islam.

There is no doubt but most Americans want out of this perhaps never ending war, but such is impossible.  We are all rather like the passengers and crew on flight 93, the challenge, the threat, the war has been brought to us by others, by others who desire to harm, to kill, to destroy us and all we and our ancestors have created.  Like the Flight 93 Forty we have to choose: Fight for freedom or die on our knees captives to fear.

We Are Safer Today--Or Not

Fareed Zakaria has charged to the fore once again with his contention that we Americans are far safer from the threat of terror operations conducted by proponents of violent political Islam today than the doom-mongers of the Right would have us believe. He argues that the Bush/Cheney administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and displace Taliban in favor of a democratic (and presumably pluralistic, liberal, free enterprise) system--and the "amping" of the effort by Mr Obama necessarily resulted in the defanging of al-Qaeda and the insurance of our safety.

Ironically, one of the architects of the Great Effort In Afghanistan, Robert Blackwell, has come to an antipodal conclusion. Reportedly, he has told the London based International Institute of Strategic Studies that the US led effort has come such a cropper that the only viable option now is to partition Afghanistan. Taliban should be left alone in the Pushtun dominated areas while the US and its partners limit their efforts to securing some sort of rump state in the rest of the geographic expression, those areas where Pushto is not the primary language.

The reason for this volte-face on the part of Mr Blackwell is one commented upon quite frequently by the Geek. He now rues the mission leap decreed by his bosses which shifted the goal from that of a limited punitive expedition directed at destroying al-Qaeda and the upper layers of Taliban to one of displacing Taliban with the mythical democratic etc. new regime. As a consequence of this change in mission, the Islamist insurgents were given time, a place, and motivation to recreate themselves and come back bigger and badder than ever.

Leaving aside such bagatelles as Mr Blackwell's role in the shift or the under-resourcing of the Afghan effort in favor of the main event over in Iraq, there are more important considerations which can be adduced to support the Blackwell Thesis that the US is losing (or already has lost) the war in Afghanistan. These more important considerations also serve to undercut fatally the unjustifiably optimistic view taken by Mr Zakaria.

Several often overlooked or quite underestimated factors combine to point in the direction of an American failure in our ongoing conflict with the advocates of political Islam both armed and unarmed. Oh, this gloomy prognostication should not be taken to mean that in the future We the People will be banging our heads on the floors of mosques five times a day or putting women in garbage sacks. But, it does mean the US will be limited, perhaps quite severely, in its ability to operate diplomatically in a wide area of the world.

And, it means that We the People will have to live with the limitations of fear and the mechanisms of security put in place to assuage our anxiety for many, many years to come, essentially in perpetuity. It means the "war on terror" will prove to be not the "long war" but the "forever war."

One of the key factors at work to our collective disadvantage was alluded to by Victor Davis Hanson albeit in an unnecessarily indirect way. The thrust of Dr Hanson's point as the Geek understands it is that the motivation, the evil, if you will, has been denatured from the attacks of 9/11, making the events as disconnected from human authorship and motives as would be the random strike of a meteor. The net effect of this deracination is to strip the progenitors of the attacks as well as their consequences from the human context.

That result is as wrong as grilled watermelon.

The subtext of the neutering of the attacks of 9/11 as well as the resultant US actions constitutes a set of phenomena permeating contemporary American values. Bluntly put, this set revolves around the major message of the American Left over the past forty years--the US is inherently evil, intrinsically mean spirited, reflexively imperialistic, arrogant, self-serving, self-seeking, and, all in all, a thoroughly unpleasant member of the global neighborhood. Beyond that, Americans, We the People, are afflicted with every "ism" listed in the catalogue of misery. We are a completely unpleasant bunch of chauvinists, sexists, xenophobes, religious bigots, and fanatical "clingers."

As a result, the American people are encouraged to back away from the challenges to us, our values, and way of life by our own self-appointed political, media, and academic elites. We are and have been told repeatedly that our values and way of life are not exceptional, that they are no better (but might be worse) than the values of other societies and cultures. There is no message from those who purport to mold and lead public opinion that we are unique, that we possess qualities and values which have provided institutions worthy of both envy and emulation.

As has been true throughout the West, the US has experienced not simply a crisis of confidence, a crisis of faith, but a meltdown of belief in ourselves and our worth which has extended for the best part of three generations. Absent the buoyant self-assurance of earlier generations, we have been unwilling or unable to both articulate what we stand for, why we stand for it, why it worth believing and standing for, and not simply defend against all comers but advance against all odds.

From the closing years of the Vietnam War forward the loss of faith in ourselves and the unique past which served to make us an equally unique people and nation in the present has become evermore pervasive and structured into the rituals of passage from the child to the adult. The early and complete capture of academia by the aging New Lefters nearly forty years ago has resulted in a transformation of the formal mechanisms of inculturalization (and most of the informal ones as well) from one which both reinforced and celebrated American exceptionalism to one which denied and deprecated it.

Our faiths both religious and civic have evaporated over the years. The education reinforced evaporative process has left us rather hollow, and certainly confused about the value of our values, the worth of our institutions, the deservingness of our nation, even the status of our country in the world. It is hard as hell to fight a war when you have little if any idea as to why you are fighting and what difference it might make if you win or lose.

This opens the door to the folks on the other side of the hill. The Muslims. Or, to err on the side of accuracy, the proponents of political Islam, particularly those who advocate the necessity or desirability of armed, violent political Islam.

Unlike the faiths, both religious and civic in the West, in the US, the faith of the Muslim is alive, vivid, vigorous, full-bloomed. In a very real and critical sense, Islam has recaptured the militancy of its youth during the past thirty to fifty years. While the faiths of the West have aged, aged quite ungracefully, the faith of Islam has regained its full vigor of centuries ago.

Islam, it must be understood, is not simply a religious confession. It is that. It is a faith. But it is much more. Islam is a way of life and of living. It is a complete, total system encompassing all aspects of the human condition. It is law. It is government. It is a system of economic philosophy. It is a community. It is a way of war. There is no part of life too small to elude its all inclusive embrace.

The basics of Islam, the Five Pillars, are both easy to understand and not overly onerous to execute. There is no complex liturgy, no complicated doctrine to parse and accept even if not understood. In effect, Islam provides emotional engagement, a strong sense of community, an equally strong and appealing sense of purpose, even destiny. It provides a commonsensical, real world based system for governing relations, solving disputes, maintaining harmony.

So far, so good. And, it gets better. Islam is multifaceted. Not only is there no central clerical establishment, there are actually two foundation forms of Islam.

No, not Shia and Sunni. Rather there is an "official" Islam, the Islam of the clerics, the scholars of jurisprudence, the Ulema. There is also an "unofficial" Islam, the Islam of people, particularly people organized in the semi-secret brotherhoods, the tarika.

For centuries the tarika have been the primary instrument of missionary activity, humanitarian efforts, community organization, and a multitude of other matters. These brotherhoods give Islam a flexibility, a vitality, a capacity to expand unequalled in other religions and unrivalled by government entities.

Today, the brotherhoods are alive and well as the shock troops of Islam both political and otherwise. The prototype Muslim Brotherhood has given rise to a near tsunami of derivatives, offshoots, descendants which cover the globe and do all manner of activities both laudable and (to us) potentially threatening. The capacities of the brotherhoods have been consistently underestimated by decision makers here and elsewhere to our profound disadvantage.

There is another area which has been underappreciated in the US. It is the one factor which ties together disparate elements in the recent history of Muslim majority countries so as to explain why there has been the sudden expansion of not only militant Islam but the advocates of political Islam, again, particularly those who espouse violent political Islam.

That factor is the educational systems of majority Muslim countries. The essential contextual matter is the expansion of the number of genuinely independent majority Muslim states at the end of World War II--four--to the nearly sixty of today. With independence came the new educational systems which universally emphasized a heady combination of nationalism and Islam.

Particularly since the late Fifties, the expansion of educational systems indoctrinating students in the glories of Islam and the evils of the West has been critical. By the time of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the somewhat later perceived triumph of armed Muslim believers over the Red Army, the educational systems of many, even most, Muslim majority states were producing large numbers of graduates who may have been deficient in their proficiency in secular subjects but were most knowledgeable in Islamic belief, values, and history as well as in the purported lacks, weaknesses, and "sins" of the West.

Against the backdrop of this form of indoctrination oriented education, the youth of Muslim countries soaked up the perceived victories of their co-religionists in Iran (against the Great Satan, the US) and Afghanistan (against the atheistic Soviet Union) with the result they were good to go in jihad. All that was needed was a "brotherhood" ready, willing, and able to provide the leadership, training, and strategic goal.

This was the role of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and the numerous others in Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, across North Africa, in the Arabian Peninsula, and even in Europe. The troops were there, produced by the madrassas and state operated systems alike. The "brotherhoods" were there. The motive was there--cleansing the Arab Peninsula of the "infidel" Americans and the Arab Mideast of the "Zionist entity."

The decentralized nature of "official" Islam is both complemented and potentiated by the assorted brotherhoods. Simultaneously, the educational systems of Muslim majority states continue to churn out fully indoctrinated graduates who are eager to defend and advance the One True Faith, to die (and kill) for the faith.

In short, Muslim strengths mirror our weaknesses.

They are confident. We are not.

They are educated to believe in the high value of their faith, their beliefs. We are educated to doubt, to distrust, to eschew the beliefs and values upon which our society, our polity, our culture are predicated.

They have a broad set of flexible, informal, self-organizing brotherhoods. We rely upon remote, rigid, tinted with arrogance official bureaucracies.

They see the future as theirs, ordained by Allah. We see our best days as being well in our past.

When these more basic considerations are given their proper priority, the conclusions are simple and not particularly enjoyable. It really doesn't matter if we "triumph" in Afghanistan. Nor will merely surrendering a part of that place to the violent political Islamists of Taliban buy us any peace.

Nor does it really matter if every last member of al-Qaeda is killed. We will be no "safer."

Not unless and until we regain the confidence, the faith which we have so heedlessly and unnecessarily tossed away these past two generations, can we hope to wage effective war with the violent political Islamists. And, not unless and until we can see the decay of the current high level of Muslim certainty that the future belongs to the Slaves of Allah can we have any hope of being safe at home and potent abroad.

Looks like some very grim decades ahead.

ADMIN NOTE: The Geek invites, welcomes and will post all on topic comments but due to having been attacked by spam comments he has had to take precautions for which he apologizes.

White House Language Cops Deny Reality

One of the most important considerations at work in foreign relations today, arguably the most important, is that of self-identification. There are legions of ways in which an individual may identify himself and establish his relations with other humans. The most common ways in which a person so locates himself in both demographic and political space are tribe, ethnicity, region, nation, language, and religion.

Typically the identifiers merge in a reinforcing way. This is particularly true in the case of genuine, mature nation-states. Citizenship, language, geography, shared sense of history and values, all combine to provide a unitary identity by which the individual can feel a loyalty to a rather large, often remotely governed abstract--the nation--circumscribed by secure, defensible borders under the effective control of a consensually accepted polity--the state.

This can be seen quite clearly with the Americans. Not that many decades ago the emphasis was on the word, "States" in the name "United States of America." Now it is on the words "United" and "America." Our primary identity has shifted from city, state, or region to nation-state as we have become ever more mobile and ever more homogenized culturally, socially, economically, and politically. Even our once very distinguishable regional dialects have melted away in the heat of mass communications.

Americans may also have secondary identities such as ethnicity, religion, and generation, but these are most often purely secondary--unless brought forward in importance by the politics of victimization. It is only in the context of playing the game of victim-and-victimizer that any secondary identifier is given pride of place.

Unfortunately, playing the victim card has become so much a feature of our political landscape in the past forty or so years that the Law of Unintended Consequences can have great and terrible effects. This is particularly the case when the sensibilities so often invoked in the politics of victimization are invoked in the practice of foreign policy.

So, Geek, just what has this got to do with the real world, anyway?

Well, bucko, it's like this. The US and the rest of the civilized world is currently at war with--here comes the nitty-gritty--someone. Since 9/11 there has been no doubt that the US and other nation-states of similar foundational values and core institutions have been under armed attack. And, we have fought back.

But who attacked us? Against whom have we been fighting?

These key questions were not answered by the Bush/Cheney administration. The conceit held by the neocon ninnies of that time was that the US was engaged in a "war on terror." That was a logical and ontological monstrosity. It is impossible to wage war on a specific tactic of war which is what terrorism constitutes. It would have made as much sense to have declared war on air attacks without declaration of war on 8 December 1941 as to fight a war against terrorism.

The Bush/Cheney administration belatedly came to understand that it was unwise at the operational level to maintain we were waging war against Islamists or jihadists--even though we were. After the early period of boisterous enthusiasm and belief we could have a pair of quick and cheap victories in Afghanistan and Iraq in which the terms "Islamic," "Islamist," "Jihad," and similar were hurled with the rapidity of an M-4 on rock and roll, fear that overblown oratory might create ever more Muslims with a deep anti-American orientation overtook the White House and environs.

The same fear has gripped the Obama administration. Its latest excrescence is the presidential directive to eliminate "offensive" terms such as "Islamist" and "jihad" from strategic planning documents. This move is meant not only to bolster the famed Obama Outreach to the Arab and Muslim world which started in Cairo a year back but to reorient the way in which the US both approaches and is perceived in majority Muslim countries.

The goal is laudable. The means are not.

The Obama Prohibition still leaves us in the dark regarding the nature of the enemy we are fighting, the motives which propel that enemy, and the signposts marking our progress toward or regression from success in the war. The enemy needs a name. His motives and goals need to be understood. The definers of success need to be prescribed.

Admittedly, naming the enemy was much easier in the "old days." In most of our previous wars the enemy was either a nation-state or a pretender to that status. Other wars, those of an interventionary nature, the enemy could at least be identified by a specific ideology or his opposition to a polity supported by the US.

Naming names was quite easy. And, usually quite effective in mobilizing and maintaining political will here at home for the war "over there."

Outfits like the many franchises grouped together under the name al-Qaeda or even country specific entities such as the Talibans of Afghanistan and Pakistan are not so susceptible to easy and accurate identification unless one is willing to run the risk of offending someone's sensibilities somewhere. And, if those offended are Muslim in their primary identification, the consequence may be harmful to both national interest and personal health.

Whether reality imposes risks or not, whether the Obama administration likes it or not, not properly identifying the enemy, his motivations and goals makes the possibility of being successful in our efforts against him diminishingly small. The ironic elephant in the room is that by its very insistence upon extreme sensitivity to Muslim sensibilities, the Obama administration just like that of George W. Bush in its later years implicitly admits the nature and character--the identity, if you will--of the enemy.

The enemy is, of course, Islam. More accurately and specifically it is that segment of the Muslim population which accepts as a prime motivator and goal the universal, all encompassing identity of Islam. Make no mistake about it, Islam is a far more totalistic belief system than the other monotheistic religions. There is no daylight between faith and any other aspect of human life. Not only is there no daylight, there is no possibility that any will or can emerge.

Adherents of politically oriented, expansionist Islam, the Islamists, are not misunderstanders of Islam; they are good Muslims. True Believer Muslims. To think otherwise is to diminish both the power of the Belief and the sincerity of the Believer.

While some operatives of Islamism may be stooges, may be suffering from personality or character disorders, may be incomplete personalities, such is not the case with the movers, shakers, leaders, and commanders of Islamism and its armed, conjoined twin, Jihadism. The leadership cadre, even many of the trigger pullers and suicide vest wearers, are motivated by a sincere and pervasive belief that through their actions, the will of Allah to conquer the infidel and punish the apostate is being followed. They are convinced to their very marrow that their actions, including their deaths, will bring a better world, a more faithful and peaceful world into existence.

Other communities of faith have held similar, even identical views in the past, often the not too distant past. Even today there are Christians and Jews willing and able to commit murder and other crimes in the True Belief that by so doing they are following the will of the deity, and they are suffering in order to prevent sin, rectify past sins, or ushering in a better, more godly future.

The difference between the Islamists and jihadists on the one hand and True Believers in other faiths or secular ideologies is their greater number on the ground. Where the number of American "pro-life" advocates willing to commit murder on behalf of their faith is quite small or the number of ultra-orthodox Jews willing to kill archeologists who dig up inconvenient, long buried facts which contravene Biblical accounts is diminishingly small, this is not the case with respect to Islamists and jihadists.

This implies that the latest generation of language police in the White House are doing no good service to either the security and interests of the US or the best interests of Muslims by failing to properly and narrowly define the enemy. Ultimately it is up to Muslims throughout the world to decide: Is their religion is best represented by the totalistic interpretation of the Islamists or would it be better if observant Muslims rigorously rejected the blandishments and threats of those of their brethren who maintain that the way of Allah demands jihad, requires the suicide bombings, the wholesale killings, the waging of wars without end or conclusive result?

The vision of the world espoused by the Islamists is, at root, a recreation of the culture, the values, and the worldview of the Arabian Peninsula over a thousand years ago. The question for the one and a half billion Muslims today living in all countries of the world is simply what do they want for their future--life in Seventh Century Arabia or today?

This is the choice implicitly presented to the Muslims by the Obama administration's underlying strategy of engagement. It is impossible to discuss science, health care, investment opportunities, trade, education as the administration desires without challenging Muslims to choose between the Islamist worldview and agenda and one which allows for fully observant Islam lacking only the totalistic, expansionist, and death oriented features of Islamism.

This decision requires identity politics. It requires every Muslim to decide if the primary definer of faith demands acceptance of the Islamist understanding of what it takes to be a True Believer in the One True Faith. This is a decision which is not easy to make, particularly for people who have no tradition, no experience with the tortured process of evolving the sort of identity and consequent loyalty which typifies the nation-state.

Making this sort of difficult choice is not made any easier by our refusal to name our enemy in the wars today. You don't have to make a choice when you don't know there is a choice which must be made.

Mr Obama and others of the apprehensive, politically correct, multi-cultural persuasion have to understand that it is not only impossible to succeed in a war when the enemy cannot be properly, openly, and consistently named. It is also impossible to gain allies when they do not know with whom they are joining and against whom they are fighting.

Those are two very good reasons for naming names. Two good reasons for telling one and all, Muslims most of all, that our enemy, the enemy of both the present and the future, is the Islamist, the jihadist. By presenting a clear definition and thus a choice, the Muslims of the world can decide to reject the enemy in their midst.

Finally--An End To The "Global War On Terrorism"

Among the idiotic actions of the Bush/Cheney administration was declaring war on terrorism. The notion of fighting a war against a specific tactic was both illogical and distracting. One fights an enemy--not the tactics the enemy employs.

Finally, the abominable circumlocution has been heaved out of the official US lexicon. Counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan gave the old "GWOT" the heave ho in a speech at Georgetown yesterday. The Geek applauds.

The Geek is not ready to give Brennan and the Obama administration kudos for abandoning the term "jihad" and its cognates. Tossing out "jihad" is an exercise in the absurd. It is also lacking in logic.

Brennan admits that our enemy, which he defines as al-Qaeda and akin groups, are seeking the establishment of a "global caliphate." Well, golly-gee, ain't that a religiously motivated goal? You know, Shariah and all that?

Then, gosh, what is wrong with "jihad?"

According to Brennan, the term means the internal struggle on the part of the believer to be an ever better Muslim. He is right. That is one of the word's denotative values. The lesser one.

The greater meaning is armed struggle against the infidels and apostates. It is an obligation on all good Muslims. It is the means by which "The House of Peace" (Islam) will defeat, conquer and occupy "The House of War" (everyone else.)

What is hard to understand about this? It is in the Sacred Writings of Islam as well as all the revered commentaries by Islamic scholars over the centuries. Heck, it is even what the jihadists say they are waging--jihad against the infidels and apostates.

Certainly as an old Mideast hand for the Agency, Mr Brennan is quite well aware of the word, its primary meaning, and its widespread currency. There is no need to attenuate the reality--particularly as Mr Brennan has correctly described the long-term goal of the Islamists including their armed component, the jihadists.

It is not, as Mr Brennan and others would pretend, a matter of elevating criminals to the dignity of religion. Not that at all. Rather it is a matter of correctly identifying the use of religiously rooted terms and concepts to justify criminal acts.

The religious coloration given to criminal acts by quoting Koranic verses, issuing fatwas, and insisting that jihad is incumbent on every true Muslim does not alter the basic nature of the act. Rather, acknowledging the use of concepts and terms from religion by terrorists and other criminals allows the proper parsing between observant Muslims and jihadists.

Getting beyond terms--important as these are in the definition of the enemy--and looking at motivations, Brennan seems to have adopted the socio-economic-political stance. He appears to have bought into the thesis that economic marginalisation, political marginalisation, and poor education are the root causes of Islamist terrorism.

While the poor, the disenfranchised, and ignorant are to be found in the ranks of Islamist jihadist groups including al-Qaeda, so also are the un-poor, the enfranchised, the educated. One need not be a former CIA officer nor a counter-terrorism specialist to know that the overwhelming majority of the leaders, the planners, even the executors of high profile attacks, have been drawn from the ranks of the economically well-founded, the educated, the upwardly mobile, even those who could have a most comfortable and well-integrated existence in their host society.

Even in the Gaza Strip an appreciable number of wannabe martyrs to say nothing of those who command and control them are not the flotsam of the refugee camps, the detritus of war. Even in that armpit of the human race, the chief jihadists, and most of the trigger pullers and suicide vest wearers are not poor, alienated, hopeless.

Social work, psychiatric intervention, economic uplift, educational outreach will not dent the population of actual or potential jihadists and the Islamists who direct their lives--and deaths. It beggars the imagination to believe that a man with the experience of Mr Brennan does not know this.

Islamists and jihadists alike are True Believers as Eric Hoffer defined the term. Their identity as individuals with worth and meaning is derived completely from their acceptance of and subscription to a particular interpretation of Islam. Some of the Islamists and jihadists are also nationalist True Believers. The combination of religious and nationalist True Belief cannot be addressed by mere economic or political reforms. Nor can it be countered by "public diplomacy" and education.

To the Islamist jihadist True Believer, other Muslims, even the most observant who do not share their world view of a global caliphate, Shariah for all, and the use of all means--fair or foul--to attain these goals, are suspect at best. The Islamist jihadist True Believer is more totalistic in his motivation than was even the most committed Nazi or Marxist-Leninist. Get a grip on that ground truth.

Mr Brennan has spent most of his adult life at the Agency. That sort of experience is noted for its breeding of a cynical but realistic view of people and their motivations. It is difficult to accept that Mr Brennan escaped this. Or that he really believes the pap about social work, economic development, and education as even a partial counter to the enemy before us.

However, Mr Brennan's boss, POTUS Obama is probably so naive as to believe that some ACORN style community organizing will end the jihadist (OOPS! Bad Geek! You should have written "violent extremist.") menace. And, as the hoary cliche has it: You have to go along to get along.

Sure, use the soft power tools to peel away the softest of the soft-core support for the Islamist jihadist agenda. That might work. But, for the hard core, the True Believers, there is but one sovereign remedy. They must be killed.

As the white eyes used to say about a chunk of the Geek's ancestors: "The only good Apache is a dead one." Every now and then as in the recent case of Baitullah Mehsud, we do manufacture a good Islamist jihadist.

The real deal is the need to make a whole lot more "good jihadists" not rename them.

When Is A POW Not A POW?

Way back in the bad old days of the Global War on Terror, the Cheney-Bush Administration made one of its characteristically thoughtless decisions. This particular exercise in ill-considered major policy choices was that of inventing a new category of US prisoner, the (unlawful) enemy combatant.

To make darn sure that this decision would receive maximum attention over time, the Cheney-Bush neocon ninnies surrounded the initial ungrounded in reality decision with the barbed wire and bars of Gitmo. In a companion move, the administration authorised the military to create a less visible form of Gitmo at the Bagram base in Afghanistan.

Now the Obama administration and the president himself are in the crossfire between those who decry the very idea of indefinite detention without all the customary formalities provided by the American criminal justice system and those who are certain that any person once dubbed an enemy combatant will be a terrorist forever more. Whipsawed between these two camps of the hyperventilating, it is small wonder that President Obama is searching for a solution less complex than the health care reform proposal.

It is not as if the US has never faced the conundrum of dealing with individuals captured in active combat against American forces in the field who were not the military personnel of state actors. Admittedly, the vast majority of wars waged by the US have been fought against nation-states. It was easy to deal with battlefield captives: Put them behind barbed wire until the war was over and then ship them home.

But, say the apologists for the Cheney-Bush conduct of the Global War on Terror, the folks our troops capture are not the lawful personnel of a state. They are the (unlawful) members of non-state groups waging asymmetrical war against the United States. So, the US has no choice besides holding them in durance-not-at-all-vile in perpetuity or at least until each individual can prove that not only is he not guilty of any crime under US law but also that he no longer represents a danger to the US, its troops or citizens or the those of any other allied state.

Had the laddybucks of the Cheney-Bush team not been so busy in the making of history, they would have discovered without more than the slightest effort that the US government had dealt with (unlawful) enemy combatants before. The most recent taking and holding in preventative detention of (unlawful) enemy combatants came just over a century before the troops toppled Omar in Afghanistan.

The main figure in this episode was the Apache war leader Geronimo. This legendary figure was born near Turkey Creek in what is now New Mexico near where several of the Geek's own ancestors also first saw the light of what would soon be the White Man's land but was then their own quite private turf.

Eighty years later in 1909 Geronimo died in captivity at Fort Sill where he and others taken with him nearly twenty years earlier were being "detained" as that day's version of (unlawful) enemy combatants. Geronimo and his associates had, it is true, spread terror across southwest New Mexico, southeast Arizona, and a swath of Mexico. They killed civilians as well as soldiers in both the US and Mexico. They dragged large American forces on one fruitless chase after another until finally taken prisoner under circumstances, terms, and conditions which are still hazy and hotly debated by historians.

The upshot was that Geronimo and the others taken with him were hauled off to Florida where they died in large numbers from endemic disease as well as the impact of a climate to which even the robust Apache were not accustomed. Later, for reasons which are unclear, some of the Apache were allowed to go to the reservation in Arizona, but Geronimo and some others were transported to Fort Sill and never allowed to go home--even to die.

To say that the continued captivity of Geronimo was unjustifiable as he passed his seventieth birthday is to belabor the obvious. Age and decrepitude as well as the rapid changes in the old Apache ranges of New Mexico and Arizona combined to make the man and his followers completely nonthreatening.

The captivity, the "detention" of these Apaches, passed any legitimate consideration of national security and entered the foul realm of vengeance. The same phenomenon resides explicitly in the Cheney-Bush approach to POWs captured in the Global War On Terror.

Arguably, the US would be in its rights if it held individuals captured on the battlefield, those taken "in arms" against the US or its allies as prisoners of war, according to the requirements of the Geneva Convention. While it is true that these individuals were not in the service of a state actor and, it must be noted, the Geneva Convention did not consider the possibility of non-state actors engaged in war other than resistance forces directing their efforts against an invading or occupying power, this oversight does not enervate the capacity of the Convention's clauses to be extended to al-Qaeda, Taliban, or other groups' members.

This approach implies that the captives might be held until such time as the US declares the war to be over. And, this might never happen. In which case the prisoners of this sort of war would be facing the very real prospect of life long captivity.

As an alternative the US could consider the case of each individual taken "in arms" in order to determine on an individual basis as to whether or not the individual continued to represent a threat to the US, its citizens and troops. If found to be free of sinister impulses, the individual would then be released to his country of origin or initial capture.

The problem--and it is a very real one--is that of determining future intent and capacity. The situation is analogous to that of preventative detention as applied to sex offenders. Current federal law as is the case with many states permits the continued detention of sexual offenders after their criminal sentence has been completed. The reasoning is the protection of society against future possible depredations outweighs the individual's right to freedom.

In principle this balancing act may be correct. In practice, given the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of accurately predicting the future behavior of an individual means case by case travesties will necessarily be committed.

If the psychology of sex offenders admits of little predictive certainty, how much more is this the case with (unlawful) enemy combatants? If Uncle Sam is going to place his finger on the scale so as to maximise the safety and security of Americans, very few POWs will be released, even, like Geronimo, in their dotage.

Recently released Pentagon findings indicate that the screening and release process to date has been far from leakproof. A small percentage of individuals released from Gitmo or Bagram or the assorted POW cages in Iraq have returned to battle. Corpses, documents and verified testimony have shown that more than one in ten of those released return to active combat against the US and its allies.

The most recent proposal to have been floated contemplates a form of preventative detention involving judicial review by a special court first after fourteen days in captivity and then at six month intervals. The prime author of this proposal, Benjamin Wittes, is a well-known and respected student of matters connected with terror and responses thereto. His work is solid, very solid.

But, the proposal suffers from all of the deficiencies associated with preventative detention procedures generally. The recurrent judicial evaluations must be based upon prognostication as to the danger represented by the release of the individual. In addition, the possibility that the process will be polluted by the understandable, all-too-human desire for vengeance against the perpetrator of putatively dastardly acts must be factored in. That which happened to Geronimo can happen--no--will happen again.

The first duty of a government is to protect its citizens against threats of foreign origin. It is that reason which compels erring on the side of caution when it comes to the release of POWs taken in a war against non-state actors. The human rights activists typified by Human Rights First's capo Elisa Massimino must realise this brutal reality.

Al-Qaeda, Taliban and the other Islamist jihadist entities started the current very, very long war. As they are non-state actors (and hopefully will stay that way) only the US and its allies can bring the war to an end. Until and unless that happens members of these groups taken "in arms" must be held in Geneva Convention agreeable captivity.

Those captives who have committed a crime under federal law can and should face trial. This facing of justice must take place with all the customary features afforded by the Federal Courts. If convicted of discrete crimes, these individuals must be incarcerated according to the provisions of the relevant statutes under which they have been charged and convicted. Upon the completion of their sentence these people along with any detainees not charged with a Federal offense must be detained until either the end of hostilities or a clear finding that the individual no longer represented a threat.

The Geek agrees with those who find preventative detention distasteful. The proliferation of laws allowing or even requiring detention after the completion of criminal sentences applied to sex offenders bothers the Geek as it is so easy to err against the individual in the interests, real or alleged, of safety.

The same is true with respect to (unlawful) enemy combatants. As the case of Geronimo shows the introduction of vengeance is too easy. The prediction of future behavior is too uncertain to permit of an easy conscience when the situation of POWs in this new and brutal form of war is contemplated.

However, when all relevant factors are considered, the need of the US government to protect the lives and property of its citizens overwhelms any presumed harm caused the individual by his having made the choice to take up arms against us. The Obama administration realises this and is willing to take the heat from those who are overly bothered by the necessary consequences of taking effective action on the behalf of We the People.

If his choice results in his spending decades, perhaps his entire life, behind barbed wire, that is unfortunate. But, he made the choice.

Such can be the will of Allah.