The summer so far: North Korea fired several rockets into the Pacific Ocean; the intercontinental-range Taepodong test flopped. Iran thumbed its nose at international calls to halt its uranium enrichment program, violence increased in Baghdad, Taliban stepped up attacks in Afghanistan to disrupt the NATO take-over there, the Israel is still conducting a military campaign by Israel against Hezbollah after years of provocation. And the summer ain’t over yet.

There are all sorts of implications for the United States. One is how we can better go about accomplishing our objective of ridding ourselves of the scourge of terrorism. Can we do that in a manner closer to how we achieved the demise of communism as opposed to the manner that we destroyed fascism? How do we “bring down that wall” more or less peacefully as opposed to falling into a necessity of all out total war? For that is the difference - we beat communism with minimal and intermittent violence (not to say there was none; Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan etc. attest that there was) and we beat fascism only with total violence.

Unfortunately the prelude to our fighting the War on Terror has more similarities to the prelude to World War II than it does to the years of fighting communism.

Consider the decades following World War I. In the 1920s we experienced the peace that followed a “war to end all wars.” As usual in American history we dramatically drew down our Army. And during the 1930s we failed to build up our military even as Hitler and Japan began to demonstrate the threats they were to the civilized world. The League of Nations set a precedent of inaction and bumbling that today’s UN is all too adequately fulfilling. After a few years of scattered violence in Asia and Europe the civilized world woke up nearly too late.

Consider the world following World War II. Though war weary our eyes remained wide open. We understood that the threat of fascism had been replaced by communism. We maintained our military, increased our capabilities, continued our wartime draft and engaged the enemy where they broke or attempted to break our containment of them. In some cases we fared better than in some others but overall we held. Eventually communism imploded upon itself and was defeated without the scale of violence required in WWII. This was known in the 1980s as “peace through strength” and even while it was working many misguided folks derided it.

Weary in the 1990s from the Cold War, instead of acknowledging the new threat of terrorism, we fell back into the trap we fell into in the 1920s. This time it was said that “history was over” (regards to philosopher Francis Fukuyama) and that we had a “peace dividend” to cash in. Once again, we drew down our military while a threat was developing and looming. Today we find ourselves significantly and constantly engaged in war across the world with an operations tempo not known during the Cold War.

Fortunately, the war level is not at that of WWII - not yet anyway. The issue now is how do we still achieve victory before we find ourselves in a total war of WWIII? We had a chance following 9/11 to significantly increase our military but we failed to capitalize on it. Today it would be harder. But we need to go back to a peace through strength approach. It is a moral imperative if we want to rid the world of the evil of terrorism with the minimum amount of violence possible.

Yes, small mobile lethal armies can defeat the likes of Saddam and the Taliban but it takes boots on the ground - lots of them - to win the peace. Remember that it took a million soldiers each in Japan and Germany - for ten years - to rebuild. We saw in Afghanistan during my tour of service the difference it makes when you can leave units in a single place for an extended time. It is dramatic. It is all about building trust and relationships, which is particularly critical in the Middle East and Central Asian cultures. When we come through a village for a week and don’t return for another month or more, the locals have no reason to assist us - their lives are on the line for cooperating.

When Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander in Afghanistan during my tour there, adopted the approach of extended stays in single places, we suddenly went from hearing a majority of that region’s reports addressing rocket attacks and IEDs to a majority of that region’s reports addressing weapons cache turn-ins, increased intelligence reporting, and more effective use - and results - of aid funds. The problem was that we didn’t have enough troops to do this in more places. It takes lots of boots on ground in lots of places for lots of extended time to build trust and accountability.

Furthermore it is not just about winning violent conflicts - it is about winning our political aims through deterrence, which is changing the behavior of the enemy by their fear of what we can do before we have to do it. Today we are feared less and less. North Korea and Iran both know we are stretched to our military limits. So does al-Qaeda. So do sometime allies such as Russia and China. And so do our regular allies. Their current behavior demonstrates these perceptions.

Our enemies must fear us. Our sometime allies must believe that they should act with us instead of against us to ensure their national interests. Our regular allies must be able to depend on us so they can commit to us. One thing that has proven to accomplish these objectives is a large and strong military. The stronger it is, the less often we will have to use it. The Cold War proved it.

It is not our perception that matters in deterrence - it is the enemy’s perception that matters. Without having crunched the numbers it can also be safely assumed that it would be cheaper to maintain a large force that is intermittently used than the one we have now that is always engaged - certainly it would be in terms of lives. Finally, when we do go in then we must go in heavy and with enough forces still available to keep other threats at bay. We must win when we have to and deter other times.

As we look at Just War conditions we have to consider what other effective means we can take to achieve political aims short of war. Strength brings peace. Increasing our military to Cold War levels is an imperative - a moral imperative. That will allow us to achieve our aims without having to commit to greater levels of combat as this Long War continues even as we now may be faced with having to increase our commitment of forces in the short term.

So the key to deterrence and victory in the long term is having a military large and strong enough to never raise the question of readiness, either in our minds, our allies’ minds but, more importantly, in the minds of our enemies. Their perception is the perception that counts when it comes to deterrence. And peace through strength - a large and robust military - will save lives, preserve security and offer hope. It is time to do what Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s - build our military.

The AP:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — A U.S. Army sergeant died of wounds suffered in Iraq, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.

The death — along with two others announced Tuesday — brought to 2,000 the number of U.S. military members who have died since the start of the Iraq conflict in 2003.

Staff Sgt. George T. Alexander, Jr., 34, of Killeen, Texas, died Saturday at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, of wounds suffered Oct. 17, when a bomb exploded near his vehicle in the central Iraqi city of Samarra, the Defense Department said.

It has been long anticipated that the antiwar factions would use this benchmark as the occasion for renewed demonstrations.

Update: Reuters:

The U.S. army said the 2,000 American dead was an artificial mark, not a milestone.

“It is an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives,” said U.S army spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Steven A. Boylan.

If you have seen the movie Batman Begins you know that the Bad Guys employ a microwave emitter to make the water in Gotham’s pipes boil, exploding the city’s water system and bringing their Evil Plan to success.

Of course, any microwave emitter - which every microwave oven has - powerful enough to boil water in a pipe would also boil the blood of every person standing nearby, a point the screenplay seems to have overlooked.

But not the US Army, which will deploy one or more big microwave emitters to Iraq next year for riot control.

The Active Denial System weapon, classified as “less lethal” by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The idea is that people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

The ADS’s weapon is literally a heat ray. The ADS is being characterized as a “less-than-lethal” weapon, but it depends on its targets moving out of the beam area. However, the heat ray may be so powerful it could cause permanent injury before targeted people can get away. If a riotous crowd is beamed and turns panicky, some people might be caught in a crush or trampled underfoot and literally be cooked to death or at least badly injured. So I would guess that employment directives will specifiy that the heat ray be fired for brief periods of only a few seconds, then turned off for a period before being turned back on.

Sandia National Laboratories claims, though, that,

This technology is capable of rapidly heating a person’s skin to achieve a pain threshold that has been demonstrated by AFRL [Air Force Research Laboratory] human subject testing to be very effective at repelling people, without burning the skin or causing other secondary effects. …

[The beam] penetrates approximately 1/64 of an inch into human skin tissue, where nerve receptors are concentrated. Within seconds, the beam will heat the exposed skin tissue to a level where intolerable pain is experienced and natural defense mechanisms take over.

“Natural defense mechanisms” means run away, of course. Sandia is a gummint agency, so natch they wouldn’t phrase it, “intolerable pain is experienced and the victim runs blindly away, screaming in pain and terror.”

This intense heating sensation stops only if the individual moves out of the beam’s path or the beam is turned off. The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan or the intense radiant heat from a fire. Burn injury is prevented by limiting the beam’s intensity and duration.

On the whole, this weapon seems more effective than tear gas and is by any measure to be preferred for riot control over using firearms.

I reported June 30 that one of the American soldiers slain in the shoot-down of the MH-47 helicopter in Afghanistan was the son-in-law of my town’s mayor.

Yesterday, James W. “Tre” Ponder III (I do not know his rank) was memorialized in a ceremony at Fort Campbell, Ky., where he was stationed as a member of the 160th Special Operation Aviation Regiment.

Other members of the regiment who died were also memorialized.

Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staf, said today that the campaign in western Iraq would be slow going and said that patience is called for. In another piece, Wretchard writes of reports that the enemy knew ahead of time the attack would be launched (almost certainly true, IMO) and that therefore, “the Marines have hit an empty sack and that the insurgents had escaped prior to the assault, leaving only those who chose martyrdom to stand and fight.” Wretchard thinks not and explains why.

As Chesty Puller’s landing boat churned toward the Inchon shore in 1950, he turned to a reporter near him and motioned to the F4U aircraft overhead firing rockets at North Korean positions.

“See that?” Chesty yelled over the noise. “Every plane here flew off the decks of the carriers out in deeper water. So much for the experts who said after the last war that carriers are finished.”

One notes that 55 years later, the US has the largest carrier fleet in the world. But Chesty need not have referred to aircraft carriers to find spectacularly wrong predictions:

“I predict that large-scale amphibious operations will never occur again.” — General Omar N. Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, October 1949

“We’ll never have any more amphibious operations. That does away with the Marine Corps. And the Air Force can do anything the Navy can do nowadays, so that does away with the Navy.” — Truman’s Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson, to Admiral Richard L. Connally in 1949

The “end of this or that” crowd is still practicing, only this time the predicted death concerns tanks. Writes Austin Bay,

In the original Rumsfeld program, heavy armor, like the M1 tank, was a “legacy system” — an archaic technology. Rumsfeld’s Whiz Kids weren’t the only ones who thought the tank passe. An Army buddy tells the story of a could-be Democratic appointee he escorted through DOD briefings. The pipe-smoking pontificator kept saying, “The tank’s dead.” My infantry pal finally turned to him and said: “Yes sir, the tank’s a dinosaur, but it’s the baddest dinosaur on the battlefield. You face one.”

In November’s battle in Fallujah the Army provided most of the tanks and the Marines most of the infantry. One Marine battalion commander wrote that everyone wanted more tanks. When the Marines came up against an enemy strongpoint in the city, they waited until a tank or two came up. Within five minutes, the commander said, that little firefight was over. But sometimes they couldn’t get tanks in time, so they had to go in the old-fashioned way. That’s when the Marines suffered almost all their casualties.

This could ruin your whole morning.

Strategy page also has some dope on a new Air Force bomb called HardSTOP,

… designed to destroy the inside of target buildings, without damaging adjacent buildings. HardSTOP is a GPS guided half ton cluster bomb. The GPS and computer in the bomb control the dispersal of 54 smaller bomblets, that are designed to penetrate the roof of a building and explode inside. The bomb software can be programmed to distribute the bomblets in an area as small as 20 feet in diameter, or up to 110 feet. When the bomblets go through the roof, they explode. Some of the bomblets can be programmed to go through one or more floors before exploding. With HardSTOP, the risk of damage to nearby buildings is minimal. Actually, the building the bomblets hit won’t be damaged much, as the small explosive charge in each bomblet is designed to kill people, not destroy a building. In effect, HARDStop puts 54 large hand grenades inside a building, allowing nearby friendly troops to quickly move in and take possession.

Sort of the conventional equivalent of the “neutron bomb,” I guess.

Operation Matador is the largest anti-terrorist operation in Iraq since the Army and Marines cleaned out Fallujah last November. It began today, with the objective of breaking the backs of the insurgencies operating from towns and villages near the Syrian border. Bill Roggio has details, including the report that the bad men are trying to stand their ground and fight (they have nowhere to flee to) which means US and Iraqi forces are cleaning their clocks. See also Belmont Club.

Don’t forget that fighting continues in Afghanistan, too.

One happy outcome of this operation, besides simply reducing the number of terrorists (100 reported killed just now on news) and diminishing their havens, is that it may drive the Baathist insurgents, known as FREs (for “former regime elements“), away from their alliance of convenience with the Islamist terrorists. The Baathists are secular-oriented socialists with little truck for the strict religious fundamentalism of al Qaeda. They have been working together only because they each hate America and democracy, but at bottom they hate each other, too. In fact, were they to succeed in dislodging the United States from Iraq (ain’t gonna happen) at some time thereafter they would turn on one another.

In fact, in February 2003, Osama bin Laden called upon Iraqis to fight the Americans, even by suicide attacks if necessary. Was he trying to save Saddam’s skin or his Baathist government? Not at all. In fact, in his Feb. 11 statement broadcast on al Jazeera TV, bin Laden openly called Baathists “infidels” but admitted he was forced to make a pact with them:

Socialists are infidels wherever they are. . . [but] it does not hurt that in current circumstances, the interests of Muslims coincide with the interests of the socialists in the war against crusaders.

There’s an old toast I learned in the Army whose clean version goes like this:

Here’s to you and here’s to me,
may we never disagree.
But if we do,
to heck with you.
Here’s to me!

One effect of Operation Matador may be to fracture the uneasy alliance between Islamists and Baathists. Why? Most of al Qaeda’s fighters in Iraq are foreign to the country while almost all the FREs are native Iraqis. The FREs have the option, distasteful as it is to them, of asking for quarter and deciding to integrate into a free Iraq; I think that when they realize that victory on their terms is impossible they will take that course. But al Qaeda can’t and won’t. At some point, I hope, the FREs may offer to finger al Qaeda personnel and locations in exchange for clemency of some kind.

The director of operations for the joint staff in the Pentagon just said on a news broadcast that the insurgents being fought in Operation Matador are well armed, better trained than any fought before, and well equipped with uniforms and flak vests. This makes them more difficult to defeat, but it may also make them more confident they can prevail. This will be their undoing, for there is no force anywhere in the world that can hope to prevail against the US Army and US Marine Corps in conventional ground combat.

Update: Belmont Club’s maps show that US Marines have secured the high ground to the west of the terrorist strongholds, cutting off an egress to Syria. This is smart military tactics, but I wonder whether one reason the bad guys are fighting so hard is because they know they can’t flee to Syria in any event. If I were Bashar Assad I would be very reluctant to give America an excuse to conduct combat operations on Syrian soil, which we would have every right to do in hot pursuit of a fleeing enemy - a right concretized in international law and practice for many centuries.

The San Diego Union Tribune has a good rollup of the action, including Syria’s claim that “it is arresting would-be infiltrators and doing what it can to control the border with Iraq.”

Also, Blackfive has some thoughts about just whom the enemy is - it seems US forces went in presuming they would be mostly al Zarqawi- affiliated, hence Islamists if not outright al Qaeda members. Yet, as the Tribune story points out, 10 insurgents surrendered after being pounded by Marine fire - about which Chester, a former Marine officer, blogs,

…Seems to reinforce the idea that the bad guys in this fight are trained military personnel, either from maybe Saddam’s old forces, or from Syria, rather than Jihadists — though its probably safe to assume a mix. Ten surrendering certainly doesn’t sound like anyone eager to get to paradise like we’ve come to expect…

As I said above, if the enemy is a conventionally-trained force, that’s not bad news although it does perhaps forbode more harsh fighting. They have no air support, no imagery systems, no significant indirect-fire weapons except mortars, and probably limited communications capability. They have obviously worked hard at developing effective defenses of urban buidings - see here - but the Marines learned in Fallujah that the M1 Abrams tank is pretty much a cure-all for fighting defenders in buildings.

(The Marines are much under-armored compared to the US Army, though. One Marine officer wrote before the Iraq invasion,

A fully mechanized Army Division is simply mind-boggling. … Marines are tough but we don’t win the big wars. The Army wins the big wars. They do it because they are massive and can bring an incomprehensible amount of firepower to a fight.

The most important fact to remember is that one Army Mechanized Division has more firepower than most countries.

But unlike Fallujah last November, there seems to be precious little Army armor, if any, in Operation Matador.)

The enemy’s lack of support, intelligence and command-and-control systems doesn’t render them helpless or ineffective by any means. It does mean they started the battle with a huge deficit of combat power relative to US forces. Commanders on the ground caution that tough fighting lies ahead, but they, their troops and - crucially - the peoples of both America and Iraq know that our ending point is victory, however long it takes.

Neiother does it bode well for al Qaeda as a whole that, ethnic rifts are tearing at al Qaeda.

American and Pakistani intelligence agents are exploiting a growing rift between Arab members of al-Qaida and their Central Asian allies, a fissure that’s tearing at the network of Islamic extremists as militants compete for scarce hideouts, weapons and financial resources, counterterrorism officials say.

This develppment probably will have no effect on the enemy in Operation Matador, but it doesn’t offer long-term encouragement for al Qaeda’s long-term sustainability in Iraq, either.

(My dog in the hunt is this fact, so the more pacification that takes place now the less apprehensive I am about this fall.)

Strategy Page reports that Sunni Arabs are getting steadily more disenchanted with al Qaeda: “In a war of symbols, blowing up Moslem women and children is not a winning tactic.” Islamist terrorism remains endemic in Iraq, of course, where last year slightly more than 30 percent of all such attacks in the world took place - well behind India, believe it or not, where 45 percent of the attacks occurred.

But 2004 was a bad year for us good guys.

2004 marked the highest number of significant incidents of terrorism since the intelligence community started keeping statistics in 1968. (An incident is counted as significant if an attack results in the death, injury or kidnapping of one or more persons or property damage in excess of $10,000). Attacks jumped from 175 in 2003 to 651 in 2004. This surpasses the previous high of 273 significant attacks in 1985.

The bad news kept on coming. One thousand nine hundred and seven (1907) people died in international terrorist attacks last year. This marks the second highest death toll since 1968; falling short of the infamous record of 2001.

To which the Washington Post adds,

The data provided to the congressional aides also showed terrorist attacks doubling over the previous year in Afghanistan, to 27 significant incidents, and in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, where attacks rose to about 45, from 19 the year before. Also occurring last year were such deadly attacks as the seizure of a school in Beslan, Russia, by Chechen militants that resulted in at least 330 dead, and the Madrid train bombings that left nearly 200 dead.

So well more than one-fourth of those killed in Islamist terrorism died in two spectacular attacks. That means that the rest of the attacks, though numerically greater, were relatively less deadly, an observation that is borne out by experience in Iraq, according to recent statements by Joint Chiefs of Staf Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers.

Not all is rosy for the terrorists, either. Bill Roggio reports of a”recently intercepted letter from one “Abu Asim al-Yemeni al-Qusaymi, a purported representative of Al-Qaida’s Committee in Iraq, … believed to be addressed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” al Qaeda’s head in Iraq. Among others things the letter (if authentic) makes this outrageous claim:

The entire Islamic nation is waiting to have an Islamic state implementing the rules of Allah, and are waiting for those men who are going to protect their dignity that are being abused everyday.

Well, I already covered that fiction so I won’t belabor it. What the letter goes on to say is a real peek inside the Islamists fighting in Iraq. Bill continues,

The fighters believe they are being sacrificed unnecessarily, and have been ordered to do so by Zarqawi himself, and are also complaining of their treatment by their own leaders. …

al-Qusaymi then longs for the good old days of Fallujah, where Zarqawi was free to openly visit the troops and care for their needs. It is unclear if the “brothers that were tortured and jailed” he is referring to are jailed by local police, tribes or al Qaeda commanders, but either way, Zarqawi no longer has the freedom of movement to obtain their freedom. This is a sore spot with al-Qusaymi and likely with the rest of the rank and file, and demonstrates that Fallujah was an important sanctuary for al Qaeda:

Who is to blame, should it be the oppressor or the oppressed? We have brothers that were tortured and jailed. They are harmless and nobody is meeting with them or asks about them. It is unlike the case in Fallujah where you used to come and visit us, and we enjoyed your company. The situation has changed dramatically and that is not acceptable to Allah.

When al Qaeda’s leaders start beating each other up with what they think Allah wants it can’t bode well for their unity. There is also this tidbit from the letter in which al-Qusaymi complains about the al Qaeda in Iraq’s small-unit leaders:

We have commanders that are not capable of being good leaders. We are not accusing them without reason but we have tested them and found them incapable.

The kind of tactical incapability al-Qusaymi refers to may explain some recent terrorist attacks that baffled American officers:

Strategists who keep close tabs on the war in Iraq are scratching their heads over a sudden shift to large-scale attacks on American bases by the insurgents who heretofore have primarily bedeviled U.S. forces with their roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks.

In one event 100 terrorists struck the Marine base at Husaybah, attempting to blow a hole in the perimter with a fire truck packed with explosives.

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Butler shook himself from the rubble of a suicide truck bombing. He staggered to the ledge of his three-story guard tower and stared into a cloud of white smoke. Butler, 21, of Altoona, Pa., was temporarily deafened by the blast, but he recalled what came next with cinematic clarity. The white smoke parted to reveal a clean red fire engine. It sped past a mural bidding travelers “Goodbye From Free Iraq” and hurtled directly toward Butler, who shot at the fire engine until it exploded about 40 yards away from him.

After this the enemy tried to storm the base but were repelled after suffering 34 killed and wounded. This attack came not long after 70-80 terrorists launched a fairly conventional attack againt Abu Ghraib prison where they lost 50. (Some American officers think this attack was the work of Baathist dead enders, not al Qaeda.) At any rate, such attacks are bloodlettings for the insurgents.

American commanders long ago recognized the ability of the terrorist leaders to adapt quickly to changing conditions and exploit any perceived weakness. Some U.S. commanders privately hoped that this day would come when the poorly trained terrorists would go head-to-head with American regulars. If terrorists come out in the open in large numbers, it makes it easier to find them and kill them.

The insurgent and terrorist leaders score points for being able to pull a company-size attack force together quickly in so open and barren a terrain, and to plan and coordinate a complicated, precisely timed assault. But it’s good their fighters are all volunteers for martyrdom. When a hundred of them charge a hard-core battalion of 700-plus Marines, that’s what awaits.

(The writer of the cited story, btw, is Joe Galloway, who both reported and fought at the battle of the Ia Drang Valley in 1965 in Vietnam and was the only reporter awarded the Bronze Star Medal during the Vietnam War, and that for bravery under fire.)

Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman argues that the main reason the violence has risen is because the perpetrators understand their side is losing.

But these bombings are also signs of the deeper struggle that the U.S. attempt to erect democracy in Iraq has touched off. My friend Raymond Stock, the biographer and translator of Naguib Mahfouz and a longtime resident of Cairo, argues that we are seeing in Baghdad, Cairo and Riyadh the modern incarnation of several deeply rooted and interlocking wars. These are, he said, the war within Islam between Traditionalists and Rationalists, which dates back to Baghdad in the ninth century; the struggle between ardent Sunnis and Shiites, which dates back to succession battles in early Islam; and the confrontation between Islam and the West, which dates back to the Arab conquests of the seventh century and the Crusades.

In the modern incarnation of each of these struggles, members of the Sunni-Traditionalist-jihadist minority are losing. And the more that becomes evident, the more violent they will become - because their whole vision is in danger of being repudiated by fellow Arabs and Muslims. “The Iraqi election was a total shock to the militant jihadist forces in the Arab-Muslim world,” Mr. Stock noted. “They warned Iraqis that ‘you vote - you die,’ and instead millions of Iraqis said back to them, ‘We vote - we decide.’ ” And the thing they are deciding on is not to be pro-American, not to be pro-Western, but to try to build their own Arab society in a way that will be open to modernism and interpretations of Islam that encourage innovation, adaptation and progress.

The jihadist forces hate this notion.

Which is a bit of an understatement. And to which James Joyner adds,

Despite years of propaganda from dictators, mullahs, and biased journalists poisoning their minds, average Muslims are rejecting the jihadist call. That the terrorists are willing to murder their own indiscriminately is a sign of desperation.

And I hate to toot my own horn (well, a little), but it does seem to me that the rest of the commentati are finally awakening to what I wrote in November 2003: Al Qaeda’s primary war is against other Muslims - the Muslim Civil War is the most important struggle in the world today:

Al Qaeda’s war is not only against the West; in fact, I say that they are not even principally fighting against the West. Their primary war is against other Muslims. What is at stake are lives, human freedom and the very definition of Islam itself.

As I pointed out in August 2002, the Muslim world is faced with defining what Islam really is. If al Qaeda is not in fact the keeper of the true faith, then the rest of the Muslims must unite to destroy al Qaeda just to ensure the survival of Islam itself. They need to understand that the present crisis is not primarily that of Islamists against the West, it is the Islamists against everybody who does not toe their line.

The rejection of al Qaeda was pronounced on Jan. 30 when Iraqis went to the polls despite al Qaeda’s murderous threats.