James, thanks for the link. It's an interesting problem, trying to tease out the contradictions in Anon's platform. I'm mulling over issues about the post I saw - was it here? - the other day about how the Red Brigades only had a few dozen guys and the IRA a couple hundred, but they tied the Italian and British governments in knots for years. I wonder if, rather than the "50,000 Al Qaeda terrorists" that get tossed around, the hard core of committed anti-US jihadists is more like 500 (exclusive of guerrillas in Iraq). What would that mean, in terms of our ability to eliminate the threat.

Where I tentatively go with it comes back to the IRA. There were X active fighters. But everybody in the battleground neighborhoods left their front and back doors unlocked so that the fighters could run through their houses to get away from the British. They did this out of some complex of sympathy and fear that probably varied from house to house. Years later, I was reading an article about the drug wars in DC and saw a reference to the exact same phenomenon - people leaving their houses open so dealers escaping from the police could get through.

I think the key to beating Islamist terrorism may involve getting the bulk of the Muslim populace to lock its doors at night, metaphorically speaking. You could argue that force (general war a la Iraq) is a way to scare them into doing this, but I think that approach WON'T work, for various reasons.

Insugencies are damned near impossible to defeat, especially by democracies, simply because the actions needed to defeat them are both unacceptable domestically and likely to gain more support for the insurgents.

And even the violently-inclined among them have their own problems - they're likely to be madder at Israel or the government of Indonesia or the Russians or whichever infidel impinges on them most directly. Some people will buy Bin Laden's sales pitch that the US is the puppeteer behind all the local problems, some won't.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the grievances between us and the Muslim world are far older than 9/11--most of us just woke up to them then.

The significant thing that has changed is the emergence of an exceptional leader capable of more effectively organizing our dedicated enemies and setting them to work against us.

Such leadership is no more common there than it is here, which is why it was and still remains vitally important to capture or kill Osama. We are actually further from that than ever due to the mishandling of the War On Terror--but even than could be turned around with the right policies shaped by clear thinking.

Furthermore, the worry that reducing our dependence on Middle Eastern oil would be interpreted as "weakness" on our part is a piece of the terminally muddled thinking which has hobbled us.

The reasons for doing this are part of the "best interests of the citizenry" which you brought up on another post. (If you doubt this spend a little time looking into how China has been involved in driving oil prices higher--we have adversaries and competitors beyond the Middle East.)

More generally, it matters very little whether the "jihadists" think us weak or strong, since they will attack in any case and are immune to intimidation. What does matter is whether we can make policy by choice and not by constraint in response to it. Oil dependence has prevented this from the get-go and should be abandoned.

As far as our unwavering suppport for Israel is concerned, there are two dimensions to it. One is the natural ideological sympathy for a democracy however draconian and authoritarian its actual behavior. (If it pleases you better you, can insert the words "firm" and "tough" in the preceeding sentence.)

This sympathy is quite real, and largely justified. But the unfortunate thing about the actual relation of the pro-Israeli lobby to our domestic politics is that they have a stranglehold on it so complete that even this natural and justified sympathy cannot be rationally discussed.

I, for one, also don't think that this stranglehold is in the "best interests of the citizenry" however sympathetic I may be to Israeli democracy.

It is time we asked the question openly of why a country sitting on 200 covert nuclear warheads with the countries on its borders clearly pacified beyond any real level of threat has to be allowed to do ++anything++ it pleases, without serious criticism, in the interest of its "survival"?

Beyond this, the principle we should seek is the capacity to set policy by choice and not constraint, and to use force sparingly but effectively so we always have the option of force--as we will clearly not when Iran soon goes nuclear, largely because of our pointless invasion of Iraq.

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