Uh oh - An Enemy With Intelligence

As if things weren't bad enough, now it turns out that the self-styled "jihadists" are more than just a bunch of camel drivers hiding in caves and gnawing on rancid sheep shanks. Well, we couldn't help thinking that the ham-handed crudity of the 9-11 attacks was the most high-tech, sophisticated thing they had to offer. But now a report comes out that "the type of Islamic ideology that motivates terrorists is more sophisticated, complex and difficult to fight than suspected in the immediate aftermath of 9/11." In other words, these guys have brains and they know how to use them. "Much jihadist literature is written with intellectual brilliance." What? And here we've been led to believe they only communicated with a few grunts and hand signals. And what's worse, "Literature produced during the Marxist and fascist movements in the 20th century 'doesn't compete with the ideology of jihad in terms of potential longevity'". So wait a second -- do you mean that American academicians are going to have to throw out the works of Lenin and Stalin and start pushing jihadist literature instead, purely on intellectual grounds? This is certainly a low blow to Western pride. Not only that, but the Internet plays a vital role in the spread of these ideas. In other words we gave them the tool, and now they're using it against us. Oh, the humiliation! It almost sounds like we're back in 1941, dealing with an intelligent enemy.

The real problem, of course, is that we're dealing with an enemy -- an alleged one, at least -- with actual ideas, and ideals, and an amazing amount of will power to carry them out, not least being the willingness to mount suicide attacks at the drop of a hat. Now, the suicide part we've seen before, with Japan -- and the only way to deal with that was with pure brute force. The idea part brings back shades of Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism, and yes, we dealt with those with brute force some of the time, with threats and intimidation some of the time, but also with ideas, and ideals, of our own -- not only by way of demonstration, but as a means of inspiring the troops and gathering civilian support. In this, of course, there was always a delicate balance between stated ideals and the suspicion that certain people were accumulating a lot of power, and a lot of money, as a fringe benefit of the wars in question. But ideals seemed to carry the day -- and in retrospect, they most assuredly did carry the day. Who can name the "Daddy Warbucks" characters of any of our major wars up through Korea? But I still remember the Dow Chemical protests during Vietnam, and now we have Halliburton, Blackwater, and a host of other profiteers. Even at that, ideas could prevail -- if we had any. And I suppose if you attend enough Memorial Day parades and military funerals, you could get the impression that America is still an idea-driven society as manifested in its foreign ventures. But I find it to be all a bit of a veneer at this point. We "cling" -- to steal a term from the Democratic primaries -- to certain ideas in order to convince ourselves that what this country is doing is good. But we protest too much at times, and it all begins to sound sort of hysterical, i.e. it sounds like we're "in denial". Well, I'll tell ya, folks, the jihadists are not in denial at all -- they know what they want and why they want it, and this knowledge runs very deep. Our politicians can only hope that, this time around, "ideas" _don't_ prevail.

The report is at http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/search/s_572770.html