This harks back to the days of "islamofascism" and the republican candidates loudly complaining about how the democrats didn't use the phrase. John McCain has since stopped using it (I think) but it would be interesting to know if he still thinks there is an Islamofascist threat. It also highlights McCain's confusion about the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

"is we have to hunt down those who would resort to violence to move their agenda, their ideology forward."

didn't obama's FISA vote make this much less likely for certain well connected American ideologists?

You've just proven that you and Obama have no idea what AL QEADA is.

Al QEADA means THE BASE. Osama Bin Laden didn't want to build a giant terrorist group in Afghanistan, his plan was to fund, train and arm OTHER terrorists groups who wanted to attack the West. You did not have to be AL QEADA to receive support, funding, training and help carrying out terrorists attacks.

Once you received your training in Pak/Afghan camps, you returned to your country of orgin until needed.

In fact, as the left has repeatedly pointed out....the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11 were not from Afghanistan, most were from Saudi Arabia, Iraqs southern neighbor, and they were Arabs, not Afghans.

They were also middle class, not the poor street kids Obama thinks become terrorists.

Iraq and Al Qeada funded and trained the same bad guys. For instance, both Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden provided training and funding for The Army of Muhammed, a Bahrain based terrorist group organized to attack American interests.

Also, Saddam Huusein put money into Egypt’s Islamic Jihad. One leader of IJ that Westerners can easily name was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is Osama’s chief deputy and primary mouthpiece to the world.

So Saddanm Hussein was funding Zawahiri's activities.

Of course this is all lost on the left..so why bother.

Romney's use of the word "caliphate" was a sure sign he was being disingenuous.

But what we also want to do is to shrink the pool of potential recruits. And that involves engaging the Islamic world rather than vilifying it, and making sure that we understand that not only are those in Islam who would resort to violence a tiny fraction of the Islamic world, but that also, the Islamic world itself is diverse.

And that lumping together Shia extremists with Sunni extremists, assuming that Persian culture is the same as Arab culture, that those kinds of errors in lumping Islam together result in us not only being less effective in hunting down and isolating terrorists, but also in alienating what need to be our long-term allies on a whole host of issues.

If we have allies over there why do Democrats have this weird unworkabel unrealistic ambition to starve them out by cutting them off from all of there income. Think energy independence.

One thing for sure...Both Islamic fascists and Obama get very mad at satiracal depictions.

Coincidence??

Sure-fire steps to solve our problem with "Islamofascism"--

1. End the illegal, immoral, unsuccessful occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

2. Don't invade Iran or any other place for that matter.

3. End all US monetary and military support for Israel.

4. Stop supporting other criminal regimes in the region, such as Saudi Arabia.

5. Stop the crazy rhetoric vilifying Muslims and others "we" don't like.

You can take steps to attempt to limit your conflicts with others but, ultimately, it requires action and a decision by the others to actually limit the scope of your conflict.

Ezra - Which of those things do you think we shouldn't do - or do you differ only/mostly as to means?

Patton --

You seriously think Al Qaeda and, say, Iran or Hezbollah, are working together in some sort of concerted action?

Your point of the 9/11 terrorists being Saudi instead of Afghan overlooks the fact that citizens from both these countries are susceptible to appeals to a particular brand of Sunni extremism. Saddam's funding of Islamic terrorist groups was part of his realpolitik against his old enemy, Iran. Islamic Jihad, fyi, is one of the most pro-active charitable and social welfare groups in Egypt and elsewhere. Does it indulge in terrorism? Yes it does, but there's a very good argument to be made that it was the militant secularism practiced by the Egyptian government, in its drive to be a modern, secular republic, without understanding the role of Islam in Muslim societies, that drove it's members into terrorism.

Does that sound familiar to the point Ezra's making, about the US’ approach to the problem of Islamic fundamentalism?!

so why bother.

Why indeed, Patton, why indeed.

Patton is right, in a way, but the conclusion that he draws doesn't follow. Al-Qaeda doesn't exist, at least not in anything like the way we are used to thinking of organizations as existing. So as long as we are inventing things we might as well invent something called Islamofascism.

But of course this doesn't make the war in Iraq or Afghanistan any more rational or justified. Patton and Romney and their ilk want to define the enemy in the broadest possible terms. Fine, okay. But what you have just done then is to sign us up for a battle we cannot possibly win. Unless you believe the United States is omniscient and omnipotent, which for a while people like Patton and Romney probably did actually believe but which, post-Iraq, even they can't really believe any more.

The Grand Strategy of relinquishing Israel's (our 51st state's) "Palestinian Empire" is that as long as our Mideastern cultural/political appendage continues to move in on Islamic people next door it will be the prime exciter of the kind of people are most likely to bring terror to our shores -- and that it is more urgent for our homeland security that Israel to contract its wandering population to its legitimate borders than anything we might do or not do in Iraq (or, ultimately, Afghanistan).

But television rules the motivations of our progressives who have to watch war on television every day but whose eyes don't have to view Palestinian sufferings very often nor the hatred it puts into the hearts of their supporters.

Come to think of it, watching war on television agitates our academic progressives (includes media) more than the INFINITELY! greater tragedy that 25% of American workers now earn less than LBJ's minimum wage of 1968 (double the average income later). You cannot even find that story out there anywhere.

Turn of your TV, so-called lefties, and regain your perspective.

Shrink the pool of recruits? That's disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest. No one yet understands how people are recruited into it, but if the 9/11 perpetrators are any sample, the recruits DO NOT COME from slums, poor families, hopelessness or people who were dispossessed by Jews. Got it?

Republican rhetoric is so unrealizable that it can actually legitimate an under-cover cynical pragmatism. Iran-Contra for example. A comparable example: how the anti-fascist crusade rhetoric of 1930s Soviet foreign policy (which wowed its chosen audience)shielded the search for an accommodation with Nazi Germany.

Ezra—

I agree with your distinction between the Left’s approach to terrorism and that of the Right. However, framing it in terms of scope I think inadvertently feeds into the Right’s characterization of the Left’s approach as ineffectual. This results from framing the difference in re results rather than methodologies. The crucial difference, it seems to me, is that the Left’s approach is grounded in an insistence on acting on accurate information, while the Right, as always attuned to the projection of tough-guy imagery and indifferent (at best) to evidence, takes an attitude reminiscent of Arnaud-Armaury (the Abbot of Citeaux)—”Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

Needless to say, we’ve already seen how well that works.

Anonymous,
The whole Palestinian nation is being dispossessed (thanks for the phrase), settlement by settlement, by our 51st state. :-)-

The repubs want to make the threat seem as big as possible and so the jumble all moslems together. The goal is to scare people into voting for them.

You people should read the koran and then some actual history. Muslims have been murdering non muslims for 1400 yrs. They are involved in mass murder everyday throughout the world. It is in the koran.

Here is a little tidbit:

Michael Ellis DeBakey never lost the Southern drawl he acquired growing up in Lake Charles, La. He was born on Sept. 7, 1908, the oldest of five children of Lebanese-Christian immigrants who moved to the United States to escape religious intolerance in the Middle East. His parents chose Cajun country because French was spoken there, as it had been in Lebanon. [Emphasis added.]

Muslims have been murdering non muslims for 1400 yrs.
...
Michael Ellis DeBakey ... was born on Sept. 7, 1908, the oldest of five children of Lebanese-Christian immigrants

Hm. Did the Muslims not get around to murdering his family before they moved to the US? What took them so long? They had 1300 years. Were they slowly working along in reverse-alphabetical order starting in 639 AD and hadn't yet made it to the "D"'s by the 19th century?

The fact is that in the pre-nation-state-era, the economics of empire -- particularly muslim empires -- were such that it was an economically bad move to massacre or force conversion of the Christians, because they paid extra money in taxes. Ethno/religious strife and declining economic opportunities for the comparably well-off Christian minorities in the middle east meant that a lot of them looked around at their situation and decided that a better life was to be had in the west, but that was true for plenty of people from non-Muslim countries that emigrated to the USA, as well, and if you claim that they'd been mass murdering all Christians in sight for 1400 years, there wouldn't be any of them around in the first place (and, in fact, Christians made up a majority of people in what is now Lebanon at the time DeBakey was born).

So now The New Yorker is an insult to Islam.

Barack has decreed it! And we know what Islamic extremists do to those that insult Islam.

''''Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker and writer who had recently made a television film critical of Islam, was shot and stabbed to death on an Amsterdam street on Tuesday'''''

Perhaps Barack will now ask for the New Yoprker staff to get police protection.

So given Barack Obamas and the left, including Ezras position that we need to concentrate and focus our attention on Al Queda and only Al Queda, what exactly should we do if we happen to hear another terrorist group planning to attack the United States?

Should we ignore them? Should we not spy on them, should we not attack them if we have the intelligence to go afetr them?

You are arguing that we shouldn't go after any other group until they actually launch an attack on us and kill thousands of Americans, then we can go after them.

That's like saying the Clinton adminstration should have only concentrated on the Branch Davidians and not worried about what the blind Sheikh was doing in New York.

Good Fareed Zakaria interview.

P.S. this reminds me of a post i just saw on Marc Ambinder's blog. he was talking about Mitt Romney's VP prospects and in passing, very casually, mentioned that "Romney passes the threshold commander in chief test."

why, or how, Romney, who has neither foreign policy experience nor any understanding of foreign policy, passes this test is a great mystery. marc ambinder is, obviously, a republican shill, but he's also sadly representative of the larger MSM. It's amazing how these lies can be written up by reporters as if they were actually incontrovertible truth.

what exactly should we do if Patton: what exactly should we do if we happen to hear another terrorist group planning to attack the United States?"

you should be asking john mccain that question. obama wants, as you do and as most people do, to go after terrorists planning to attack the united states. On the other hand McMoron wants the U.S. military to occupy Iraq indefinitely for no apparent national security reason other than "winning," whatever that means, and even if the indefinite occupation is making us more vulnerable to terrorism, which it is.

let me boil it down for you if that was too complicated. Obama wants to kills terrorists. McMoron wants to indefinitely continue killing poor brown people in Iraq that have nothing to do with either terrorism or U.S. national security.

You're an idiot, Patton.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" --Arab proverb
Perhaps the Bushies have overly conflated the different strands of the Islamic world but that doesn't mean connections don't exist. Iran (Shiite) supports Hamas (Sunni) and Syria (majority Sunni). Forget your Israel hatred, when Iran has the Bomb, Saudi and Egypt will also want it to protect themselves from Persian hegemony. Just what the world needs.

This thread is great evidence that there is an inherent contradiction to the idea that conservatives who hate Arabs and Muslims can somehow help make the Middle East democratic. The sad thing is these trolls seem to believe their own BS, which is just one strawman piled on another. At some point when you have become a cartoon character, you move from inspiring anger to inspiring pity. I pity poor Patton.

"Iran (Shiite) supports Hamas (Sunni) and Syria (majority Sunni)."

It should be noted that these connections are about the Israel-Palestinian conflict and are not directed at the US. Also, while Syrians tend to be Sunnis, the ruling Ba'athists tend to be Alawites, whom the Syrian Sunni majority see as cultists and apostates. Since Alawites have used the Ba'athist state to control the economy and seize all political power, the Sunni majority hates them, which is partly why the Ba'athists are so keen on maintaining power - to avoid becoming the victims of ethnic cleansing or genocide.

Funny how the same people who see no connection between Al-Qaeda and Iraq see all kinds of connections between Israel and Al-Qaeda. Isn't there an inherent contradiction to the idea that leftards who hate JOOZE can make the Mideast peaceful? BTW what's with the "Egyptian Brotherhood is not a terrorist group"? Last time I checked it was the MUSLIM Brotherhood. Was that a mistake or just more PC Koolaid? Ever heard of Sayyid Qutb? Zawahieri? Hamas and Al-Qaeda were both founded by "EGYPTIAN" Brotherhood members. No connection at all.

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