Grand strategy ill-defined: if weíre not bad, they must be

ìWar of Ideology,î by David Brooks, New York Times, 24 July, p. A27.

David Brooks, usually very astute by my standards, buys into the 9/11 Commission bit on this being a war of ideas first and foremost, and I must say I find that fairly disappointing. The fight-fire-with-fire crowd comes into two sorts: they kill us so we kill them, and they defame us so we defame them.

Yes, weíll kill them when we get the chance and yes weíll argue our case to the best of our ability, but making the war symmetrical is a false hope, because it never will be. On our side is globalizationóthis huge, nearly unstoppable historical force that will remake the Middle East in an image far more recognizable and acceptable to us than to them. On their side is simply the fear of that process and a desire to stop it first and foremost by blaming us, demonizing us, and driving us and our unholy ways out of their neighborhood.

Telling them that their fear-threat reaction is wrong will get us nowhere, because their fear is real and well-founded. Simply telling them that resistance is futile will only get their backs up more in terms of resistance.

What we need to offer is not ideology but connectivity. We should not be in the business of telling them how to repackage themselves to adjust to integration into the global economy, but simply offer them the tools as much as possible and signal our patience in their efforts to shape that connectivity and those content flows in such a way as they can find acceptable.

Even radical Islam is wrong only in degree: their desire to stop globalizationís encroachment is too much, but their innate sense that they must do whatever it takes to slow down its destructive social onslaught is essentially correct. They need the sense of our permission to manage the content flows as they see fit so long as they allow broadband connectivity to emerge for the masses.

Their fear isnít wrong, nor in many ways is their hatred of the change they see coming. Choosing violence to stop that historical process is wrong and we should say so, but that does not constitute our ideology waging war against theirs. We cannot make Islam, even radical Islam, the problem. We can only make connectivity the answer and let this civil war within Islam work itself out.