He's a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land

I pretty much tune Fouad Ajami out when he talks anything having to do with Obama, because on that score, he's about as reliable as Karl Rove in his one-sidedness.

But when he writes directly about what's wrong with the Middle East and Arab culture, he's often quite powerful in his observations--to wit, the subtitle of this WSJ op-ed:  "Millions like Faisal Shahzad are unsettled by a modern world they can neither master nor reject."

That is a microcosm of the Arab world in general:  globalization has embraced it--thinly, and it is both amazed and repulsed by the possibility/inevitability of deeper integration.

But it is an especially good capture of expats who never quite connect in their adopted Western countries--hence the susceptibility to the chimera of dropping out and tuning in to jihad. It is the perfect, Calgon-take-me-away Deus ex machina. You hit the rough patch and booyah! You've got this noble out that suddenly makes your life historic and genuine and not such a failure. We're talking the ultimate Plan B--a concept most of us known well after the last tough year and a half.

More:

The maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, army, America—gives away this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure an American education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the grip of a deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and Casablanca to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the Islamic diaspora is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like Faisal Shahzad.

This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning "hearts and minds," no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

We can succumb to the tempting notion that it's all about "empire," hence it's always we who are the ultimate target, followed by the Brits in a residual sense. But that's our version of escapism. The globalization we began has escaped our grasp. This dynamic won't end by our quitting the contest.

We will be killing the un-redeemables and the irrationals until they stop being born.  Globalization, in the form of that massive (as in, now close to 60% of the world's population) global middle class, will simply keep paying somebody to make them go away. Might be us, for as long as we want it to be, but it will definitely be somebody with a gun.