Pentagon’s Vision for The “Long War”
The Wall Street Journal’s Brendan Miniter reports:
At a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sized up the progress of the war on terror, compared it to the struggle against Nazism and communism, and noted this struggle will take years to win. It was similar to remarks the president, the vice president and other top administration officials have been repeating for years. And it also is the line of reasoning that the press corps has largely dismissed as hyperbole. Many in the media simply don’t accept the comparison of Osama bin Laden to Hitler.
But looking over the Defense Department’s plans for remaking the military, it quickly becomes clear that that comparison isn’t dismissed inside the Pentagon. The recently released Quadrennial Defense Review, which reveals long-term military planning, shows a top brass worried about the ideology of hate preached by imams across the Islamic world. This ideology, though twisted, is somewhat coherent and calls for using terrorism to create a “caliphate,” a unified Islamic state, stretching from Afghanistan and Iran all the way to Spain and including most of North Africa. For a lack of a better term, some American military planners call this ideology “bin Ladenism.” (Emphasis ours)
Read the whole thing.
As it relates, there’s an interesting post that we stumbled across months ago which seems apropos.
Ken McCracken argues “The Case for Permanent Bases in Iraq”
(And somewhere a liberal is going into seizure)