Winds of War: The War on Terror is Over. We Lost - Good.

Over the last week, many of our allies in the “The Central Front (Iraq) In The War On Terror," on terror have abandoned President Bush. The Washington Post declared that “Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday. ... In a wide ranging interview on BBC television, Kissinger presented a bleak vision of Iraq, saying the U.S. government must enter into dialogue with Iraq's regional neighbors including Iran if any progress is to be made in the region.”

Even our closest ally, Britain, is pulling away from the war on terror. The Armor in the so called War on Terror is Cracking Blair, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan! Bush…

So the war is lost. “Good”, I say. Now let’s get on to the real war and fight it.

The real war? The war against the ideology that drives the terrorists not the terrorists themselves. It’s high time we discard the notion that we are at war with terror. We are at war with an ideology, an ‘ism’ – Islamism. The Rand Corporation agrees.

The United States could discredit Al Qaeda in the Muslim world by challenging its violent Islamist ideology and muzzling its leading proponents, an independent report released on Thursday said.

Notice the phrase ‘muzzling its leading proponents’. And who are these proponents? Just those who practice terrorism? No. The proponents of this ideology are those that support its goals and objectives both violently and non-violently through the use of intimidation, infiltration and disinformation. What I have been blogging about now for over 6 months.

The Rand Report goes on.

The 364-page study, published by the RAND Corp think tank, described Al Qaeda’s Islamist ideology of violent resistance as a “global revolutionary creed” akin to the Marxism-Leninism philosophy that the West defeated with “a robust political warfare” campaign during the Cold War. “If the ideology is countered and discredited, Al Qaeda and its universe will wither and die,” concluded the two-part study, entitled “Beyond Al Qaeda” and funded by the Air Force. “It follows that a comprehensive US strategy needs to move beyond the boundaries of conventional counterterrorism theory and practice, and address these ideological and political factors,” it said. The study’s authors recommended the Bush administration expand “decapitation strategies” to include ideologues, holding up as examples decisions by British and Indonesian authorities to either jail or deport hard-line Muslim clerics. “Preventing Al Qaeda’s ideological mentors from continuing to provide theological justification for terrorism could expedite the movement’s ideological deterioration,” they concluded.

Though the report falls short of my understanding of the tactics used by Islamists, it does place the Islamist ideology front and center as the target of our offensive. The war on terror is over. They won. We lost. It was never winnable anyway. Let’s move on to the real war and fight it the way it should be fought – in a non-PC way. Or in the words of Pogo, "We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us".

I wonder if the Rand Corporation has been reading the anti-jihad blogs that we have all been slaving over in the last few years.