Miniter's Notebook

He cites this recent AP wire story: "As the operation unfolds, Marines would continue to hold the region south of the Euphrates, while the Stryker Brigade, which has been based in Mosul, pushes south, putting insurgents in a "vice," a senior U.S. military strategist said." Ultimately, I'd leave this decision up to the commanders on the ground (after all, they work with this reporter)—but a little bit of caution about operational details wouldn't be a bad idea.

A number of military sources have been asking me "just whose side is the media on, anyway?" For a while, I wrote it off as the usual griping. But I've also been thinking about Olivier Roy's book Globalized Islam (Check out this review). Bear with me as a stretch out a tangent (don't worry, it will snap back into place at the end). If read enough of the militant Islamic literature—and I mean the recent stuff, not Milestones or In the Shade of the Koran)—it is surprising how many Marxist ideas and concepts one runs across. If Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri's Knight Under the Prophet's Banner, the no. 2 man in al Qaeda's cri de coeur, one finds multiple citations from the Iranian Communist Party and a frankly Marxist critique of the West. And of course all of that "crusaders" and "imperialist" name-calling is old-school Left chic too. Roy argues essentially that Islamism is not a ideological offshoot of Islam, but a Western proto-Communist ideology which hides itself in the mosque the way a London terrorist hides himself among commuters on the Tube. For many in the media, who grew up in campuses controlled by the irresponsible Left, the Islamists do not seem so foreign but oddly familiar. Rather than seeing Islamism as a civilizational threat, they see those who fear it as the same squares who thought the radical vegetarian "die in" on the quad was the end of life as we know it. Of course, they are not making careful distinctions (between peaceful protestors and bomb builders)—and maybe I am not either. But I know a lot of center-left press and I know they don't feel about the war the same way I do and I wonder why. Maybe Roy is on to something...