...Western leaders must not attack Islam; to take sides against any religion runs counter to the traditions of religious tolerance upon which the United States was founded. But they must denounce the use of force to propagate religion, and make it clear that they will match force with force. The enemy is not "terrorism", but any form of violence, including conventional warfare, in the service of religious expansionism.

What does that mean in practice? First of all it changes the subject and shifts the battleground. The issue is not whether Middle Eastern governments will adopt democratic reforms - that is not within the power of the West to dictate - but whether Muslims will employ violence in the service of territorial irredentism in the Kashmir or Palestine. There simply is no more room for the jihadist dogma that Muslims may not abandon a square meter of the Dar al-Islam. Violence to reclaim lost territory is a characteristic of radical Islam and the hallmark of an enemy of the West. The first step should be to remove Yasser Arafat to exile in some inaccessible locale.

Further steps should be action - not protests - to protect Nigerians, Indonesians, or Sudanese against violent attempts to further the Islamic cause. Black Sudanese are the victims of genocide encouraged by the radical Islamic regime in Khartoum. Washington should send them not only food, but also weapons and Special Forces advisers. Stern warnings, backed if necessary by a reduction in foreign aid, should be delivered to US clients in the Middle East that jihadist rhetoric on the part of government newspapers and government-sponsored clerics simply will not be tolerated.

Enemy is radical Islam
In short, the West must give the Islamic world a clear choice as to who is with it, and who is against it - words that President Bush has used but with muddled meaning. That would change the character of the intelligence war utterly. It may be harder to define who is friend and foe today than it was in 1981, but by the same token, it will be far easier to tell friend from foe once the West carves its criteria in stone.

The bane of US intelligence in the Middle East from Somalia to Iraq has been its inability to know whom it can trust. Victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan, although sometimes attended by paternity suits. The unseemly public exchange of charges between the CIA and the Pentagon over Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi is the most flagrant example. The CIA has placed stories in the press claiming that Chalabi is an Iranian provocateur, heatedly denied by Chalabi's friends in the Pentagon civilian establishment. This removes all doubt that America's intelligence effort is an orphan. The only question is, whose?

It would be convenient if US universities trained prospective spies in Middle Eastern and South Asian language skills and culture. But the United States can obtain all the spies it wants with all required skills: it simply has to persuade Muslims to join its cause. Once the US determined to win the Cold War, enough Russians and Eastern Europeans switched sides to give the US the winning hand. Existential despair is the result of the West's tragic encounter with the Islamic world, but it can cut two ways; it has produced suicide bombers, but it also can produce radical reformers who repudiate their own culture in favor of the West...