The full article is worth your time. Until then, peruse these pull quotes. The long war is not about Islam. It's about human social networks ... insurgency runs in social networks ... People get pulled into rebellion by their social networks. To assist the President’s reëlection, bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party. “If I were a Muslim, I’d probably be a jihadist. The thing that drives these guys [is] the same thing that drives me, you know?”
To be clear: that's the guy who wrote "long war" into the Quadrennial Defense Review. Iraqis spread information through rumor. We should have been visiting their coffee shops. Bush speeches are all uplift, and no strategy. We say "long war", but there's this enormous sense of impatience.
This begs the question of whether the jihadists are more or less patient. America must help ... flood the Internet with persuasively youthful Web sites ...
So it's a scene, but it's also a movement. Have you seen The Dreamers? I can see a similarly nostalgic film being made 30 years from now, from the Islamist point of view, regardless of who has "won" or "lost" by then. When to Be Young Was Very Sexy One of the themes of "The Dreamers" is the passion and folly of youth -- not just youth as a universal aspect of the human condition, but youth in Paris in the spring of 1968, one of those enchanted historical dawns when, to quote Wordsworth, "to be young was very heaven." "The Dreamers," which is disarmingly sweet and completely enchanting, fuses sexual discovery with political tumult by means of a heady, heedless romanticism that nearly obscures the film's patient, skeptical intelligence. The three main characters, 20-year-olds besotted by sex, movies, ideas and each other, express themselves with an unguarded sincerity that would be easy to patronize or to mock.
Bertolucci returns to Paris with a twist ... a strangely thought-provoking and bittersweet ode to the '60s ... "The Dreamers" is a passionate tribute to the cinema's contribution to the great '60s cultural fusion, as well as a melancholy reminder of just how far it's fallen from that heady era of its highest idealism.
Highlights of 'Knowing the Enemy' | 
