IIRC, there was some amateur journalist–or maybe just an amateur history buff/current events guy that was like this guy in NZ–predicted almost the exact sequence of events that led up to WWII simply from the avail. open sources in the newspapers, recently published books, university lectures, monographs, etc., as well as unclass. govt documents. Can’t remember who he was, but he was for real–and left all the professional spooks, State Dept guys and journalists in the dust..just by methodically sifting thru avail sources. Both cases really demonstrate what one smart, focused, dedicated guy can do… We should make that guy in NZ head analyst for the CIA or DIA–be hard to do worse.

One Democrat, after Tet and Uncle Walter’s lies about it, was shocked he wasn’t arrested for giving aid and comfort to our enemies. He never would have survived either Wilson’s or FDR’s administration.

I would demur slightly from your analysis without challenging it’s central thrust. It seems to me that our that while it is perhaps appropriate to label many in AQ as dissatisfied unsuccessful malcontents who “just want to watch the world burn” for no good reason other than that alone, others have rather more focused objectives–they are just not ones amenable to bribery. LBJ thought he could bribe/buy-off Ho-Chi Minh with a TVA equivalent economic development program for the MeCong Delta, but Ho answered to a different drummer–that of the ideology of Communism. Fanatical ideologues are not suspectible to the logic of economics or modern finance–as neither are religious fanatics of the kind the Taliban and much of AQ represents.

Bandits eventually tire of the sport, retire, or die, and the problems they cause cease accordingly. Religion and ideologies are rather more long-lived, and there’s the rub. What we are facing is a world-wide “movement” that is no longer dependent upon one man of cabal of like-minded individuals linked by the internet world-wide. As long as a single copy of the blueprint for the ideology we face–the Koran–remains in existence there will always remain the seeds of future anti-western movements laying in wait, like dormant seeds in decades long drought conditions, only awaiting that single drop of water to spring back to life.

To some extent we are facing the functional equivalent of the “Andromadea Strain” (a thesis I’ve advanced here and elsewhere before) In days past the existence of Islam was not a threat to Western Civilization because only a modern industrial state (think China) was capable of mounting a mortal threat, and such threats as these societies did pose were well known and we in the West supplied with the necessary conceptual and physical armor to resist. Islam was bottled up in the sands of Arabia or diluted by the manna of non-ascetic un-desert lush jungles of S.E.Asia. With the advent of cheap airline fares, relaxed immigration/border-control policies world-wide, and modern communications technology, the perfect climate has been created to facilitate the spread of Islam. And make no mistake, long-term Islam is the problem–of which present-day Jihadists are only a particularly deadly out-growth.

Unless and until the day when Muslms become like modern-day cafeteria Catholics who ignore those aspects of the liturgy they find inconvenient, the only solution would be to destroy every copy of the Koran in existence and kill all 1.5 Billion Muslims in existence. But as this is clearly impossible, we are stuck with a long-term problem to which there is seemingly no solution–like living with a long term disease that. if monitored and controlled with the proper medicine might be somewhat debilitating, but not life-threatening, but left untreated could rapidly prove fatal.

The topical solution? Only a multi-track approach will do and I am afraid one of them is almost nearly un-doable. The intelligence-tracking and killing of key leaders to demoralize the opposition and prevent future terrorist incidents is doable even if difficult. More difficult, but doable is the tamping down ofd entire populations in AfPK and preventing the Jihadists from creating a sense of momentum and inevitability among the population at large (more about exactly HOW later) But where I, for one, despair is the concern that, as so many here have voiced, we in the West as a culture have lost confidence in the central tenants of our own Civilization and thus the will to resist. And in this, we may be beyond the point of no return….

“You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Voting “present” is not a viable option when in the Oval Office, no matter how many Czars are lined up to fuzz the issue of responsibility and to take the fall when things go south.

If only the republicans had leadership that is not indistinguishable from the democrats. This is how third parties form.