Alternate Reality

First, since this is all for posterity, I should mention that I did not actually vacuum the house. I made a valiant attempt that ended with our vacuum in flaming pieces. This resulted in us getting a new vacuum cleaner as a birthday present, which I did use to clean the cars, although it was my wife who did the actual vacuuming of the house.
On to the meat...
So I biked down to school to attend a symposium on Religion and Terrorism and the dichotomy between philosophy/theory and operationally relevant presentations was stark. To paraphrase one of the Psychology PhDs that spoke, he is very safe in the academe, sheltered from the potential that he ever bear responsiblity for the consequences of the ideas he presents. In contrast, the keynote centered his presentation on Sun Tzu's timeless admonition that if you know your enemy and know yourself, you will have nothing to fear in one hundred battles, along with detailed lists of the type of data that needs to be gathered and analyzed in the battle against Al Qaeda and it's ideological brethren. One man drifted between discussions of the philosophy of Rene Girard, the inadequacy of Greek Rationalism in understanding Radical Religous Terrorists, and the case for a first strike against the Iranian nuclear program under the doctrine of anticipatory self-defence as defined in current internaltional jurisprudence.
A representative from CAIR declared that groups such as Al Qaeda have no standing in Islam and therefore should not be labeled as Jihadists or Islamic because such terms both legitimate the claims of the groups and inflame opinion against us and for them. Personally, if the groups wrap themselves in the green banner of Islam, then there is an Islamic connection, but it does raise some interesting questions from an Information Operations perspective. Of course, he wanted to have it both ways in saying that if a group commits terrorist acts, then it is a terrorist group; but HAMAS and HEZBOLLAH are social welfare organizations. Still, the issue of words is an important one, and no matter how delusional I think much of the Arab world may be, framing our enemies in terms that do not play in to the preexisting concerns about our policies would probably be a good idea.
Maybe sticking with specifics is best? It goes back to the keynote speaker's discussion of knowing our enemies. Call them by name. Why group everyone under some cumbersome blanket term like Islamofacists, Jihadists, etc? Sure it was easy to call every enemy country during the Cold War communist, but it resulted in many missed divide and conquer opportunities. The Soviets and the Chinese were not one and the same, but it took almost thirty years to figure it out. Put in the context of a global counterinsurgency, each group may share an ideological base and be networked and related in many ways that are similar to the variety of leftist groups during the Cold War (the scene in the safehouse in Spielberg's Munich illustrated this very well with the PLO guys sharing a room with Mossad agents claiming to be in ETA, the Red Brigades, etc.), but each has it's own name and local goals. Global problem, local solutions. It's a common rant for me and I could expand upon it but won't here.
I am glad to see that after years of mistakes, these ideas are starting to be implemented in Iraq with early indicators of success. Ironically, recent carbombings provide an excellent metric for measuring how things are going. A reduction of such attacks would be ideal, but that Al Qaeda in Iraq is using car bombs to attack Sunni Mosques is a sign that that terrorist group is becoming isloted from its demographic base. Baby steps.