The Bush administration and their apologists usually unnerve me when they set up convenient straw men, like the Hollywood or media "elite" as the enemy they must corral and erradicate. This is how they opperate domestically and by doing so win elections based on team identification and exploitation of fear and ignorance.

Internationally, however, they are mere pawns of a greater struggle so many fail to appreciate. Democrats have already been cowed into impotence by the black/white themes of the right-wing mantra that you are either with us or against us. The fiction that "those people" only understand strength and violence plays directly into the plans of Osama and his followers. The idea that we are creating more terorists than killing, and that the actions of the Bush administration are a recruiting tool for extremists, is more than mere speculation.

We are not playing checkers here, where the moves are simple and the path to victory clear and quick.

We are involved in a multi-dimentional chess game, with a variety of players, whose uniquely colored pieces move in unspecified and unpredictable patterns, and where checkmating the enemy king alone does not recognize that another will replace him and the only real winning solution is to convince one side or the other to walk away from the board.

We yearn for a simple solution to the terrorist threat, to peace in the middle east, to just plain getting along. More people voted for the simple, the slogan-like easily digetible pill which provides hope, and hope alone -- not an actual solution -- that it will all just go away if we're tough enough, mean enough, and resolute enough.

Understanding the rules of the game is essential, and it is hardly simple. Like most things in internatioinal policy, or politics in general for that matter, the game is complex and often times our best move is counterintuitive, because their last move was calculated to prod us into a predictable reaction.

If we are to win this War on Terror, we must be willing to embrase the complicated and scrutinize the simplistic with a warry eye. To this end, it is required that we know our enemy and his desires. Thinking that it is as easy as saying "they hate our freedom," borders on the irresponsibly stupid.

We must understand what they want, what they need, and not give it to them.

To this end, I very much recommend taking 5 minutes and reading Pericles' Diary at Daily Kos :: Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz part of which I have excerted below:

In radicalizing your apathetic sympathizers, you have no better ally than the violent extremists on the other side . Only they can convince your people that compromise is impossible. Only they can raise your countrymen's level of fear and despair to the point that large numbers are willing to take up arms and follow your lead. A few blown up apartment buildings and dead schoolchildren will get you more recruits than the best revolutionary tracts ever written.

Perversely, this means that you are the best ally of the extremists on the other side. That doesn't mean you love or even talk to each other -- they are, after all, vile and despicable demons. But at this stage in the process your interests align. Both of you want to invert the bell curve, to flatten out that big hump in the middle and drive people to the edges. That's why extremists come in pairs: Caesar and Pompey, the Nazis and the Communists, Sharon and Arafat, Bush and Bin Laden. Each side needs a demonic opposite in order to galvanize its supporters.

Naive observers frequently decry the apparent counter-productivity of extremist attacks. Don't the leaders of Hamas understand that every suicide bombing makes the Israelis that much more determined not to give the Palestinians a state? Don't they realize that the Israeli government will strike back even harder, and inflict even more suffering on the Palestinian people? Of course they do; they're not idiots. The Israeli response is exactly what they're counting on. More airstrikes, more repression, more poverty -- fewer opportunities for normal life to get in the way of the Great Struggle.

The cycle of violence may be vicious, but it is not pointless. Each round of strike-and-counterstrike makes the political center less tenable. The surviving radical leaders on each side energize their respective bases and cement their respective holds on power. The first round of the playoffs is always the two extremes against the center. Only after the center is vanquished will you meet your radical counterparts in the championship round.

Hat Tip: Ara