A vast Right-wing conspiracy

[R. Fiero]

Right-wing attack dog David Brooks ("the conservative media 
have 'cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery 
system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out'") 
has written in the NY Times that since nation-states serve as 
hosts to stateless militant Islam the war on terror can only be 
won in the same way that the Right has come to dominate in the 
US which was to use the techniques that the Right accused the 
dissenting Left of using -- agitprop, domination of the media 
and well-funded think tanks.
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War of Ideology
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 24, 2004 NY Times
. . .
We also need to mount our own ideological counteroffensive. The 
commissioners recommend that the U.S. should be much more 
critical of autocratic regimes, even friendly ones, simply to 
demonstrate our principles. They suggest we set up a fund to 
build secondary schools across Muslim states, and admit many 
more students into our own. If you are a philanthropist, here 
is how you can contribute: We need to set up the sort of 
intellectual mobilization we had during the cold war, with 
modern equivalents of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to 
give an international platform to modernist Muslims and to 
introduce them to Western intellectuals.

Most of all, we need to see that the landscape of reality is 
altered. In the past, we've fought ideological movements that 
took control of states. Our foreign policy apparatus is geared 
toward relations with states: negotiating with states, 
confronting states. Now we are faced with a belief system that 
is inimical to the state system, and aims at theological rule 
and the restoration of the caliphate. We'll need a new set of 
institutions to grapple with this reality, and a new training 
method to understand people who are uninterested in national 
self-interest, traditionally defined.

Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in 
Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably 
with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last 
few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from 
now on will be military. The rest will be ideological. He 
observed that we are in the fight against Islamic extremism now 
where we were in the fight against communism in 1880.

We've got a long struggle ahead, but at least we're beginning to understand it.
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Odd following on a misportrayal of Vineland we now have an 
Objectivist reading of M&D.