[LarryW]

Trapper John, it’s hard not to agree with you on the points you’re making, but I v/r submit that the conflict we are about to join is more similar to the one fought against organized crime in the 60’s and 70’s. If you lump all the Islam Extremists into one bowl (while the mantras vary wildly) you’ll find very little difference in one glaring aspect: they are competing with one another. Not just for recruits (while that is certainly one of the obvious tools), but more for market shares. They are making billions and billions of dollars in plain old neighborhood extortion. The spectrum of extreme Islam is less to do with ideology and more to do with money and the power associated with great sums of cash on hand (not stocks and bonds…cash). By posing as an ideology it makes the fighting of it appear more difficult. It's them wrapping their faces in black grease rags. If you see the fight as destroying their cash on hand and denying them additional cash the struggle will be less opaque. I agree that this conflict will be like nothing we have fought before on the battlefield, but that we need to recognize the goal of the enemy is to attain the greatest amount of cash for the ranking leaders and a goodly amount for the Capos. They have no passion for the fighters, for Islam, for Sunni, or Shia, or Allah, not for mosques, or even their families, or anything else, although they sure put on some good theater that theirs is wrapped in a noble ideal. I think this is the first step in “knowing our enemy”. Knowing ourselves surely includes acknowledging our weakness for “tolerance”, but also our “impatience”.

I damned sure don’t know the strategic approach to win this contest, but I’d love to get some of the Mafia family in a think tank and put the subject to them while Rudy Giuliani acts as the facilitator.

In the meantime, introduce a sudden change in the appearance of the Euro and dollar. Print up a bunch of new middle denomination bills. Turn what they have into worthless paper. They'd start trying to dump or exchange it and might just reveal themselves. Then we could smash them like the vermin they are. Just a thought admittedly based on nothing but wildassed notions and probably too much salt in my diet.