Steyn: Membership in one group does not preclude simultaneous membership in another.
I've been saying for a while that membership in the groups is to some extent fungible. The difference is, that Mark Steyn was able to put this together in his NH study, and I had to go to Afghanistan to see it in action: it was quite possible for a guy to be a member of the Jamiat-i-Islami (Massoud's guys, Tajiks, the core of the Northern Alliance and basically good guys), the Taliban (Omar's guys, bad guys), and al-Qaeda (really bad international bad guys). If we scarfed him up for something he did when he was wearing his TB hat, we had to expect a protest from the local Jamiat general (Aghan "general": anybody who has more than six full-time followers) and probably a rocket from State or HQ after the general went to his boss, Mohammed Fahim Khan (who wore the two hats of head Jamiat warlord, and Defence Minister in the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan).
Steyn: the Iraq–Syria frontier ... certainly porous, [but] porousness cuts both ways.
Simply brilliant. And if the PTB are looking forward, what they are doing now is recruiting and organising the core of a "Free Syria" movement that will put Bashir Assad's dictatorship on the defensive. Let him worry about spray-painted slogans and things that go bang in the night.
The key to winning a war on global islamist terrorists, is fighting that war not where the terrorists would like (among our women and children) but where we would prefer (in their back yard).
They key to fighting that war is to have muslims who reject islamist terrorism fight for a just and righteous government in their own nation -- or at least, if they are going to have a medieval dictatorship, one that is hostile to Islamist terrorism (viz., Egypt). I think the Saudis are moving crabwise in that direction. They hate to see the line drawn from their clerics to their terrorists, but the terrorists are making it unavoidable.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F