It will never come into being. But that won't stop the Islamists from trying to make it happen.

I believe the objective is not to halt the potential creation of a region-spanning Islamic super-state but to deny the Islamists safe haven and Taliban-style direct control over state apparatus in any one of the states in the target region. Bush himself makes that clear.

"The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia"

He doesn't say we are supposed to buy into the geopolitical possibility of it. Our goal is simply to frustrate the first step in the plan -- denying them control of any one nation-state in the desired area.

If your neighbour believes that killing his wife and kids will usher in global utopia, and he's striving to do that with all his might -- it's not important that you believe the credibility of the claim. The only important thing is preserving the life of the wife and the kids.

I should also add that control of any one nation-state doesn't get them a whole lot closer to global caliphate, but it does give them greater latitude to train and equip forces that will do non-trivial damage to other countries.

Sort of like how they used Afghanistan as safe heaven and struck at WTC in 1993 & 2001, embassies in Africa, USS Cole in Yemen, and so on. None of those things presents an existential threat but it is certainly very inconvenient to lose major office towers, assorted government facilities, hardware (and obviously human lives, too) every so often. It is the sort of death by a thousand cuts that we can do without.

I also don't like him mentioning the killing of Van Gogh. Don't confuse our problems with the US'.

That is the best answer, Chris, and you have opened an interesting point. Would we care if there was a caliphate if it were a friendly or at least non-dangerous external entity? No. So the question still is on the table though only a political one - was Iraq necessary? By what the President said it was because it was required to interrupt the formation of the caliphate. That, I think, was incorrect logic as Saddam was as uninterested in a Talibani Iraq as the US was. But he also would not do what Lybia later did despite all the warnings and offerings. <p>In the end, I think the invasion of Iraq was more like what the British tried to do unsuccessfully in 1777 with New York state when they attacked from the City as well as Canada - physically split and disrupt the potential larger adversary.

"It is a war against a group with a plan of empire and domination."

Snort. Sounds like a massive case of self-projection if you ask me.

Well, yes, in a way but does the team that leads 10-1 in the fifth stop playing? You have to crush. The only weird thing is the two venue thing. Attacks in "X" leading to action in "Y". I am sure smarter people understand that bit. I am sure they do.

I don't see the caliphate explanation as a statement of <i>our</i> strategic goals. What I see George Bush doing is explaining <i>their</i> strategic goals: Why they will not stop attacking us even if all westerners left Iraq, and every hoped-for country in the would-be caliphate. The caliphate, we presume, will never form. But they certainly want us out of their perceived "sphere of influence" so that they can give it a try. Call it the Islamist Monroe doctrine.

I think most people would be happy to let them have their turf, if it weren't for the fact that <i>when</i> they had it, they couldn't resist poking us in the eye and trying to take down our buildings and leaders anyway.

Military action by the west is not required to stop any neo-caliphate, it's required to protect Western lives and property from both the larger-scale WTC attacks and the smaller-scale piecemeal attacks. If Al-Qaeda gets a nation-state backer (like the former Afghanistan), it then re-acquires the capability to launch more dangerous, high-casualty strikes against the West. That is what makes military intervention essential.

[Ed.: <i>Nothing personal is included in the following satirical piece entitled "A Comment In Reply"</i>]<p>

Well why, then, invade Iraq, silly - of course it's all about the caliphate. It must be. Someone is over thinking this. See, Saddam had nothing to do with the twin towers but he did sit in the middle of Osama's crayon drawing. Besides, it is the radical Islamist Monroe doctrine. See those 157 people in the world will get a province each and Karl and Dick know it. They have a crayon drawing, too.<p>[Ed.: <i>Thank you for your understanding</i>]

Hey! Who did that! Not me. If it was me I would have just said that the Bush explanation requires belief that Iraq was behind 9/11. No one has said anything that justifies that. Trouble is by removing him, the area has been flooded with islamo-fascist nutcases as opposed to the totalitarian-pan-Arabist-nutcases. It was a side-track based on a bubble of belief that has been burst yet the track has proven too deep to get out of...so we have to keep calling the thing on the end of the string a nice balloon. My head is getting achey. I need to sit.<p>Is there any other reasonable explanation? Or better (as we are each poking pointy sticks at the goat entrails we like best) is there a better opinion? I'd like a better opinion, frankly, as otherwise I feel like a war on terrorist cells has been diverted into hundreds of billions and thousands of dead on a roll of the dice that there were WMDs and/or an Al Qaeda connection with Saddam. And isn't today's mixing of the stated intention of Al Qaeda with the goals of the US invasion a funny way of presenting this "stay the course" argument? How will Al Qaeda frame the argument next?

Well you and I will disagree, of course, but the "deny nation-state apparatus" argument has (as far as I know) always been made by the White House. I do not see that Saddam needed to have anything to do with 9/11 in order for the "deny territory" argument to hold weight.

If one of your enemy's strategic goals is to occupy a given space, then you can cause him a lot of grief by taking it yourself and forcing him to expend a lot of men and materiel trying to dislodge you. And that's what we're doing.

Whether or not Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 is immaterial in my view. They are a strategic lynchpin in the geography of the Middle East, and the West had all the casus belli they needed in Iraq's consistent violation of all the 1991 Gulf cease-fire agreements.

Osama wants Saudi Arabia too, for that matter, and while they are not exactly democratic they at least are willing to be a (small and sometimes unwilling) part of the solution. If you can keep Osama off-balance for a decade or two by denying him his strategic goals, then the whole enterprise starts to look like a waste of time. And then maybe people will not be so willing to listen to Islamists reliving the glory days, but unable to deliver even one strategic goal.

No, I can buy the lynchpin. We agree on that. That is the NYS 1777 scenerio that you physically divide. Trouble is the investment. But, as you say, the investment is on both sides. No one is going to back the party that can't last. So an Iraqi civil war is bad and may require 100 billion US from the US for a decade to make sure it is avoided. I think my only point is that that is a heck of a lot of an investment in the planning and I still see no end game. There must be something better than war without end, amen.

What if Al Qeada has already been pretty much beaten and we don't know it yet or don't want to admit it?<blockquote class="smalltext">Indonesia's counterterrorism forces say the suspected suicide bombers who carried out the attack in Bali last Saturday appear to have been a small group with no prior criminal record or link to a large organization like Al Qaeda, giving the case echoes of the London subway bombings in July. A senior Indonesian counterterrorism official said Thursday in an interview that the bombers seemed to have been "jihadists" without previous involvement in terrorist acts that would have brought them to the attention of the authorities. A former senior member of Jemaah Islamiyah, the radical Islamic organization here, who has defected and is helping the government, said he did not recognize any of the men, the official said. The heads of the presumed bombers were severed in the blast, and pictures of them have appeared on television and in newspapers. The official spoke on condition that he not be identified, because he is not the authorized spokesman for his agency. The Bali attack, which in addition to the 3 bombers killed 19 people, most of them Indonesians, in separate explosions at three restaurants, seems indicative of the way in which terrorism is shifting, terrorism experts say. It was less sophisticated, complex, costly and deadly than the terrorist operation in Bali three years ago, in which a van loaded with explosives exploded in front of a nightclub, killing 202 people. And the organizations that financed the earlier attack, Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah, have been severely weakened. Yet the terrorist threat remains, while presenting a different challenge from when Al Qaeda provided training, financing and direction.</blockquote>

Reading reports the next day, I think George thinks that the insurgents had the scale to administer a nation of millions:<blockquote class="smalltext">"Would the United States and other free nations be more safe, or less safe, with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people and its resources?" he asked. "Having removed a dictator who hated free peoples, we will not stand by as a new set of killers, dedicated to the destruction of our own country, seizes control of Iraq by violence."</blockquote>So Iraq was invaded to keep it out of the hands of the bad people who entered it after it was invaded.

Well I am hardly acquainted with top U.S. policymakers, but my guess is that the end game consists of launching a new Islamic Reformation coupled with an Islamic Enlightenment. A lot of time, money and protection will have to be poured into moderate Muslim clerics, with the goal of leeching off support for the jihadist element. If states like Turkey and Iraq thrive, then their freedom, prosperity and stability relative to the rest of the region will start to signal the bankruptcy of any neo-caliphate claptrap. And just like the French and American Revolutions, everyone else will be looking their way and wondering "why can't we enjoy that kind of life, too?"

To me, that seems like a generational undertaking. As far as I know the Islamic world does not yet have its Luther, Locke and Diderot, and when it does, we will have to protect and support them without, perversely, being seen to obviously do so. The end game is certainly fuzzy, given that even with Christianity (which has already had its Reformation, Counter-Reformation and Enlightenment) we get the occasional nutbar who thinks that it's okay to kill abortionists, or gays, and so on.

But that will cost hundreds of billions the US does not have. If that is the unspoken plan, isn't it also the unspoken source of the next depression?

Though it remains their goals, I agree that this dangerous future will not come into being, but something like it could have been more of a threat had Al Qaeda *not* attacked on 9/11. I remember reading of differences within the group - I believe it was Khalid Mohammed who wanted to ignore the West and focus expansion and influence throughout the Middle and Near East. But the Osamaists wanted to go West, and now they're all screwed.

Possibly, Alan. I'm sure America's economy will continue to experience long-term (20-50 year timeframe) net growth -- even accounting for occasional recession and depression. Someone will be forced to rein in George's spending spree. But that's a whole other discussion.

The other big problem is Osama's other strategic goal: four million American dead. He thinks that's a pre-requisite for Islamic victory in the neo-caliphate project.

Now four million bodies is a lot to rack up, nightclub by nightclub and office tower by office tower, unless you can get your hands on some good old-fashioned WMD. It is hard to think of an American administration, liberal or conservative, that would accept a devil's bargain of four million dead without some concrete guarantee ending hostilities.

So their choices are essentially fight and go bankrupt, or stay prosperous but suffer piecemeal attacks with the potential for annihilation of at least one urban centre. And who can say whether Osama's goals and body count will not experience "scope creep" as the calipate project stalls?

What other choice do they have, really.

I think I am confident that if Osammy had or gets the power to kill 4 million Americans it will have nothing to do with Iraq. If he could have done it, as we all thought he did after 9/11, it would have happened already. If he gets a person to a water source, say, and poisons it and 25,000 die that is independent of Iraq and has a lot to do with who got the chemistry degrees in 1988. Fighting that is the reasonable war on terror that does not take hundreds of billions a year.

But at that point you are letting Osama achieve at least one of his strategic conditions, with no benefit to yourself (other than not going broke, that is). Which leaves him free to contemplate exactly how to screw up Western infrastructure and kill Western civilians in piecemeal attacks. Iraq eats Islamist resources as well as ours, and I will wager that the West has more to spare.

Adopting your strategy is entirely defensive, and nobody ever won a game by playing defense, exclusively. Defense needs to be played, but without offense the Islamists are free to contemplate ways to pierce our defenses. Going on the offense keeps them off-balance and focused on other priorities, like survival.

I am not saying the invasion of Iraq was a master-stroke. It could certainly have been better-managed. But it is keeping Islamist minds and enthusiasms focused there, too. And it would be difficult to combat Islamist ideology's hold on the region without having a beachhead for the less jihad-inclined.

One could also argue that Iraq is a training ground. If, as I think is apparent, there is no Al Qeada WMD capacity sitting around (they would have used it) creating a context of conflict with them hones their skills and creates a catalyst for investment, as it were. What a success in Iraq could achieve is a deflation of nutbar recruitment prospects. However, that success is far off if the US goal is to somehow contain them there. Leadership will be bolstered by a stalemate. Plus the other side just needs hundreds of people and hundreds of thousands of dollars against the US's need for tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars. That is not a comfort to me.