The superb Tiger Hawk blog (www.tigerhawk.blogspot.com) not only has an analysis of yesterday’s spirited debate in the Corner but adds his own realist theory for why democratization is an important part of the strategy for confronting jihadism. It’s very much worth the read and, on balance, I’d say it’s pretty much where Cliff is — which is always a good place to be.

As a critic, I would say this much. The administration would do well to study this argument. In its haste not to offend Muslims, the administration’s rhetoric generally tries to take Islam off the table (the usual thing is to say that 19 terrorists “hijacked” a great religion, etc.). I’ve always thought this was a grave tactical error: it underestimates the jihadists; it suggests that it is not important for us to try to understand what the enemy thinks and believes; and it eliminates the possibility of any examination by which we might be able to develop principles for sorting out those Muslims who are sympathetic to the jihadists.

What I especially like about the Tiger Hawk analysis is that it gives militant Islam its due as a well-developed religio-social system. It is necessary to do this if we are ever to understand its attraction to those it draws in and assess the chances of democracy (or anything else) as a competing system in the Muslim world.

The downside, of course, is reality: the jihadists’ system DOES draw on Islamic scripture and is undeniably a creature of Islam. That hardly means it is necessarily destined to dominate the Islamic world, but it does expose the shallowness of rhetoric that portrays jihadism as a fabrication that has nothing to do with true Islam. Would understanding this cause many non-Muslims to be troubled by Islam in a way they are not now? Probably, but nothing is being served by conscious avoidance of important information.