Shelf Life

Michael A. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributor to National Review Online, is one of America’s most valuable experts on terrorism. In The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How Well Win (St. Martin’s, 262 pp., $24.95), he provides an impressive analysis not just of the particulars of our current struggle but of the overarching truths about American identity that will be the source of our eventual victory. Just like the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets, writes Ledeen, the Taliban “grossly underestimated our enormous capacity to rapidly unite to accomplish a national mission. … It is because we feel ourselves part of a common enterprise—the advance of freedom—[that] we spontaneously organize ourselves to achieve that enterprise.”

This is absolutely correct: The distinctive genius of the United States is to combine immense—indeed, unprecedented—military power with a remarkable lack of militarism. We don’t seek out opportunities for war, in fact we do our best to avoid them; but when we are provoked, we fight to the death in the cause of peace and freedom. Ledeen explains what, specifically, this fight will entail in the coming months and years. He warns us not to “oversimplify the war by describing it as a war with Islam, or a war with Islamic Arabs . . . While there are many peaceful Muslims, the terror masters follow a tyrannical and bellicose version of Islam”—one that Ledeen contends will rapidly fall out of favor among Muslims once reverses on the battlefield prove it isn’t history’s wave of the future.

Featured Tags

Michael A. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and contributor to National Review Online, is one of America’s most valuable experts on terrorism. In The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How Well Win (St. Martin’s, 262 pp., $24.95), he provides an impressive analysis not just of the particulars of our current struggle but of the overarching truths about American identity that will be the source of our eventual victory. Just like the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets, writes Ledeen, the Taliban “grossly underestimated our enormous capacity to rapidly unite to accomplish a national mission. … It is because we feel ourselves part of a common enterprise—the advance of freedom—[that] we spontaneously organize ourselves to achieve that enterprise.”

This is absolutely correct: The distinctive genius of the United States is to combine immense—indeed, unprecedented—military power with a remarkable lack of militarism. We don’t seek out opportunities for war, in fact we do our best to avoid them; but when we are provoked, we fight to the death in the cause of peace and freedom. Ledeen explains what, specifically, this fight will entail in the coming months and years. He warns us not to “oversimplify the war by describing it as a war with Islam, or a war with Islamic Arabs . . . While there are many peaceful Muslims, the terror masters follow a tyrannical and bellicose version of Islam”—one that Ledeen contends will rapidly fall out of favor among Muslims once reverses on the battlefield prove it isn’t history’s wave of the future.