During a tense Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Army Gen. John Abizaid, who as head of Central Command is the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, declined to endorse Vice President Dick Cheney's assessment that Iraq's insurgency was in its "last throes."

I would go back to the president's statements over the last several years and I would defy you to find one speech which he talked about Iraq where he doesn't say there would be difficult times ahead, that we had a long road to hope that a great deal of sacrifice was going to be called for by both the American people and by the Iraqis to achieve this goal. Look, we do not underestimate the ferocity and the anger and the viciousness of the people that we face. We are in a war. Some people may treat it as a law enforcement matter and be worried about indictments from the U.S. attorney from the southern district of New York. But we recognize this administration and the American people we are in a war and the only way you have a successful outcome in the war is to aim for a complete and total victory, which is exactly what we're doing.

Excellent and thought-provoking post, Jeremy. I totally agree with you that the last thing we should do is stereotype and that doing so makes us that much less likely to have a strategy that is effective. And as you point out it's dehumanizing, which makes us see all muslims as universally "bad" and divides the lot of us up into "us" and "them." Whenever we put ourselves apart from "them" we are in morally murky waters, I think, and then it's no surprise, though horribly sad, when we find ourselves abusing people's basic human rights. 

I have to say, though, that the Times' article is in opposition to an essay I read recently about jihadists written by Pankaj Mishra in Granta from 2002 (the issue was "What We Think of America," #77, and was released soon after 9/11). Mishra had been covering Afghanistan and Pakistan (as well as India) for Granta and the New York Review of Books for several years before 9/11. He talked about Pakistan's support of the jihadists in Afghanistan through their madrassas and direct state-sponsored support. He pointed out, though, that it wasn't just the Pakistanis who were fueling the jihadists there before and after the complete Soviet pull-out of 1992, but also the Saudis and the Iranians, who were supporting warring factions of jihadists (sunni/shia) and of course our own CIA, who helped create the first jihadists in our desire to bring the USSR "their own Vietnam War."

I guess the columnists are technically right in that it isn't the madrassas themselves that give jihadists combat training. They do set them up ideologically, though, steeling them for the physical training they receive elsewhere. Under the Taliban, the madrassas fed the intellectual movement in Afghanistan and also gave the movement warm bodies to train for jihad. This seems like an important point. We all know now that it was the jihadists working under the shadow of the Taliban who funded and trained the terrorists who came to the US in 2001. Does that mean that the madrassas were at fault? Somewhat, I think, even if not completely. I think it's simplistic of our administration (what else is new!) to say that it's only about anti-americanism in the madrassas, since most of the victims of islamic fundamentalists are other muslims who are not US citizens or even sympathizers.

I worry that in our desire to counter the administration (and do I ever want to do that!), we fail to see the religious fundamentalism of the jihadists for what it is: a dehumanizing, violent venture that has the goal of spreading chaos, death, and destruction in the jihadists' home countries and elsewhere. I hope we have the courage to challenge religious fundamentalism wherever it takes hold, including here at home. I am very worried about our own homegrown christian fascism (and I use 'fascism' in the true definition of the word -- a government run for corporate interests that uses bellicose nationalism and fear to control the people -- not Tom Friedman's distortion last week when he called the Iraqi insurgents "fascists." Some of them are fanatics, yes, and some are left over from Saddam's totalitarian regime, but they're not fascists.). It makes the administration blatant hypocrites when they criticize muslims for not routing out fundamentalists (in madrassas and elsewhere) when they are actively encouraging fundamentalism here in the states. Give me a break!

I want to believe it's possible to challenge the administration and their policies, and to question their absolutism, while still criticizing the religious fundamentalism that has given rise to jihadists abroad and wackos here at home. Maybe to do so we need op-ed columnists to question the administration's blanket assumptions of islamic schools (especially when the statistics don't match the rhetoric). I just hope they point out the destructive nature of dehumanizing, religious-based ideology, regardless of whether it's coming from the White House or a Pakistani madrassa. The Nigerian writer and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka said it perfectly in his book, "The Climate of Fear":

"The fanatic that is born of this dogmatic structure of the ineffable, religion, is the most dangerous being on earth."

Soyinka goes on to say "The tributaries that feed the cesspool of fanaticism may ooze from sources separated by history, clime, and race...but they arrive at the same destination -- the zone of unquestioning certitude..."

Unfortunately, we have an administration who are "certain" in their convictions too, and they use religious language to express them, which makes it impossible for them to speak with any authority or moral imperative here or abroad. Besides their faith-based followers, the rest of us see right through their meaningless rhetoric. We all know their criticisms of madrassas are hollow since they promote "faith-based initiatives" at home and in their heart of hearts want nothing more than a cadre of fundamentalist Christian schools (state-funded, of course) to produce generations of followers of 'unquestioning certitude.' They've lied so much, and covered their power-grabbing machinations in the rhetoric of Christianity and platitudes about American democracy, that nothing they say can be trusted or assumed true.