- Part anti-guerrilla mountain struggle, as in Afghanistan;
- Part shooting-war-cum-occupation-cum-counterinsurgency, as in Iraq;
- Part intelligence, spy v. spy covert struggle, fought quietly -- "on thedark side," as Vice President Dick Cheney put it shortly after 9/11 -- in avast territory stretching from the southern Philippines to the Maghreb and theStraits of Gibraltar;
- And finally the War on Terror is part, perhaps its largest part, Virtual War-- an ongoing, permanent struggle, and in its ongoing political utility notwholly unlike Orwell's famous world war between Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceaniathat is unbounded in space and in time, never ending, always expanding.
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"Behind the notion that an American intervention will make of Iraq 'the first Arab democracy,' as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, lies a project of great ambition. It envisions a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq -- secular, middle-class, urbanized, rich with oil -- that will replace the autocracy of Saudi Arabia as the key American ally in the Persian Gulf, allowing the withdrawal of United States troops from the kingdom. The presence of a victorious American Army in Iraq would then serve as a powerful boost to moderate elements in neighboring Iran, hastening that critical country's evolution away from the mullahs and toward a more moderate course. Such an evolution in Tehran would lead to a withdrawal of Iranian support for Hezbollah and other radical groups, thereby isolating Syria and reducing pressure on Israel. This undercutting of radicals on Israel's northern borders and within the West Bank and Gaza would spell the definitive end of Yasir Arafat and lead eventually to a favorable solution of the Arab-Israeli problem.
"This is a vision of great sweep and imagination: comprehensive, prophetic, evangelical. In its ambitions, it is wholly foreign to the modesty of containment, the ideology of a status-quo power that lay at the heart of American strategy for half a century. It means to remake the world, to offer to a political threat a political answer. It represents a great step on the road toward President Bush's ultimate vision of 'freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes.'"
