The news is abuzz this week with assessments that al Qaeda's influence and power have returned to pre 9/11 levels. I'm sure the Bush administration will explain this as it does its Iraq strategy: everything is on track, but it just takes time.

Maybe that's true. But an alternative explanation is that the administration's strategy is fatally flawed. There are two primary reasons for this. First, when the enemy is motivated primarily by U.S. penetration into the Islamic world, increasing the amount of U.S. penetration into the Islamic world is not exactly the best way to calm them down. But because the administration has based its strategy on the assumption that Islamic extremists aren't really motivated by what they say motivates them but instead by something we made up and ascribed to them ("they hate freedom"), it can't grapple with the idea that its actions are the exact wrong thing to do.

Second, while the administration is right that the foundation of the threat we face is the ideology which generates extremists, it has come up with a strategy that focuses on killing or capturing extremists rather than undercutting the hostile ideology. America's primary "partners" in the conflict--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan--tolerate and even support the ideology which gives rise to violent extremists. Our strategy tolerates this. It is a fatal flaw