WAR FOOTING: 10 STEPS AMERICA MUST TAKE TO PREVAIL IN THE WAR FOR THE FREE WORLD
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr
Naval Institute, $27.95, 320 pages
... The book addresses grand strategy, not merely military strategy for winning militarily. In describing their strategy, the authors talk in terms of the application of all elements of military power to include diplomacy, information operations and economic tools as well as military power; the acronym that the military uses for this melding is DIME.
The first step that the authors describe is to "know the enemy." Here, the enemy is described not as radical Islam, but as fascism disguised as Islam or Islamofascism, which the authors see as a political movement attempting to legitimize itself through religion. The book portrays the main villains here as the Wahhabist sect of Islam, primarily centered in Saudi Arabia. Although they do not go so far as to claim that the Saudi government formally sponsors al Qaeda and its offshoots, the authors clearly see the Saudi government as an enabler, and they fully feel that Saudi oil money is the root cause of the evil.
The book then goes on to address a holistic approach for defeating the enemy abroad, at home and in the area of world perceptions. Some of the suggestions put forward in this volume include such commonsense economic advice as diversifying our oil reserves and changing our policies for resourcing homeland-defense assets on the basis of real need, not political factionalism. That particular argument comes at a time when many in Congress are attacking the Patriot Act without suggesting positive alternative approaches...
Know Your Enemy
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