This is a passage that just spewed forth from my fingers as I sit here working on my Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy book. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I thought it was sort of an interesting brain fart and would welcome comments.

As what was to become known as the "global war on terror" took shape in the late summer and early autumn, President Bush adopted a decidedly ideological perspective. As small number of analysts such as Michael Scheuer, who had been an Osama bin Laden analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency, advocated a policy perspective. But given President Bush's person inclinations and the angry and impassioned mood of the country after September 11, the ideological approach was almost inevitable. The explanation for the conflict was remarkably similar to those developed in the early years of the Cold War. Al Qaeda did not attack the United States because of anything it did, according the President Bush, but because of what it is. "They hate...democratically elected government. Their leaders are self appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

While casting the conflict with Islamic militants as a reprise of the Cold War helped Americans, most of whom had never heard of al Qaeda before September 11, understand what was taking place, it also gave hint of a major problem which later emerged. While the Cold War was, to a large extent, an ideological "war of ideas," it was a symmetric one. Both sides offered different methods of political and economic organization, but they were, at least, talking about the same thing—day to day, physical life. The question for the peoples of the world was whether they wanted to live their daily lives in a political/economic system structured by free enterprise democracy or by communism. The ideological conflict with Islamic militants, though, was asymmetric. The United States was talking about the structures of political and economic daily life; al Qaeda was talking about spiritualism and fealty to God. While not yet evident as American strategy for the global war on terror took shape in 2001, countering spiritual and religious arguments with political and economic systems was difficult, perhaps in even fatally flawed. Americans knew how to conduct a symmetric war of ideas but they were novices at asymmetric ideological warfare, particularly one involving spirituality and religious belief.