Quote Originally Posted by Gian P Gentile View Post
Dr. Metz:

I liked the first paragraph and it seems to me to be spot-on in terms of nailing mistakes made early on in how to approach the war with al-queda.

In the second paragraph you seem to portray the Cold War as some how a simpler or easier problem since it was symetric. I have found military officers tend to do this same thing when talking about how difficult coin is compared to what they think war with the soviet union would have been like had we fought it on the north german plains; that conventional war is somehow simpler than coin. I believe both are difficult in their own ways and conditions. So again you may want to look at the subtlety of your second paragraph and how it makes the Cold War appear to have been an easier problem for policy makers than the war on terror. If that is what you think of it then so be it, but I think it was a set of challenges that were different in degree and not quality.
What I was trying to get at is the point that strictly in terms of the "war of ideas," the Cold War was easier. It was complicated by the fact that there was an audience in the West that was at least partially receptive to the ideas of the other side (the political left). Today, there is less of that. But--and this is kind of uber theme I'm working on within the book--the Cold War was essentially a civil war within Western culture (albeit one that eventually played out in non-Western cultures). This conflict is quintessentially cross cultural. That's why drawing strategic concepts from the Cold War can be ineffective.