The excerpts below come from an interview with Carl G. Jung, "Diagnosing the Dictators." They may offer us a typological context to frame this discussion.

"There are two types of strong men in primitive society. One was the chief who was physically powerful, stronger than all his competitors, and the other was the medicine man who was not strong himself but was strong by reason of the power which the people projected into him. Thus we had the emperor and the head of the religious community. The emperer was the chief, physically strong through his possession of soldiers; the seer was the medicine man, possessing little or no physical power but an actual power sometimes surpassing that of the emperer, because the people agreed he possessed the magic--that is, supernatural ability. He could, for example, assist or obstruct the way to a happy life after death, put a ban upon an individual, a community or a whole nation, and by excommunications cause people great discomfort or pain."

Interestingly, Jung goes on to compare the Hitler/Medicine Man mystique to, of all people, Muhammad, Islam's final prophet, a political, spiritual and military leader. While reading that passage for the first time, I couldn't help but think of charismatic radical imams like Moqtada Al-Sadr, Osama Bin Laden, Sheikh Abdel Rahman, Sami Al-Arian, who seek first and formost to control the meaning of the religion by attacking the legitimacy of Muslim leaders and liberal clerics and also by shunning dissent within their local congregations and communities.

What, therefore, shall be our magical realist plan for psy-ops and other countermeasures to depower the mystique of a "medicine man" like Moqtada al-Sadr while empowering his adversaries?