George Herbert once remarked, "Love thy neighbor, but pull not down your hedge." The peopling of the earth after the last Ice Age set the stage for Globalization. That is to say, population movement was possible, but it was so slow that populations became isolated from one another and developed distinct languages, traditions, and cultures. When various distinct populations came into contact, the results included conflict, co-existence, and intermixing. In the 20th century, an explosion of technological developments in Western Culture accelerated the growth of communication, trade, and population movement between cultures — what we now call Globalization. Globalization is now pervasive, fostered by the Internet, and the rapid movement of investment capital that it enables.

The promise of Globalization is the adoption of uniform standards of financial accountability, transparency, and performance — practices that can only be enabled by good, responsive, transparent, accountable governments — i.e., democracies, according to Friedman.

The perils of Globalization are the "winner take all" nature of the global marketplace (due to the nature of both social and economic networks), alienation caused by the influx of ideas and people into cultures more rapidly than they can be assimilated, and — unless "Green" business practices are demanded by consumers and citizens — environmental damage.

Currently the most dangerous of these downsides may be alienation. Consider that most of the volunteers for al-Qaeda are upper middle-class Muslim men from the Arabian Peninsula and the Maghreb who have studied in Europe and England. In Muslim countries, they enjoyed a certain status relative to and deference from women. In Europe, no such status and deference is recognized. In Muslim countries, they lived in a culture suffused with Islam. In Europe and the West, they live in a culture suffused with secularism, in which children are viewed as a burden rather than a blessing, and in which the only avenues to public status are wealth and fame. Naturally they seek the comfort of the mosque. And it is there that they sometimes meet radical companions, or radical Imams [ put there or maintained there by now globalized radical Islamic fundamentalist "charities"]. As Marc Sageman notes, such alienation and dislocation can be antecedents to conversion experiences. Some of these young men become radicalized, as did, for example, Muhammad Atta, the German-educated engineer and leader of the cells that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

But this alienation can occur even in one's own home country. Consider that the Internet can change the relations between generations in traditional cultures. Whereas the young used to look up to the old for wisdom, now the young know more than the old do about the Internet, and the ideas flowing across it. Suddenly, one is no longer at home even in one's own culture. This can create resentment, and a desire to stop Globalization.

Now, Globalization can be kept at bay — one can protect one's olive trees, as Friedman would put it — but at the price of alienating the Global Capital markets. In other words, keeping out the world's ideas keeps out the world's wealth as well. This can create further resentment, and a desire to change the rules of the game by trying to dominate Globalization — to turn one's own threatened cultural norms into global norms. It is this desire that leads the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah to attack the current economic and political engines of Globalization, the West in general, and the United States in particular.

For the radical Islamofacists, the drivers of the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah, it boils down to this: if Globalization comes to your country, you will no longer be able to force your women to live their entire lives under virtual house arrest. You may do it for a while, but not indefinitely. So they attack the West. They are the army of what Barnett calls the "non-integrating gap," those regions of the world that refuse to accept what are the growing global norms.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that what they want is not so much to stop the spread of those norms, but to spread their own norms in their place. The Hirabis demand respect for their interpretation of Islam (which is both idolatrous and blasphemous), to the extent that no one will be free to criticize them publicly - which amounts to dhimmitude (second class status) for the rest of the world, including the majority of the Islamic world. If they were to prevail, the best the world could hope for is the way Saudis currently live under the yoke of their own mutaween, or "religious police."

The current minimal norms of international behavior must be enforced (and improved) if they are to be effective in creating a sustainable and liveable international order. Like it or not there is only one military force of global reach left to what Barnett calls the "functioning core" of the international community. And that force is the military strength of the United States of America. That is to say, somebody must be the "enforcer" for the international community, and the US is it by default. But the world wants the US to be a champion, not a bully.

Nevertheless, the US cannot sustain unilateral action indefinitely. The West, if it is to survive in a livable world, must regain its solidarity and purpose, and continue to lead — and when necessary force — the shaping of international order. To do less will abandon the world to a technology-enabled patriarchal honor/shame based tribalism.

Vengeance is mine, saith the LORD. In the case of Global Salafist Hirabah, those who claim to wreak God's vengeance are Muslim clerics and laypeople who fancy themselves to be clerics. In reality, these people are prisoners of their own really, really bad theology. They worship not God, but an image of God, an idol that is as wedded as they are to the honor-shame cultures they mistake for Islam. They perceive that their honor/shame cultures are under siege from modernity and globalization, and therefore they delude themselves into thinking their religion is under siege. By this method they justify all manner of evil. For them, the God of the Qur'an and the Bible is like a blank screen onto which they project their own prejudices, hatreds, and longing for revenge and domination. With such projection, they can deny that their destructive urges come from within themselves. Instead, they can believe that their will to kill is but submission to the Will of God. Yes, the same God who willed that 113 of the 114 suras of the Qur'an begin with the words, "In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful...." (They begin every sura but one to stress their importance and their intendedness — they are worth repeating, and they are not an empty formula!) We maintain that the Hirabis have allowed themselves to be seduced by what the Qur'an calls "the Slinking One, who whispers into the hearts of men, " that they are idolaters who worship what they imagine God to be rather than God, and that by associating the evil in their hearts with God's Will, they are blasphemers.

The term "Salafist" derives from the Arabic salifiyya, meaning a "return to the ancestors," more specifically to the ways of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and his Companions (Abu Bakr, Ali, Salman al-Farsi and Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqas, may God be pleased with them), and the Rightly Guided Ones (the first four Caliphs — Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali). After this time (about A.D. 661) a dispute arose as to who should succeed as Caliph (Commander of the Faithful) which led to the schism between Sunni and Shi'i Islam. The Salafists believe that by returning to the purity of the Islam of the Rightly Guided Ones, Islam can be rescued from its cultural decline relative to the West since about A.D. 1400. (They do not consider that Right Guidance can come from the whole people as well as from an enlightened leader, and that therefore democracy could open a "ground up" channel for Right Guidance and renewal in Islam.)

The Salafists have divided into two camps: those who emphasize a gradual salifiyya based on preaching, persuasion, and setting a good example, and those fundamentalists who extol a violent revolutionary struggle, whom we call Hirabis. Some Hirabis aim to achieve the violent overthrow of all the regimes of the Middle East (whom they call the Near Enemy), particularly of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Since Western powers with economic interests in the petroleum in the region are correctly seen as supporting these regimes, the Hirabis target these powers (the Far Enemy). Thus, the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah is an insurgency targeted at the political will of the Western Powers in general, and America in particular to support the status quo in the Middle East. More recently, the Hirabis have added the Palestinians and US support for Israel as a concern, in order to gain legitimacy and support from a wider Muslim audience.

Changing world policy toward the Middle East, however, is not the final aim of the Hirabis. The reason they want to erode support for the current regimes is not to establish freedom for oppressed Muslims. Instead, they want to become the oppressors, forcing all Muslims to live according to their version of Islamic Law, and killing any Muslim who does not. For example, the Taliban (al-Qaeda's puppet government) used to execute women in Afghanistan for not properly covering their heads. All non-Muslims will become dhimmis (second class citizens) with no political rights. In other words, what the Hirabis want is power, and the more they see themselves succeeding (or at least not being defeated) the more ambitious they become. Many Hirabis now want to make their version of militant, expansionist Islamic Fundamentalism the dominant politio-military power on earth, forcing dhimmitude upon the rest of us worldwide, starting in Europe and Britain.

In their theology, the Hirabis believe that God loves for them to kill men, women, and children of the Enemies of God (anyone who opposes the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah). Thus, even Muslims can be targeted if they oppose the Hirabis, or even if they just happen to be around other targeted areas or individuals (because they should not have just "been around" — given the access they had to the Enemy, they should have killed the Enemy themselves.) In particular, since suicide attacks have been discovered to be their most effective weapon, the Hirabis have so glorified suicide attacks that they have created within some Muslim communities what can truly be described as a "culture of death." Suicide attackers are publicized as having been "wedded to the dark-eyed," referring to the houris (youthful ones) that attend the every need of the blessed in the highest heaven. Thus, the posters, leaflets, and websites listing the names and photos of the dead suicide attackers look not so much like funeral notices as like wedding announcements.

The effect is to seduce children into wanting to become suicide attackers themselves. Since the Qur'an states that God made the various religions so that we may know each other, we point out that to readers of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament to Christians), this looks like "sending your children through the fire to Moloch," so roundly condemned by the Hebrew Prophets. To this reader of Eric Berne's Games People Play, it also looks like the game, "Let's you and him fight." That is to say, for many, the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah has become a business, for which it is necessary to recruit a steady supply of cannon fodder.

Fourth Generation War, or 4GW, is the name that Hammes (see below) uses for politico-military insurgencies in the 20th and 21st centuries. While insurgency and terrorism are not unique to this time period, they have undergone rapid evolution in the recent past, because the insurgents have made a special effort to learn from each other's efforts. I abstract his history of 4GW below:

Mao Zedong: Began 20th century 4th Generation Warfare. With his co-comander Zhu De, he summarized its tactics in a sixteen character folk rhyme, which translates roughly as:

Enemy advances, we withdraw,
Enemy rests, we harass,
Enemy tires, we attack,
Enemy withdraws, we pursue.

Mao and De pursued three-phase warfare:

1. Build political strength.
2. Consolidate base areas.
3. Launch final (military) assault.

Mao showed that an insurgency could start and win a civil war.

Ho Chi Minh: Innovated in the use of propaganda, mass media, and manipulation of international public opinion. Ho showed that an insurgency can destroy an opponent's will to continue the struggle, and thus win a war against a foreign superpower without having to defeat it militarily. It is noteworthy that the neither the North Vietnamese Regular Army nor the Vietcong insurgents won a single significant battle - including the famous Tet Offensive. Phase III succeeded only after the US withdrawal and its refusal to supply parts and ammunitiion to South Vietnam. That is, North Vietnam got the US to simply give up and withdraw — and wars are lost by whoever quits fighting first.

One major difference between the Global Fundamentalist Hirabah and the Vietnam War is that the North Vietnamese were content with a regional victory. They did not pursue their enemies after they withdrew. Though it should be obvious from 9/11 and subsequent attacks and foiled plots worldwide, this is not the case with the Hirabis. Emboldened by their success against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan, they are now taking on the world. To withdraw, it would be necessary to withdraw from planet earth, and even then the withdrawers would be pursued.

The Sandinistas: Refined the use of political propaganda, media manipulation, manipulation of religious sentiment (Liberation Theology) to overthrow its country's government without the use of major military force. The Sandinistas showed how an insurgency can defeat the government of its host country without a Phase III military assault, or even an army of its own.

The First Intifada: Used limited force (adolecent boys throwing rocks) against limited objectives (Israeli military and police forces in the Occupied Territories) to delegitimize the Occupation in the eyes of the world, the United States, and even the Israelis themselves. Brought about a change of Israeli government from Likhud to Labor, and a willingness on the part of Israel to withdraw from the Territories in exchange for peace. The Palestinians showed how an insurgency could defeat an occupying power without a Phase III assault, a military force, or even modern weapons.

The Second Intifada: The gains of Intifada I were squandered by Arafat, who on returning from Tunisia to take over leadership of the Palestinians, returned to the rhetoric of destroying Israel. Subsequently, he allowed Ariel Sharon to manipulate him into the Second, or Al-Aqsa, Intifada, and sanctioned the use of suicide bombers against civilians in Israel proper. This brought Likhud back to power in Israel (with Sharon as Prime Minister) and legitimized the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Territories as a "First Line of Defense" against terrorism.

Al Qaeda: Largely through the resources of one wealthy man, combined with the exiled Egyptian Islamic Jihad, built a global insurgent organization composed of both tightly organized command-cadre elements, and loosely affiliated elements that more like a social movement. Exploited the civil war in Afghanistan to help the Taliban win all but 1/6 of the country. This yielded a sovereign "front government" to provide shelter for training camps and other logistical support.

Mike Scheuer notes that the grievances Al-Qaeda uses to generate volunteers in his book Imperial Hubris:

• US support of Israel's domination of the Palestinians
• US troops on the Arabian peninsula
• US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan
• US and Western support for Russia, India, and China
• US and Western pressure on Arab governments to keep oil prices low
• US and Western support of corrupt Arab governments against Muslim Fundamentalists

I think Scheuer appreciates that these grievances are recruiting/propaganda tools in a 4GW, and that how and when we go about changing the above situations (or perceptions thereof) are of critical importance. What he fails to appreciate is that al-Qaeda is in business to stay in business, and that they will invent new grievances is their old ones are dealt with. What counts most in 4GW is ideas, rather than weapons, and will to continue, rather than resources.

That is to say, 4GW is really a conflict of ideas, and, generally speaking, you can't kill an idea. You simply have to come up with a better one.

Currently, Al-Qaeda offers a vision of a return to the Caliphate and the time of the Rightly Guided Ones. So far, this has amounted to a backward-looking culture of death, inspired by an idolatrous identification of Islam with honor/shame cultures, and a blasphemous identification of God's Will with their own rage, which violates what used to be accepted norms in Islamic culture and jurisprudence. America offers a vision of democracy, religious freedom and progress. The coming decades will tell which vision is more appealing to the populations from which al-Qaeda and its like draw volunteers.