A still invaluable perspective on the "great war on terror" is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani.

From Publishers Weekly:

Osama bin Laden’s pronouncements are rarely published in full in the United States, but transcripts of his messages-often available overseas-provide startling insight into the political, rather than religious, nature of his thinking. "Labeling us, and our acts, as terrorism is also a description of you and your acts," bin Laden said recently. "Our acts are a reaction to your acts."

In this meandering rumination on modern-day terrorism, Mamdani takes a controversial step by agreeing with bin Laden, at least on this point; he argues that groups like al-Qaeda are generally motivated by legitimate political grievances with U.S. foreign policy.

"In a nutshell," Mamdani writes, "the U.S. government decided to harness and even to cultivate terrorists" during the latter half of the Cold War as it sought to roll back the Soviet Union’s global influence. Now, with that legacy coming back to haunt its creators, Mamdani concludes that "no Chinese wall divides ‘our’ terrorism from ‘their’ terrorism. Each tends to feed the other."

These ideas evolved from a series of talks the author gave at New York’s Riverside Church in the weeks after 9/11, and the book retains the informality of those discussions. There are flashes of inspiration, among them a thoughtful distinction between "political Islam" and "Islamic fundamentalism," two terms that are frequently and wrongfully used synonymously. There are also frustrating digressions, and Mamdani makes few attempts to address potential dissenters. Still, readers who can overlook these drawbacks will find that this study does make provocative connections across disciplines and continents-finding similarities, say, between Liberian and Zionist settlers. Mamdani is searching for big ideas, not nuances, and in this he is successful, making his book an important contribution to the national discussion on terrorism and Islam.

The book is actually much better than this "balanced" review lets on.

Mamdani is originally from East Africa (though educated in America) where he saw US support for South Africa and its terrorist proxies from very close quarters. He connects our support for terrorists in South Africa, Central America and Afghanistan based on that sort of factually grounded perspective. With plenty of experience of repressive regimes (he was born in Uganda, and had to flee Idi Amin, for example) he in no way demonizes America, where he has lived a good portion of his life.

none of this would be happening at all.

The main thing wrong with Obama's suggestion is not necessarily that he wants to go after the people who attacked us. It's that the people who attacked us are not a country. They are people who hide and take refuge within so-called "friendly" nations--Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, most notably. This is a fundamental fact that the foreign policy establishment still has not been able to digest almost a full six years after 9/11.

But that's just where the contradictions begin. You see, The Clash of Civilizations (the Samuel Huntington book, most concretely, but the argument as well) rests on the argument that seeing the world in terms of nation-states is wrong. It's got to be seen in terms of civilizations. It's a bogus either/or argument, and it's made more absurd by a ludicrous misrepresentation of Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigm, but you go to war with the theory you've got, not the theory you'd like to have, and that is the theory we went to war with--a theory that itself is at war with our own foreign policy establishment's continued insistence on thinking in terms of nation-states.

There is, of course, one more major contradiction involved. After the WMD lie turned bust, and Ahmed Chalabi turned out to be the joke every sane person always knew him to be, BushCo decided to to turn two problems into one solution, and declare the Iraq War to be all about bringing Democracy to the Middle East (though, of course, not to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.)

The problem here is that The Clash of Civilizations was written as counter-argument against Fukiyama's The End of History, which argued for the universal triumph of the Western political/economic model. Which is to say, brining Democracy to the Middle East, and all the rest of the world (though, of cource, not to Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or anyplace else where it would ruffle the wrong feathers).

So, there you have it, a three-way contradiction at the very heart of the very serious foreign policy elite's very serious ideas about what we are doing in the world, and why it cannot be questioned by anyone.

Now, here's the exit punch-line. Although Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations to counter-attack Fukiyama's The End of History, Huntington himself had written an earlier book quite similar to Fukiyama's in its Western triumphalist theme. This was The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century.

This bizaare situation was pointed out in an article in the American Prospect in July 1998, "The Clash of Samuel Huntingtons," by Jacob Heilbrunn. (Only available online via High Beam and Questia, so far as I can tell.)

So there you have it. Once you cut through all the verbose posturing, and actually get down to the fundamental Big Ideas, what the foreign policy establishement's very serious dialogue most closely resembles is Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine.

Or perhaps that's too complicated. Perhaps it's the Marx Brothers and the "Sanity Clause."