This is a war -- if you can even call it that -- that involves identifying people who ar ehidden, in groups that are not a nation, have no capitals, move in shadows, who can ruin the morale of a giant nation with a boxcutter, for Christ's sake, and who communicate by word of mouth.

To even identify them, let alone act effectively against them, requires an extent of intelligence we haven't begun to master. Intelligence comes from over-fly photos and sensors (ELECINT), or it comes from human beings (HUMINT). And there is no way we will ever penetrate this distributed networks of well- but loosely-organized criminals with sat recces and electronic sensors.

We need, therefore to make a LOT of friends in the world of Islam, very fast, and we need to deploy them in every corner of the Middle East gathering opinions, bits and pieces, learning who is friends with whom, who buys what where, whose son has just been tapped to join the Network, who suddenly seems to be spending oney like a drunken sailor, whether in the market places of Kabul or those of Tel Aviv.

This kind of networking has not been deployed by Western operatives since the heyday of Wild Bill Donovan, or the French Resistance. But this is the only way to permeate a network of people who are not identifiable by their big capitols or their five-star command HQs or their tanks and battalions moving across the plains for any bird to see.

Once their trails are found we can take action against them -- cutting off funds, spiking their cellphones or even sending small squads in to bring a few of them at a time off for summary justice somewhere.

I don't see any other effective path, and it is a long drawn out path. Breaking out the B52s and the smart missiles isn't going to hit them in an effective point because, unless I am seriously misinformed (which has been known to happen) they have no crossroads to bomb.

They are organized in cells, like the hidden Reds of Joe McCarthy's nightmares. But unlike the CP's cells these guys are capable of tight, fast coordination. They are similar in many ways to the cells of the early Bolsheviks, except accelerated by technology.

It CERTAINLY will never help to alienate and terrify any Muslim you see in the U.S. as a "probable sympathizer"/

A