Quote of note:

New Arabic-language radio and TV from the US, while a good idea, cannot be more credible than the government funding them.

Force Alone Will Not Curb the Terror Threat
Financial Times, October 05, 2004
Michael E. O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies

Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence—supposedly kindred ideological spirits—have revealed that they see the struggle against terror in very different ways. This is a political opportunity for the campaign of John Kerry and John Edwards and a reminder that America needs a much fuller debate about how to defeat terrorism.

The dichotomy between the vice-president and the defence secretary is becoming too obvious to dispute. In a leaked memo to other Bush administration officials, dated October 2003, Mr Rumsfeld asked sceptically how we could be sure that second-generation al-Qaeda operatives were not being recruited and trained more quickly than we were killing and arresting first-generation members. In Singapore, in June this year, he admitted that the US lacked a coherent long-term strategy to prevail in the war on terror. Mr Rumsfeld's ruminations foreshadowed the often-overlooked arguments on the same subject of the commission on September 11 2001.

Now consider Mr Cheney's views. He has consistently mocked Mr Kerry's call, in a speech this summer, for a more "sensitive" war on terror. Some might counter that Mr Cheney is just jumping at an easy political opening; Mr Kerry probably regrets using that word and certainly did not use it again in his first debate with George W. Bush last Thursday. But the vice-president's unwillingness to view the terrorism threat as anything but a military, intelligence and law enforcement problem is striking. The Washington Post has noted that his standard stump speech includes the following line: "This is not an enemy we can reason with, or negotiate with, or appease. This is, to put it simply, an enemy that we must destroy." That is the extent of the vice-president's thinking on the subject—at least based on his public utterances.

There is no doubt Mr Cheney is right on existing al-Qaeda members. They must be annihilated. But there is little doubt that he is wrong, or at least irrelevant, in regard to the second-generation problem. How can we prevent the disaffected, unemployed 16-year-old boy in a Pakistani madrasa, Saudi extremist mosque or Moroccan slum from giving in to the hateful propaganda of his surroundings and taking up arms against the west in the future? The vice-president has no answer. He does not even seem to recognise the importance of the question.