PRINCIPLES OF ENGAGEMENT (September 20, 2001)

Security at home. We must:

a. Provide security and overlapping backups to ensure terrorist hacking into the internet cannot corrupt or destroy the system save for resolvable and temporary problems.

b. Provide unassailable doors to cockpits in all planes, armed air marshals and substantially improved yet efficient ground security.

c. Coordinate and beef-up all intelligence agencies to an effective and synergistic level.

Try as we might in a global and free society we cannot ultimately control and check every passenger and visitor, every importation or border. There will never be adequate funds or personnel; our way of life could not sustain such controls. The only pragmatic solution is to take the battle to the source and remove that nourishment before the cancer spreads throughout the network of the free world. Cut out the heart and the tentacles will dissipate.

Long term tenacity, clarity and moral purpose must be our goals. We must insert operatives and have eyes on the ground everywhere there are training camps, offices and control groups of the various terrorist organizations including within the governments of those supporting them. We must provide motivation and monies to sustain and turn all possible contacts in these organizations.

We must provide support in every way to organizations in opposition to these terrorist groups as long as we can determine that their goal is the destruction of these groups and not, in the long term in any convoluted fashion, the endangerment of America and the free world. We must not be squeamish or delicate. Theirs is a total war - ours needs to be a total response.

The only reason, and it is ingenious in conception, why Iran, Syria and Arafat may want to be part of the coalition would be to ensure they are not a focus (as they necessarily should be) of the coalition’s fight against those safe havens for terrorists.

We must, for countries refusing to visibly and effectively support the eradication of all these terrorist organizations, strongly support with monies, logistics, publicity and even arms any and all opposition groups within and outside of those countries and to openly declare this as a consequence - either these countries are part of the solution or they must be made to understand they will be part of the problem. And clarity must include defining terrorist organizations as being all groups that sponsor or support anyone who commits intentional murder against innocent targeted civilians irrespective of their motivations or reasons.

The act must necessarily be seen to negate any cause, any logic. They must be excommunicated from the civilized world, from recourse to civilized law and forced to wander with no safe harbor.

Only then can the world have some respite from the threat of tactical nuclear bombs and chemical or biological weapons. The teaching of racial, cultural or religious hate must likewise be outlawed. Spawning a generation of future suicide bombers in the schools of the West Bank, or in Tehran or elsewhere, is as certain to wreak havoc on the freedoms of the West, as would a nuclear device.

Children should be treated as a “hands off” resource to all those who would pervert their impressionable souls with hate and lies. We do not countenance child labor or pedophilia - we should not tolerate the evil propagandizing of youthful minds. We have laws against hate crimes and none against hate education. We should campaign against, applying every legal restriction and public censure, those groups or organizations that promote anti-Semitism and hate against any racial or religious group. Specific to this focus must be any Islamic fundamentalist education that uses schools and mosques to promote hate against the west, the destruction of western societies by force and the fostering of specific violence against any individuals or groups these fundamentalists view as an anathema to their exclusionary and monopolistic desires to ensure the victory of their version of Islam through the violent destruction of everyone and everything that does not conform to their particular brand of fundamentalism.

Since Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition there has been no such intolerant, extreme, vicious and fascist regime of religious imperialists as these fundamentalists, except for the harsh fact that instead of swords and burning stakes these fanatics now have or will soon have biological, chemical and tactical nuclear weapons and they clearly have no qualms against using them.

More importantly, however, we and our allies must apply the same sanctions against not only those countries and groups outside of the USA that promote or support terrorist groups, but those self same countries or groups around the world that promote, support or allow any education or religious instruction that incorporates racist, anti-Semitic or religious hate where violence and indiscriminate murder is motivated for and seen as a necessary solution. Suicide bombing schools for children and adolescents for example is an abomination that must be outlawed with unrivaled international vigour.

Unless we do so, effectively and continuously, the future will belong to hate and anarchism and the culture of the “dark ages” will affect the balance of this century more than the combined hopes of technology, the internet and the unique and precious freedoms of the West. There has been a lot of talk about a backlash against Arab or Muslim Americans. Their civil rights, their safety, their ability to fly around the country unmolested must be zealously protected. That is the American way and the essence of American strength. However, Muslim clerics and Arab leaders in America, instead of exclusively concerning themselves with issues of discrimination, need to vociferously denounce these terrorists, their supporters and their philosophies and to follow up with matching action and behavior. They need to stop pandering to their desire to present and preserve a monolithic Islamic front against Western influence.

Only then will the rest of America and the Free World differentiate between Islamic people comfortable within the Free West’s ethos, and those seeking to destroy the West. They too, not only the broader intended victims, must stand up and be counted: only then can they justifiably claim to be deserving of all America’s tolerance, equality and freedom from discrimination.

We have a window of opportunity of perhaps a few years left, before the risks outweigh the solutions - let us not squander either time or opportunity.