Today's sensational attacks on the U. S., certainly by Muslims who were likely Arabs, are being described as "terrorist" acts by "madmen" for example by Chris Patton, EU. Others seeking an academic perspective along the lines of Sam Huntington, see the attacks as a new bi-polar division between Muslims and Western states and culture. 

Our reading at the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (Jerusalem and Washington, D. C.) is these attacks are the beginning of a struggle against the West in which the source or cause is primarily the West itself, a group of societies divided internally by an array of factors.

Practically speaking, residents of New York and Washington, D. C. as well as other U.S. cities can now expect routine terrorist assaults ranging from individual terrorist assaults, suicide bombings, germ and chemical attacks in subways and buildings. The existence in the U.S. of legal and tax exempt Arab and Muslim groups, for example CAIR, can be expected to fund and participate in, and most of all to defend these attacks while holding up their opponents as racist.

The strategic, military effect of this struggle against the West, presently most visible in the Middle East and concerning Islam and Arabs, finds its "advanced case" in Israel.  Just as Israel has been the object of an Arab undertaking, supported in the West (and most of all in Israel itself and among Jews) to extinguish, cruelly and barbarically to be sure by Arabs and Muslims,  Israel's national existence, the assault today on the U.S. was driven by this same wish or hope to exterminate a nation and its people, and for which the source of support and complicity, grotesquely, resides in the West among its rulers and elites. In other words, what makes this effort a signal one in addition to being genocidal, is that its cause (to be distinguished from its executors) is not Arabs or Muslims or per Huntington, Islam.

Today's opening assault in a war to destroy Western states is marked by two Western strategies respecting Israel and the West -by Israel and the West.

These strategies are 1) to establish among states and peoples as their leading principle that national existence is an option, particularly one that should be exercised against national existence and the balance of power by means of "conflict resolution," cessation of "violence,"  by peace processes, treaties, moral equivalence and a host of similar undertakings to which Israel (and Jews) and the larger West are committed, and, 2) a strategy with respect to war and alliance which rejects the solution of conflicts, as in Ireland, Israel, Kosovo, by the victory of one side, the defeat and surrender of the other. The mantra: "there is no military solution to the conflict," is at once the rejection of this simple response -victory, defeat, surrender -and, so far as such events can be "caused" by words and ideas --the direct cause of today's attacks and their certain continuation.

Again, Israel is the "advanced case." In a series of wars beginning in 1948, Israel has won by trading its final battle for a cease fire, an armistice and dollars. This is to say, Israel traded victory, surrender of the other side(s) and, of course, peace, borders, "neighbors"  for what it has today-a peace process. This trade included what the U.S.  experienced today and can expect to continue, indeed until victory or defeat.

We in the West, today in New York and Washington, D. C., are paying our price for supporting Israel's "advanced case" of the affliction of the West. Our "pro-Israel" support of the Jewish state's attempt to accommodate the Arabs instead of defeating them and establishing rational peace was perhaps a Western attempt to "buy off" our own day of reckoning for failure to face up to the obligations of self-defense and national existence.

If there is a simple, strategic "explanation" of today's attacks on the U.S. it is this: the U.S. and the West, along with Israel, have insisted, at least since September 1993, that the Palestinian Problem has "no military solution."  At the end of the day, and after all the pundits are talked out in matters of "violence" and "peace" and the rest, the attack on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon (and the other assaults to come in what is now a serious if newfangled war) -which resulted in the hideous and unspeakable deaths of thousands of innocent souls, American citizens who have been effectively betrayed -these deaths were triggered by the peace process in Israel (and other peace processes) and by the very people and institutions of the West that are today making the speeches about "madmen" and "terrorism."  The proximate charge of murder is on the murderers. The wider charge is on the West itself.

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