Wretchard analyzes the NIE report here. It’s lengthy, but the best I’ve seen, and well worth reading since he touches on lots of interesting points (like perception vs reality; kinetic battlefield vs propaganda war; OBL’s fatwa of the 1990′s, which specifically targeted William Perry; Iraq vs Afghanistan; etc).

Andrew McCarthy also quotes some of OBL’s fatwa against the US in his thoughtful piece.

What comes out of both pieces is consistent with my own bias: that it is a huge mistake to view the WoT (or whatever you wish to call it) as anything other than a “faith based initiative.” My jumping off point is that the Islamist fascists view themselves first and foremost as God’s sword, and that it is the radical Islamic ideology, not the contrived grievances against the west, that attracts muslims to the cause. As McCarthy (op cit) says:

Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, jihadism is attractive to tens of millions of people in what is called the Muslim world. Out of a total population of about 1.3 billion, that may not be a very high percentage (although I daresay it is higher than we like to think). But it is the ideology that attracts recruits. Grievances are just rhetoric. If the bin Ladens did not have Iraq, or the Palestinians, or Lebanon, or Pope Benedict, or cartoons, or flushed Korans, or Dutch movies, or the Crusades, they’d figure out something else to beat the drums over. Or they’d make something up — there being lots of license to improvise when one purports to be executing Allah’s will.

Brian