Fire and Knowledge

The struggle against Islamic-based terrorism will be not simply a military campaign but a battle for public opinion in the Islamic world, among our allies, and in the United States. Osama bin Laden understands that he cannot defeat or even incapacitate the United States in a conventional war.

What he and his allies can do is inflict enough pain to provoke a reaction of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq—a botched and ill-advised U.S. military incursion into a Muslim country, which in turn spurs on insurgencies based on religious sentiment and nationalist pride, which in turn leads to an escalating death toll on the part of U.S. troops and the local civilian population. All of this fans anti-American sentiment among Muslims, increases the pool of potential terrorist recruits, and prompts the American public to question not only the war but also those policies that project us into the Islamic world in the first place.

That’s the plan for winning a war from a cave, and so far, at least, we are playing to script.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006), pp. 307-308