“Al-Qaeda has a plan . . . ”

Where’s ours?,” so asks the author of this Washington Post op-ed piece, Al-Qaeda’s New Grand Strategy. He proceeds to enumerate the core elements of the enemy’s strategy, winding down with a criticism of our own:

But while al-Qaeda is finding new ways to exploit our weaknesses, we are stuck in a pattern of belated responses, rather than anticipating its moves and developing preemptive strategies. The ‘systemic failure’ of intelligence analysis and airport security that Obama recently described was not just the product of a compartmentalized bureaucracy or analytical inattention, but a failure to recognize al-Qaeda’s new strategy.

I hope this is not true. I hope that we do have a strategy in place, a secret one that has escaped the open scrutiny of our overly zealous media. But assuming we really don’t have one, we should come up with a strategy that must, likewise, exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. For this, I would like President Obama to start a global campaign against al-Qaeda by appealing to all Muslims all over the world to deny, reject, and condemn the mission and purpose of al-Qaeda. Having proclaimed themselves as the true and pure defenders of the teachings of Islam, to be rejected by their own – both by ordinary Muslims and scholars and imams alike – is to strike a blow to their megalomaniac, messianic vision of themselves.

As their influence overreaches far beyond the Middle East, we’ve got to stop the murderous influence of this fanatical group by asking reasonable and just Muslims to make an open and clear stance: that is, to proclaim publicly that al-Qaeda does not speak for them and cannot possibly represent them, and that it is nothing but a violent terrorist group.

To reasonable and just Muslims everywhere, this is your call as much as it is ours.