The enemy speaks.(The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists' Strategy for Defeating America; A Terrorist's Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri's Islamic Jihad Manifesto; Pure Goldwater; Dogmatics, Volume 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation )(Book review)

IN a project sponsored by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, the Naval Institute Press recently released a couple of paperbacks that will be very helpful to anyone trying to understand the war we're in. Both are edited by Jim Lacey, a prominent defense-policy analyst and former Army infantry officer whose writing has appeared in NATIONAL REVIEW. The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists' Strategy for Defeating America (187 pp., $18) is a reader-friendly anthology of jihadist writings from Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb to the present day. These texts are hair-raisingly candid; author after author seeks to disprove the contentions--advanced by moderate Muslims and Westerners sympathetic to Islam--that Islam is a peaceful religion and jihad is chiefly the believer's struggle against his own egotism.

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Scholar Philip Bobbitt has recently made the case quite eloquently that it is correct to speak of a "War on Terror"--as opposed to a war more specifically against Islamofascism--because the type of war waged by these terrorists will persist in the 21st century after al-Qaeda and other Muslim terror groups are defeated. Bobbitt's thesis finds support in a 1979 article, included in this volume, by Pakistani general S. K. Malik: "Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent's heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved.... Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him." Jihadists have little practical hope of imposing sharia law on the American heartland--but ...