Ayaan Hirsi Ali castigates the United States and its allies for not taking to heart that the war on terror is also a war of ideas, and for not waging it as such. She suggests how they could do better (free registration required):

American presidents and secretaries of state need not give lectures on the finer points of Islamic orthodoxy. But it is not too much to ask them to support Islamic religious reform and make the fate of Muslim dissidents and reformers part of their negotiations with allies (such as Saudi Arabia) and foes (such as Iran) alike. At the same time, U.S. officials need to stop publicly whitewashing unreformed Islam.

There is a precedent for this proposal. During the cold war, the United States systematically encouraged and funded anti-Communist intellectuals to counter the influence of Marxists and other fellow travelers of the left by speaking out against the evils of the Soviet system. In 1950, the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, dedicated to defending the non-Communist left, opened in Berlin. Leading intellectuals such as Bertrand Russell, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to serve as honorary chairs. Many of the congress’s members were former Communists—notably, Arthur Koestler—who warned against the dangers of totalitarianism on the basis of personal experience. . . .

The conventional wisdom today is that the cold war was won on economics. But this is a misunderstanding of history. In fact, in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, the United States appealed to people living behind the Iron Curtain not only on the basis of Americans’ higher standards of living but also—and perhaps more importantly—on the basis of individual freedom and the rule of law. . . .

Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam with as much courage as the dissidents who spoke out against the Soviet Union. . . . They are . . . challenging an orthodoxy that contains within it the seeds of an escalating jihad. Yet the West either ignores them or dismisses them as unrepresentative.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].