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Bin Laden's War, David A. Westbrook

Buffalo Law Review

The GWOT/Global Jihad is different from prior conflicts (including the ideological struggle of the Cold War), and these differences have important strategic consequences which are not reflected in current US policy. First, US strategy has proceeded on traditional, and inapposite, understandings of the politics that informs this war. Second, radical neofundamentalism is a new form of political organization, attuned to a globalized world, with a distinctive form of violence quite different from the violence organized by the bureaucratic apparatus of a modern professional military grounded in a nation state. Third, the politics of radical neofundamentalism has strategic consequences. On the …