After writing about Islamist terrorism for a decade, I'm convinced, along with many terrorism analysts, that we face a globalized, radical movement of militant Islamists who seek to impose theocratic rule over much of the world. It is an absolutist, misogynist, intolerant ideology that belongs in the 12th century, not the 21st. Some brand this movement Islamofascism, harking back to earlier battles with the totalitarian forces of Nazism and communism. Others say that's an overstatement, but I don't have a problem with the term–Islam is going through a violent reformation that will affect the entire planet, and the moderates appear to be losing. As if that weren't bad enough, America's response–invading Iraq–has made the conflict measurably worse.

But Mike Vlahos says we're wrong. "We are losing our wars in the Muslim world because our vision of history is at odds with actual reality," Vlahos argued in a recent talk. This is not World War II, nor is it the Cold War, he says, and branding fundamentalism in the Muslim world as Islamofascist is self-defeating. Instead, the resistance we find is but one aspect of a worldwide reaction to entire swaths of humanity being left behind. "It is a global phenomenon, not just Muslim," he told me. "Muslims are the first to perfect the model of resistance."

What makes Vlahos worth listening to isn't just that he's a very bright guy; he's also an insider. He works on national security projects at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which does classified projects for the U.S. Defense Department. A former director of the State Department's Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, he for years has advised military agencies on how to understand and respond to the Muslim world. He's also a maverick, pushing Pentagon brass and policymakers to grasp the big picture of the war on terrorism and America's debacle in Iraq.

Vlahos's latest thoughts are likely to stir controversy. He contends that America, like the Roman Empire and other imperial powers, relies on a grand narrative of itself. Through 60 years of unparalleled power, the United States has seen itself as a beacon of freedom, liberty, and prosperity to the rest of the world. But the 9/11 attack threatened that image, suggesting that the nation–and all it stood for–was vulnerable. To compensate, Washington set off not on a limited quest but on a war of civilizations, determined to make the world safe and right, or perish trying. "What we needed was a grand yet child-book story with easy enemies and a ringing ending called victory," said Vlahos. Instead, the war has "morphed into a violent, uncontrollable force accelerating larger world transformations."

Vlahos calls it "the fall of modernity." While Thomas Friedman writes of an increasingly prosperous world that is flat, Vlahos sees a dangerously disjointed future of haves and have-nots. He points not to Friedman's work but to Mike Davis's Planet of Slums, a disturbing tour of the world's ghettos, shantytowns, and squatter communities–a great divide that in 30 years may encompass as many as 3 billion people.

To Vlahos, the world's bad guys and fundamentalists–whether Brazilian slum gangs, Somali Islamic courts, or Iraqi militias–should not be seen merely as threatening groups but as "alternative communities" that arise in response to a failed, skewed process of globalization. The advent of the age of terrorism–of what the military variously calls asymmetric warfare, unconventional war, or counterinsurgency–has given these communities the means to render impotent the source of America's strength, its supreme military authority. Despite America's vast armaments, we can't make people do what we want. Indeed, by militarizing our response to these groups, we're making the situation worse. We refuse to recognize or negotiate with them yet don't know how to engage these new actors on the world scene. "We are the midwives," Vlahos warns. "Our efforts work not only against us. They actually help birth a future that works against us."

Iraq, he says, is already lost. Worse, it is a harbinger of an era that America cannot control."The world empire is coming undone," he concludes. "We don't understand what all this conflict is about, and until we do we're just going to get defeated again and again."

My head still hurts.

Bad Guy of the Week: To human-rights groups, he is the face of genocide. The turbaned, white-robed Musa Hilal is widely considered the top leader of Sudan's Janjaweed militias, the marauding bands blamed for the murder of tens of thousands of blacks in that nation's ill-fated Darfur region. Earlier this year, the U.S. Treasury Department and the United Nations placed Hilal on blacklists ordering his assets frozen and travel restricted. In interviews, Hilal has claimed that his men are "just regular soldiers" and have nothing to do with the atrocities across Darfur. Meanwhile, the toll continues to rise: Since 2003, the conflict has killed some 200,000 and displaced nearly 2 million in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, widespread rape, and other war crimes. For an interview with Hilal, in which he admits the Sudanese government has backed and directed the Janjaweed, check out this 2004 video from Human Rights Watch.

Photo Credit: © 2006 Human Rights Watch