How to deal wih jihadism

Matt Yglesias has a perceptive comment on the distinction between the views of liberal hawks and mainstream liberals on the best way to deal with Muslim terrorism:

... neoconservatives and liberal hawks essentially agree that the key to combatting jihadism is to combine killing terrorists with a large-scale effort to transform Muslim societies. Mainstream liberals and many conservative realists, by contrast, think that you need to combine killing terrorists with an effort to address widespread Muslim political grievances.

That, I think, is the big conceptual debate about national security in this country, and lots of the leading figures in the Democratic Party are on Bush's side of the argument. Nor should that fact be especially surprising, since upper-level professional politicians and professional political operatives all chose their partisan affiiations long before anyone especially cared about Islamist terrorism.

I think he's hit the nail on the head here. We're never going to get very far as long as the Muslims believe we are aligned against them. And, nothing Bush & Co. have done has done anything to address their grievances. In fact, everything he's done has increased their grievances.