The Discerning Texan

One person who need not fear being hit in Britain at least, is Moshe Feiglin, an Israeli politician has been pre-emptively banned by the Home Office. "The UK's Home Office has banned Likud central committee member Moshe Feiglin from entering Britain. A letter sent to Feiglin from the office of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, and published in this week's Jewish Chronicle, says the minister has excluded him from the country, even though he had no plans to visit."

But whether or not the Home Office was correct to ban Feiglin (probably because of is controversial views) these two stories emphasize how granular warfare has become. No longer do mass armies clash on a battlefield. Today the weapons of choice are the concrete-filled JDAM, the headrest carbomb, the 22 caliber silenced pistol and the lawsuit.

Targets are now selected with unprecedented precision. Thus the Home Office can screen out Feiglin, who committed the inexcusable slander of saying "Muhammad is strong, cruel and deceitful" and yet admit Ibrahim Mousawi, of Hizbullah's Al-Manar television station who only claimed that 4,000 Jewish employees skipped work at the World Trade Center the day it was attacked.

This specificity explains why information warfare plays such an important part in the current world crisis. The operating constraint is not the power and destructiveness of kinetic weapons but the precision with which they can be targeted. The US military possesses the physical power to annhilate every living thing in the Middle East, but it has only a fraction of the intelligence capability it needs to target the truly culpable. Even terrorists, seeking to avoid an all-out conflagration (which they would lose) often calibrate their attacks to fall just short of provoking their enemies into full-scale retaliation.

Feiglin's ban was a "soft-kill" for Leftist and Jihadi propagandists. And the bounty hunters released by Teheran will doubtless be looking for ways to put a hard kill on the individuals believed to have committed the outrage of executing that upstanding representative of humanity, the mass killer Imad Mugniyeh.

The granularity of modern warfare and the quantities of information needed to support it imply that the Western resistance to the Jihad will never hit its stride until some way is found to mobilize the civilian population into counteracting Leftist and Jihadi operations. Grassroots organizing, polemic and lawfare will play as big or bigger a role in operations as the flamethrower, automatic rifle or artillery piece did in past wars. There is very literally no longer a front line in the traditional sense. There are now only different modes of fighting; some kinetic but mostly non-kinetic. And by and large the exchanges will have specific targets. Every bullet, subpoena or slander will have somebody's name on it.