A forest is composed of trees

I'm sure there are other points for reasonable people to differ on in this Bruce Bawer opinion piece, linked through Arts & Letters Daily. Something that stood out like a red flag to me, though, is the casual inclusion of Australian Army Lt. Col. David Kilcullen in a list of persons that Mr. Bawer finds insufficiently tough on radical Islam:

Even military leaders aren’t immune [to whitewashing the dangers of radical Islam]. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad.

This should make no sense to anyone who has the remotest idea who David Kilcullen actually is, what he does for a living, and how great his contributions to American counterinsurgency doctrine and practice have been. Indeed, it betrays a certain similarity to other fundamentalist orthodoxies of thought: think in concert with my beliefs, use the proper code words and pass-phrases, or be condemned. To be sure, Mr. Bawer is unlikely to express as violent a reaction as those he criticizes in his opinion piece. It does, however, leave me cold when a pundit criticizes a soldier for a failure to use, in Mr. Bawer's opinion, the correct code words, when the soldier has already contributed more and risked more in this fight than Mr. Bawer will in his lifetime.