If you are looking for moral gibberish on the subject of the Mumbai massacre you would be hard pressed to come up with a more exquisite example of utter confusion than this, from former Congressman Jim Leach:

The Mumbai catastrophe underscores the importance of vocabulary. The issue is not “war;” it is “barbarism.” The former implies a cause: a national or tribal or ethnic rationale that infuses a sacrificial action with some group’s view of heroism; the latter is an assault on civilized values, everyone’s. There is nothing heroic about doing something so easy as to walk into a hotel or place of worship with weapons and explosives and allow angered prejudice to rein. There is no justice in killing innocents, whether random or because of their faith or nationality.

To the degree barbarism is a part of the human condition, Mumbai must be understood not just as an act related to a particular group but as an outbreak of pent-up irrationality that can occur anywhere, anytime. There may be defenses — good intelligence, a gallant military, professional law enforcement — but the most effective antidote to barbarism is allegiance to civilized structures that command respect.

Actually, it is an act of war. There is a particular “national or tribal or ethnic rationale.” Leach and others in the civilized world don’t, of course, consider the mass murders “heroic,” but the perpetrators and their followers do. And it was not just “pent-up irrationality” floating without form or purpose that lead to the mass slayings, but a meticulously planned operation in service of ideological aims. And, no, “allegiance to civilized structures that command respect” is not going to do the job. Robust intelligence, well-trained military forces, and intellectual clarity about the nature of the enemy are really what is needed.

This is all mind-bogglingly wrong. What we don’t yet know is whether the President-elect and his nominees for key national security roles buy this sort of clap-trap or whether they understand that they are inheriting a war on the West, with Americans and Jews as key targets. Rather than Leach, let’s hope they adopt this clear-eyed approach set out by Mark Steyn:

This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

So which will it be — the world according to Leach or to Steyn? If we hope to survive, it better be the latter.