Graham Allison, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and one of the founders of the Kennedy School at Harvard, wrote a book 11 years ago saying that such an attack was ultimately inevitable. In this riveting conversation from 2004 he lays out the facts and the reasoning behind his warning. The likely source of such an attack is no longer Osama Bin Laden. But as you listen ask yourself whether this analysis does not apply as well – or even more closely – to ISIS.

That was the sub-title of Bob Woodward’s book about William Casey, who ran the CIA as a war operation. Before Casey’s death in 1987 Woodward interviewed him deeply and fully – and shortly after that published this astonishing account and gave us this rather stunning discussion of the hidden history he had uncovered.

Here is a recent conversation recordedDaniel Pipes, the best expert by far on the seething and long-running anti-western turmoil in the Arab Middle East. But first some words of background.

Many American foreign affairs scholars classify themselves as of the school of “realism.” That supposedly means that they take inter-nation competition and distrust as always operative, potentially or actually.  A further premise is that struggles of that sort will persist until “victory” or exhaustion are reached. Nowhere is this overview of “international relations” more regnant than in the clusters of “Middle Eastern scholarship” found at many American universities.

Together with many hidden away in the State Department and more visible and audible in the American and West European print and electronic press, the prevailing view among such Middle East “experts” has been this: that murderous jihadism, in its many contemporary manifestations, was and is an inevitable reaction to the humiliation (originally colonialistic and then Israeli) to which the Arab nations and peoples have been subjected.  At their worst such intellectoid apologists have sometimes come close to implying that “tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.”

Compounding the offense is the increasingly evoked gambit (Edward Said may well have been its most prominent American academic exemplar) that the standard of “realism”  forces all explanation of the renascent barbarism of Al Queda  to be understood on this basis. That view is now often whispered – whether in academic, journalistic or governmental settings – about the new monstrosity of ISIS/ISIL.

Some well qualified scholars – trained in the American scholastic tradition but operating beyond its received “truths” – have provided a far more accurately realistic account of where and how modern jihadism came from, how it operates and how it may be countered, perhaps in a rather extended “twilight struggle.”

Foremost among such analysts is the redoubtable Daniel Pipes. His rejection by some of the entrenched academics is in fact testimony to his tremendously important contributions over the last 30 years as he provided a detailed and truly realistic account of what went wrong in the Middle East, and in Islam itself.

Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Horthy, and Antonescu all led fascist states in 20th century Europe. The first two listed led their nations against us in World War II. How did fascism arise? What were its central ideas and intentions? Was war essential to the fascist program? How and why did the populations of Germany, Italy, Hungary, Spain and Romania support their fascist regimes? Why and how does fascism persist in contemporary political life? These are some of the questions addressed in 2006 by our two expert historians of the fascist states.

A 2005 Jihadist terror bombing killed 57 London commuters. The next day we talked with a dear London friend, the mystery novelist P.D. James who had a few years earlier been elevated to the peerage and thus was a member of the House of Lords. Lady James gave us a chilling account of what had just happened and a most insightful interpretation of this early chapter in the terrorist assault upon the West. Here is a crucial portion of that conversation.