An interesting piece by retired Army infantry colonel Bob Killebrew looks at the possible evolution of the Islamic supremacist ideology into America’s next threat: A politically transformed Al-Qaida. (Hat tip: Bala Ambati.)

Although today’s terrorists are an indisputable menace, they do not yet threaten global peace or our survival. But the political transformation of al-Qaida into a radical pan-Islamic movement would divide the world between the progressive West and a number of belligerent, deeply reactionary, nuclear-armed states, and raise the possibility of far more serious conflict.

The current leaders of al-Qaida, and the generation emerging in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, are hard and practical men. They have promulgated a broad strategic agenda — driving the United States out of the Middle East, forcing an end to U.S. aid to Israel and to U.S. backing for “corrupt” Arab regimes — that cuts across Islam’s fault lines and unites alienated Muslims throughout the underdeveloped world. Unspoken, but certainly assumed, in the al-Qaida agenda is the installation of more pious Islamic regimes, or even, ultimately, a resurrection of a pan-Islamic caliphate like the Ottoman Empire, long a dream of Middle Eastern Islamic radicals.

To carry out short-term plans for regional terrorism, al-Qaida has an almost limitless pool of manpower. But its emerging leaders will soon realize — if they have not already — that their higher objectives cannot be achieved by hit-and-run attacks, no matter how devastating. For ambitions this vast, they need to transmute terror into political legitimacy in the same way that Fatah transformed itself into the quasi-government of the Palestine Liberation Organization, leading to the sight of a gun-toting Yasser Arafat at the podium of the United Nations. Hezbollah is acquiring political legitimacy in Syrian-dominated Lebanon, as is Hamas in Palestine and Gaza. “Legitimacy” doesn’t matter to al-Qaida today, but it must have it tomorrow if it wants to stay in the game.