There's a time to go with the flow, and there's a time to divert the flow. Since there's a natural bias in human nature toward the former, one must compensate by concentrating on the latter.
It is no accident that the West has attained such Herculean strength in the world. The Chinese go with one flow. The Muslim fundamentalists go with another. But we Anglophones engineer the flow to go with us. So it is that those who fail to emulate our success get washed ashore like dead whales, and those who oppose us are flushed down the toilet of history.
I'll grant bin Laden and his ilk this much: they know how to plug the pipes. (And we did have a water pressure problem during the last administration.) But we are the civilization that invented the plunger and DraNo, and we will prevail in the end. Ross Perot had a phrase to describe their fate: a giant sucking sound.
No one cutting through cant these days? I think you sell Rumsfeld short.