Everyone - and I mean everyone - should read To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad by Stephen Coughlin. In his own words:

By singling out Mein Kampf as his example, General Pace focused on Hitler’s declared strategic doctrine, used by the Nazis as the foundation for their tactical employment of military, political, economic, and social instruments of power to establish the 1,000 year Reich. Likewise, the nature of today’s jihadist enemies can only be understood within the context of their declared strategic doctrine to dominate the world. Just as we ignored Mein Kampf “ to our great detriment” prior to World War II, so we are on the verge of suffering a similar fate today. The reason the Intelligence Community is unable to define the nature of the jihadi enemy, the Chairman implies, is because we have not “read what the enemy has said.” In other words, we have failed to undertake an assessment of the threat based on the jihadi enemy’s declared strategic doctrine. This conclusion leads to
three fundamental research questions:

• Why have we failed to do a doctrine-based threat assessment?
• What is the doctrinal basis of the jihad threat?
• How can we come to understand the jihadi threat?

A brief discussion of the research questions will be used to frame the hypothesis that Islamic law forms the doctrinal basis of the jihadi threat that can only be understood through an unconstrained review of the the Islamic law of jihad.

Coughlin was recently fired for being "'too hot' or controversial within the Pentagon." In fact, he was fired for exposing ties to militant Islamic groups amongst politically-connected Americans, and for criticising the conciliatory approach towards political Islam in general that is prevalent in the Bush administration (and, to be fair, those that came before).

I can't over-emphasize how important this thesis is. Read it.