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The attempt to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) in a civilian court instead of by a military commission has opened the floodgates to thoughtful arguments -- as well as blistering ad hominem diatribes -- by advocates of each process.

It's to be expected in an issue so charged with constitutional imperative and dimmed by the shadow of public-safety consequences.

But pundits on both sides of the debate are too often missing what should be the crux of the argument. Those in favor of military commissions say we lose actionable intelligence by Mirandizing captive terrorists, and that we risk tipping our hand to defendants during a civilian trial's discovery phase. They are correct.

And those who support civilian trials for foreign nationals captured in the war on terror claim such trials are the most legitimate form available, and that the relative independence of the judges and the court's aversion to hearsay are strengths of the civilian legal system, not weaknesses. They are correct as well.

But those are trees; it's the forest that should be our focus.

The most forceful opponent of the use of civilian courts as the venue for national security prosecution was once that system's star. Andrew C. McCarthy has emerged from his role as the lead prosecutor in the trial of the first World Trade Center bombing convinced the legal system is ill equipped to play that role.

Yet, a profile of McCarthy in last weekend's N.Y. Times barely even mentions McCarthy's most convincing argument for his case. That argument can be found in McCarthy's book on the subject, "Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad".

Law enforcement due process is "geared to courtroom success," he writes. Everything in the case revolves around the crime, the investigation of which concentrates on "essential elements," which are the facts of the case that can secure a conviction.

"Typically, some of these facts, though the sine qua non of conviction and thus requiring sharp investigative attention, have little or nothing to do with the big picture being probed," McCarthy explains.

For an Islamic terrorist, his ideology and connections are vital to his cause. Yet, McCarthy writes, from a legal standpoint, "it is much more critical to the case against an indicted bomber that his exertions have somehow affected interstate commerce than that he was motivated by a Salafist construction of Islam. Or that he may have been abetted by a rogue nation."

The legal system is designed to obtain a conviction of the defendant, and anything unrelated to that conviction is either ignored or treated as incidental. But when -- as they promised -- Islamists again struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, they should have put to bed once and for all the idea that the global jihad is incidental to our national defense. It is paramount.

One of the world's top scholars on the subject, Jarret M. Brachman, sounds a similar note in his book "Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice".

Taking a cue from Sun Tzu ("The Art of War"), Brachman advises that the West must formulate its strategy vis-a-vis Islamic terrorism based on "a firm understanding of the Jihadist movement's own grand strategy." The movement's grand strategy, of course, doesn't mean much in a district courtroom. But it is elemental to victory in this war.

Brachman approvingly references towering Cold War figure George Kennan's 1947 clarion call to contain the Soviet Union's attempts at spreading communism.

"Kennan's analysis," Brachman exhorts, "ought to resound in the ears of policy-makers today: the world can fight an antagonistic ideology only through an integrated set of national policies aimed at limiting the scope and breadth of that ideology's spread. And as during the Cold War battle with the USSR, the global commitment to containing the spread of the global Jihadist movement must be persistent, aggressive, and enduring."

Samuel Huntington, in "The Clash of Civilizations," unsheathes the Cold War metaphor as well, though he moves on before fully realizing the implications of the point he's made.

He writes: "In the Cold War the West labeled its opponent 'godless communism'; in the post-Cold War conflict of civilizations Muslims see their opponent as 'the godless West.'"

Follow that thought a bit further, and you come to this: If the Cold War roles are being reprised in our current war, those roles may be reversed. Islamists have established a network to contain the spread of Western values and influence, and we're on our heels playing defense.

In chess, there is a concept of tempo. Tempo is gained, for example, when a player forces his opponent to make a move that is purely defensive; that is, retreats to avoid an attack without advancing the application of a strategy.

McCarthy's experience as a U.S. attorney in terrorism cases has instilled in him an understanding of tempo and strategy. Any discussion on prosecuting enemy combatants, therefore, should prominently feature the most important lesson from McCarthy's book.

Winning a war is about the courage of our convictions, not about courtroom convictions. KSM and Co. belong in the hands of a military commission.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.