The Center for Security Policy assembles a conservative-all-star team (Andy McCarthy, LTG Jerry “My God Is Bigger” Boykin) to tell you to fear the coming march of Islamic law. Here’s its template:

The authors, under the sponsorship of the Center for Security Policy, have modeled this work on an earlier “exercise in competitive analysis” which came to be known as the “Team B” Report. That 1976 document challenged the then-prevailing official U.S. government intelligence estimates of the intentions and offensive capabilities of the Soviet Union and the policy known as “deĢtente” that such estimates ostensibly justified.

To make a meta-point, it’s curious to me that anyone would model anything on the 1970s-era Team B. Team B argued that the CIA was wrong to presume that the Soviet Union’s wheezing industrial base and poor economic decision-making would lead to an unsustainable Soviet foreign agenda. The counter-analysis focused on expansionist Soviet intentions and claimed vindication after the invasion of Afghanistan. Twelve years later, the combination of overstretch, military defeat, disruptive political developments, an arms race with America and a more rational generation of Soviet decisionmakers ended the Soviet Union. Which is assessment has been vindicated by history?

It’s even weird from a conservative perspective. Let’s say you want to adopt the position that the Reagan administration shrewdly kneecapped the Rooskies. To do so, it needed to exploit the discrepancy between Soviet foreign aspirations and economic fundamentals. Team B’s assessment that the USSR was actually a dynamo in the ’70s cuts right against that strategy.

Of course, the fact that we’re having this discussion in 2010 attests to the political acumen of Team B in terms of shifting the Overton Window, so I suppose the question answers itself. Sharia! I’m s-s-s-s-s-s-scared!