[Old Student]

"There are two main branches of Islam and a scant handful of subsects. "

The subsects, or rather a minority of the most extreme of the subsects, mostly Wahhabi, are the real problem. If we (or anyone else, for that matter) can manage to kill them off without generating too many more like them, the war will win itself.

You don't have to be NOT devout to get along in the world as a Muslim, you merely have to be left to practice your religion as you beleive it should be practiced (non-violently, for most of them). The Dar-al-Harb, or House of War properly applies to places where Muslims are a suppressed minority. Like France, for instance. Improper action on our part could make the USA part of that place, if we're not careful. That is why I say it is a cultural war, not a religious war. Benjamin Rush (one of the Founding Fathers) wanted us to have mandatory religious education here, and he would rather we taught Islam than no religion at all.

[quidnunc]

Old Student wrote: You don't have to be NOT devout to get along in the world as a Muslim, you merely have to be left to practice your religion as you beleive it should be practiced (non-violently, for most of them). The Dar-al-Harb, or House of War properly applies to places where Muslims are a suppressed minority. Like France, for instance. Improper action on our part could make the USA part of that place, if we're not careful. That is why I say it is a cultural war, not a religious war. Benjamin Rush (one of the Founding Fathers) wanted us to have mandatory religious education here, and he would rather we taught Islam than no religion at all.

The problem is that many Muslims in non-Muslim countries want to be free to practice their religions in ways which are unacceptable to the societies in which they live.

We cannot, for instance, allow Sharia law to be legimitated here in the US even though some portion of the Muslim community might want it and consider themselved to be discriminated-against because they aren't allowed to practice it.

Like I said, in Islam religion and culture are insepearable, and many of the practices mandated by Islam are antithetical to contemporary Western society.