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Caution to all:

In the midst of the Cold War, Burnham and others wrote of the "Death of the West" and other such missives declaring the fight lost.

This defeatist essay is instructive in some ways, it reminds us of what we are up against - not Islam per se, but a westernized totalitarian ideology that takes the evil elements in Islam and mixes a witches brew of political extremism akin to leftist ideology; it reminds us the fight is not easy, and that in many ways our western psychology is not up to the task.

But it is not as if we werent here before, in the Cold War, up against a brutal Communist enemy with a wicked yet surprisingly appealling (to some) ideology. And we won. Despite 5th columns internally and an international system in many ways stacked against us, our empire stood and the enemy's fell.

So too in this war, world war 4. The first world war ended the era of monarchic empires; the second world war ended the ideology of fascim; the third world war, aka the cold war, defeated communism as a claimant to the global future; now we have a pretender to defeat the global empire of liberal democracy and freedom. This pretender cannot ever take the throne since it is really nothing more than a reactionary force against the liberalizing powers of democracy. But it can be like a virus or cancer, eating away at our international system, pulling us down, and even, in the mideast collapsing states or nations into chaos.

But then what? The rule of taliban? or the rule of theorats like in Iran? or more dictators like Assad of Syria? It's no template for the world.

So, there is not 'end game' for their success, just a template for more conflict. If we are "losing" merely because there are enemies who fight us, then we have lost the capacity to understand war at all. Having radicals who want to bomb the west is not 'losing' the war, but changing govts and policies on that basis is.

So our real solution is to do a few things:
1. Innoculate our politics from the terrorist threat by never ever changing policies due to terrorist acts or acknowledging they have any rightful place in political discourse.
2. Take the battle to the enemy. That is, make liberal democracy win in the lands of Islam. Perhaps Bush really did know best how to bring the war in focus when he called for democracy in the mideast.
3. Know that this is an ideological war, so defeat the ideas behind extremist Jihadist thinking.

We've won tougher battles and wars than this.

We will win.