Of course they can. Our enemies foreign and domestic are upset that our power prevents them from ruling the world. There is remarkably little there.
The writer thinks getting hysterical is an argument, it isn't. So do our enemies, and that is why they are losing.
We don't care about the "soaring wills" of our enemies because we aren't trying to convince them of anything. When men abandon reason you kill them. Very simple, too simple for the author of this piece to understand. This is not a way of trying to persuade them of something. It is a means of living in a world from which they are concretely and individually absent.
As for the unanswered flood of lies, it has brought the liars nothing. They lose power everywhere, slowly but inexorably. Similarly, the terrorists in their paradise have accomplished nothing. They die in squalor, our civilization hums along. They've elevated the ambient noise level slightly and underlined the importance of various perennial virtues - so what? We have them, in any desired quantity.
The media can't win the battle for Fallujah. In case everybody forgot, the "insurgents" of Fallujah were slaughtered, and nobody blinked an eye.
Of course our own strength of will is important in this or in any other war. But strength of will comes from justice, not from blatant disregard of it. The author thinks the suicides are stronger and winning, when the facts on the ground clearly show otherwise. Our soldiers are not daunted by them. Their numbers do not dwindle. They stand their posts and shoot down all comers, as fast as those choose to come.
The terrorists and their make believer communists expect to stop the greatest military empire in history and the juggernaut of capitalism with vain gestures of defiance, spitballs, and leading editorials. They might as readily try to knock down a brick wall by playing tennis at it. It hasn't moved us an inch, while they have lost 50 million souls, several countries, tens of thousands of combatants, etc.
We are supposed to be scared of this? At least the Germans actually had a chance, if they had done everything ten times smarter than they did. The only hope these have is that one lot group of our enemies is willing to surrender to another group of our enemies.
The instant they realize we will take the pacifism of the first lot at its face value, and therefore defy them whatever they do, they will begin to notice how comprehensively they have been defeated. What is a pacifist going to threaten me with? Another stern leading editorial? ("Electoral defeat", they will say. And when I ignore their imaginary laws as readily as our foreign enemies do, what then? Will they write more stern leading editorials?)
On the simplest level, you are right. Not that I'm abandoning reason myself, but I think you're being too rational in analyzing the threat.
We don't have unlimited license to kill our enemies. Quite the contrary. Our desire for victory is very, very weak. We want to win, sure, but we don't want anyone to get killed, and we don't want to break anything, and we'd like to keep the costs down, and we don't want to offend local sensibilities, and we'd don't want to look mean to the Europeans etcetera etcetera.
In contrast, the jihadis belief that killing children who accept candy from American soldiers pleases God, and kill them without remorse. Such men require absolute strength of will. In a world full of cowardice and humiliation, men like that become heroes. Americans have a hard time thinking in these terms, but we need to start understanding this strangely resiliant threat. We dismiss the power of religious fanaticism at our own peril.