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Making it merely a religious war is oversimplistic. It is a cultural war, and the cultures at war are the extremes, not the center.

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Hello? The most important element in your "cultural war" is RELIGION -- specifically a religion the adherants of which view all non-Muslim countries as comprising the "House of War." (That is mainline Islamic teaching, by the way.)

no, the most important factor in my cultural war is couched in religious terms, but it is not, in fact, religion. First off, none of Mohammed's words actually survived him, as he was illiterate. The Koran was written down from remembered speechs and talks he gave, as well as private conversations between himself and his followers, including his several wives. The Hadith, the laws developed from them are likewise constructs of others memories. Many of them, including practically everything every one of his wives said about the subject, have been dropped from the Koran and Hadith in the past thousand years or so. Anyone who tried to cling to those parts was killed as a heretic.

There are a number of "moderate" Muslim groups who do not divide the world into the Dar-al-Islam (House of Peace), and the Dar-al-Harb (House of War). The House of War refers to places where Muslims are a repressed minority, properly speaking, unless you're an Islamofacist (my favorite term for the seriously militant types.)We need to support those, and, especially, encourage them to support us. Funny thing, the Shia are some of the ones whose traditions would seem to make them most likely to be on our side; it hasn't worked out that way, though. The moderate Sunni are most likely to be our friends; The Turks, the Kurds, the Moroccans. The Wahhabi are most assuredly not, and neither are many of the Egyptians. Even the Saudi's don't know what they are, except that most of them are Wahhabi. So although it looks like religion, it is really culture. The nearest Christian equivelent would be Roman Catholics and Albigensians.