Yep. The silent majority of Muslims are just waiting to get a good idea of who is going to win. They will go with the winner no matter if it is us or the terrorists. If we start losing, more Muslims will be encouraged to fight us. If they can get it in their heads that we will eventually defeat them they will turn on thier own leaders and reform their systems.
Imagine what kind of trouble we would have had in Japan if we had not used nuclear weapons in WWII: a long, bloody invasion and war of attrition against an entrenched, fanatic, fight-to-the-death enemy on his own ground, with eternal guerilla warfare as we tried to establish a compliant government.
Individual Japanese soldiers hid out on Pacific islands until the 1970's. If we hadn't crushed Imperial Japan's diseased racist culture with a couple nukes, we would still be chasing these vermin today, and there would be IED's blowing up in the streets of Tokyo.
What we are doing right now, in Iraq, is just about what I described above: trying to beat Japan without using the nuke.
At some point, there will be a choice point offered up, and I hope to hell we make the right decision when that time comes.