I understand "M.A.D." although I'd argue with the idea that communists were ever considered "sane", given that they too killed millions of their own people. The only thing the we had going for us in that fight was that because they were atheists, they weren't quite so ripe to collectively destroy themselves.
Do me a favor, please quit talking to me as though I've lived under a rock when it comes to "understanding Islam". I've known what a Muslim was for as long as I can remember - -especially that if I brought a guy home who was Muslim, that would have been about the one and only grounds for being disowned. I went to university with a Saudi Prince and worked with the son of a Jordanian member of Parliament -- that was all back in the 1970's. I've been to the ME twice in 1984 & in 2000. And I number among my friends some prominent anti-jihadist writers.
I've got a pretty good grasp of what Islam is and what radical Islam is, as well as having a grasp of historical context. I want to fight them as bad as you do, but the way we are handling this is doing us more harm than good. It's time to hit the reset button.
Our current policies -- supported largely by fear-mongering -- are not making us any safer and in fact are draining us dry economically and turning us into slaves in our own country. In the name of WOT, US citizens can now be pulled off the street by the government and detained offshore indefinitely with no legal recourse. Our parents rejected this kind of political insanity when the threat of communism loomed. Why are we allowing this in the name of the WOT?
IMHO, it's because we are are "the terrorized" and we are functioning like traumatized, terrorized people who are so scared that we shoot at anything that moves. And what the terrorists haven't done to us, we've allowed our politicians to do to us -- getting scanned and strip searched at the airport, being scared into submission, being hopped up to go turn over some other Muslim hornets nest somewhere else on the other side of the world "for our own good"-- and we are fighting against what? Some 8th century scimitar wielding weirdos who happened to get lucky with some airplanes ten years ago when our intelligence services had their head up their butts?
And BTW, the hijackers weren't Iraqi, weren't Afghani, or Pakistani or Libyan or any of the other places we've gone to war since 9/11-- they were Saudi. So why isn't Saudi Arabia "a glass factory" if we are really fighting terror? And oh yes, I know we need protection here because Muslims could smuggle a tactical nuke into the US and hit a major city". "Smuggle"? Really? They could have driven a damn parade across our Southern border with blimps and full scale nukes for the last ten years, and there would have been nothing to stop them. Because we've been too worried about the border between Iraq and Iran to care about securing our own sovereign borders.
So please don't assume that anyone who disagrees on how we are handling things is "naive" or "doesn't get it" -- I get it, Ron Paul gets it, it's just that we think there is a better way that doesn't have us killing ourselves, bankrupting ourselves and handing over our liberty -- the very foundation of our way of life -- to nameless, faceless government bureaucrats -- all to "keep us safe from terrorists". So when that is done, who is going to keep us safe from a government that's thrown out the Constitution?