Encouragement

The War on Terror is generally portrayed as a failure, bogged down, or otherwise hopeless. I don't feel that way about it, being prepared for a long slog from the beginning, but what you get from the media is not encouraging. Well, there's a lot of positive to the situation, and Daffyd ab Hugh gets it:

But of course, the Islamists have it exactly backwards: it is their very love of death that is their undoing every time; for men will stand and fight to the death because they love life; but they will not stand and fight at all if all they love is death... for what solace is there in deathwish to give a man courage? A love of death is the mark of despair, not hope.

Because we love life, we revere sacrifice -- but not suicide. Life seeks life, and all those who also love life flock to our shores, desperate to become Americans de jure, as they are already Americans de facto.

And freedom, free-thinking, and individualism have given the world all the great advances in science and technology, in philosophy, in politics, and especially in the art of war. As the aphorism goes, there are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous people.

Islamists are fools with no comprehension of the history of the West: we've butchered far more people than the jihadi's wildest wet dreams. And we did it with style... using industrialization and the market. (Even Hitler and Stalin had to bow to the market in practice, whatever platitudes oozed from their mouths.)

The model of the market shows how millions of individuals making billions of individual decisions will always outthink, outreact, and vastly outperform a command economy driven by totalitarian ideology -- and will outfight them, too. Every innovation in warfare over the past three or four centuries was originated in the West, not the Orient. The very guns they use are European (Kalashnikovs); their tanks and planes are knockoffs of ours; even their damned IEDs are less sophisticated than the Semtex bombs of the verminous IRA.

The jihadis desperately want the final war of Islam vs. the West. And now, as Max Boot so cogently writes in the Los Angeles Times, they're on the road to getting it, good and hard:

"Ever since 9/11, a dark view of Islam has been gaining currency on what might be called the Western street. This view holds that, contrary to the protestations of our political leaders -- who claim that acts of terrorism are being carried out by a minority of extremists -- the real problem lies with Islam itself. In this interpretation, Islam is not a religion of peace but of war, and its 1.2 billion adherents will never rest until all of humanity is either converted, subjugated or simply annihilated..."