We are going to win the "War on Terror"

First of all, I hate the term "Global War on Terror" or GWOT because you can't win a war if you can't name your enemy. If we are fighting a war on terrorism, then it is a very old war, beginning with the Jewish Sicari (named for the short swords they used for political assassination) of 1st century Roman-occupied Judea (which the Romans disingenuously called Palestina, or Palestine).

No we are responding to a war brought upon us by Islamofacists - facists who hide themselves in Islamic clothing - which many are calling the Global Salafist Hirabah (GSH). Salafism refers to a desire to return to the simpler, purer times of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions, in itself a laudable thing, provided that would-be salafist realizes that the Prophet and his Companions were innovators who looked forward, rather than fundamentalists who looked backward. Hirabah is a term connoting illegal war, brigandage, banditry, and terrorism. It stands in contrast to Jihad, or Holy War, sanctioned by God, a term with the Islamofacists misappropriate.

The Global Salafist Hirabah had a beginning - the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie on charges that he wrote a book, The Satanic Verses, that Khomeini didn't like. TSV satirized both the West and Islam in general, and Khomeini in particular. I nominate the fatwa as the beginning of the GSH, because a head of state of one government seeking to incite the murder of a citizen of another government simply for exercising his right to free expression is de facto a declaration of war against the civilization that recognizes and upholds the right to free expression. Khomeini had declared war against the West.

The GSH will also have an ending, brought about by social change in just one or two generations. This is because the Islamofacists are fighting to preserve and extend their priveleged status as Muslim men. Their sense of self-worth depends on their subjugation of Muslim women. Continuing this subjugation is ultimately a lost cause. Eventually, Muslim women will decide that they do not want to have their bodies mutilated, that they want to show their faces, that they want to drive, to study subjects both sacred and secular, that they want to work, that they want to choose whom they marry, and they want to vote. After that, this particular war will be over, because there will be nothing to fight about.

"But it's not a war!" one of my colleagues protested. It is a war because our enemies say it is a war. Denying that it is a war is just manipulating the definition of war because one wants to manipulate the conduct of the war. Is is also Eurocentric bigotry. Eurocentrists fight wars wholesale, with massed armies. Their way of war descends from the Greco-Roman way of trying to get the war over with as fast as possible so as to return to normalcy, to farming, to peace. In contrast, the horse peoples of the steppe pursued war as a part time occupation. You could raid the Roman Empire for a goods and glory on any given afternoon. You didn't want the war to come to a swift and decisive conclusion, because then what would you do? The Islamofacist way of war is descended from the tradition of the steppe nomads, but fought with modern weapons, and enabled by the internet.

But all this is not a problem if we realize that the war need not be won militarily. We can switch from fighting war wholesale, to fighting retail - where most of the action is not in shooting but in having tea with the right local leaders. We need only strive not to lose. Muslim women will eventually do the rest.

Of course, it would be nice to help them achieve their Islamic Reformation. If Western Feminists could get over their navel-gazing disregard for the condition of any women but themselves, they could help in ways that governments cannot.

In closing I present the photo above as evidence for my thesis: World War IV, the War of the Islamofacists against Western Liberal Democracy (the Cold War was World War III) will be won, not by the West, not by the Islamofacists, but by Islamic women. It is a picture of Iraqi women lined up to vote.

Their victory, like the victory of the Central European and Russian people over Communism, will be a victory for the whole world, and, in the world of Islam, a victory for God.