We are not going to win the war against Islam any time soon.
We will spend billions of dollars fighting terrorists all over the world and billions more defending all the places we gather.
And yet the guerrilla terrorists will find ways to pierce our defenses and cause mayhem all over the civilized world.
No matter what we do, no matter how much money we spend fighting them, they will not stop.
Why should they? The guerrilla terrorist's return on investment is too attractive.
What does it cost civilized society when a terrorist blows himself up in a crowd of people? Most obviously, several dozen innocent lives. But there's also the cost of dealing with the aftermath - finding out how the killer got his weapons, what accomplices he might have had, tracking them down and capturing them. The cost of closing roads and businesses, the cost of repairing the damage to buildings, the cost of having armed men patrolling the streets, the cost of treating the people who were maimed, and the cost of burying the dead. If anyone is captured, there's the cost of bringing them to trial and the cost of incarcerating them for untold years at taxpayer expense.
Those costs can run into the millions, for one single attack. And that's without factoring in the costs we incur daily to protect ourselves - our airport security, the metal detectors we have to walk through just to go to a baseball game.
And what does it cost to mount the attack in the first place?
The cost of a few pounds of explosives, a backpack, a triggering device. Probably under a hundred dollars. And of course, the life of the bomber.
The cost can be even less than that. What does it cost to rent or steal a truck and start mowing down people in a crowd?
So the investment, from the point of view of the Muslim terrorists is maybe a hundred dollars and maybe one life, in exchange for dozens of innocent lives and millions of dollars.
What possible incentive is there for them to stop, given a ten-thousandfold return on investment? If you could turn one dollar into ten thousand dollars in a matter of a few minutes, wouldn't you do it? Would any amount of sweet talk and appeals to reason and the better angels of your nature stop you? Or would you do it again as soon as you possibly could?
We will never - never - run out of terrorists, because new ones are being created every day, taught to hate us from the day they are born.
And we accept this terrible state of affairs, because we are no longer willing to wage total war on our enemies.
We hold ourselves to the standard that no innocent person must be harmed in our pursuit of the monsters - monsters whose strategy consists of nothing but killing innocents. Your Muslim terrorist has likely never heard of Saul Alinsky, but he certainly understands Alinsky's rule for radicals number 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. They slaughter our people, secure in the knowledge that we will not slaughter their people in return. Because we are civilized. We live up to our civilized standards in a war with monsters who laugh at our rules, who count on us to live up to them, who use our rules of civilized society to destroy our civilized society.
We weren't always this way. We waged total war on Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. We killed their soldiers in the field, but we also destroyed their cities and their people, killing innocent civilians as readily as we killed armed men in battle. The people of Japan were no less fanatical than today's Muslim terrorists, but they eventually sued for peace, on all the terms that we imposed upon them. Because we destroyed their cities, hanged their military leaders, occupied their country, and un-deified their emperor. There was no home-grown insurrection afterwards, because they had seen we were willing to literally vaporize them if they did not keep the peace. And they have kept the peace, for over 70 years.
We will not see an end to the war with Islam until the countries at war with us - and they are at war with us - understand that we are ready, willing, and able to vaporize them to make them stop.
