I don't think we can win any physical war on Muslims/Arabs. Even if we tried, it'd be like using a machine gun to shoot at an advancing army of killer bees. Sure, we'd get some of them, but we wouldn't noticeably dent their numbers. In fact, shooting at them just riles more of them up and makes the swarm grow in size.

But we shouldn't be warring with Muslims/Arabs *because* they are Muslims/Arabs. That's like killing black people because their parents are black. You can't help where, or from what parents, you are born, and just because your parents are Muslims doesn't make one an extremist. There are plenty of good, peaceful Muslims out there; I've met thousands.

The only real way for victory (which I will define as 'peace') is by winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the common Muslim person. Oh, maybe they will never LOVE us; probably they will not. But we can probably, if we work at it, make it so fewer people just outright HATE us. Defeat the hate that lies beneath the violence, and the violence itself will taper off. Treat the disease, not the symptoms.

A little less arrogance on the part of the U.S. would go a long way. I love my country, but we do tend to tromp around the entire world as if we own it, and that is something that people dislike. I remember when I was living in Turkey, I was at a beer house on the bay next to the sea in Izmir with a Turkish friend. He started pointing at people as they'd walk by, telling me which were Americans. I couldn't figure out how he was identifying which were Americans, because it wasn't by hair or skin color or clothing -- Turks dress pretty much like we do. Finally, I asked him and he explained with a laugh: we walk like we own the ground upon which we tread. There is a distinctly American swagger. And once he explained it, I could do it too, pick the Americans out of the crowd. I eventually learned NOT to walk that way (and to speak Turkish fairly fluently too), and suppressed that American arrogance (and the walk) enough that nobody could easily tell where I was from. Some guessed Yugoslavia, some guessed Pakistan.

I hope it all works out okay in Iraq, not just for us, but for the Iraqi people. But I have my doubts, and day by day it looks more and more like we flushed a couple of trillion dollars down the drain because we acted without consideration for the consequences.