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To draw the enemy out into open conflict, we have to allow him to win some open battles. If we come into a neighborhood with tanks and men, we should run when they resist. Aircraft bombing runs should go wildly astray. Let them believe that they can stand openly against us. Let them believe that Allah protects them against our superior technology. Let them believe that the infidels are scared and broken. Play to their inherent beliefs. It will not take long for them to openly resist.
In chess terms, you are asking what can we offer as a poisoned pawn?
But history is what we really need. We need speeches delivered from the Oval Office and the floors of the houses of Congress; lectures in classrooms of the military academies; and a general climate of historical curiosity in the public square — all concerning the character and antiquity of the Jihad. We must educate ourselves, and come to better know our enemy.
This is what we most glaringly lack. The Oval Office repeatedly tells us that Islam is a "religion of peace" that has been hijacked by a few, when anyone with just a tad of historical instruction knows the opposite is true. Our populace is largely enervated, complacent, and ignorant, certainly of its own nations' history, and much more so in the history of the world, in knowledge of the tides and waves that history moves upon and the ways in which its has shaped the world up until the present day. I don't see that we have the fortitude you speak of to fight this enemy. I guess I am a pessimist. I tend to think we won't wake up until it is too late to confront the threat.
I have read before where you have stated, with regard to Europe and the threat Islam poses to that continent, that it has seen dark days before and has come through them, and thus may be able to come through them again. But the difference I see in Europe today (and by extension, the United States) is that Christianity is no longer a factor on the continent. Once, Europeans were willing to stand up and defend the Cross to the death. Today, they shun it. The same is becoming true in the U.S. In 1983, Ronald Reagan declared it "The Year of the Bible". Just 24 years later, such a proclamation would never survive in the U.S. I guess my point is that post-christian Europe and post-christian America have nothing with which to fight the "dark days", nothing with which to combat Islam. Secularism will never defeat Islam. The more we embrace secularism, the weaker we become.
I don't see a light at the end. Perahaps my analysis is wrong and my pessimism premature. I certainly hope so, for the sake of my country.
I do think your pessimism is premature. But there is a sense in which it doesn't matter. A bleak assessment does not change the fact that we must defend what is good. Why do the Rohirrim cry Death! on the fields of Pelennor, but because fear of it cannot release them from their duty?
This is, in brief, why I have little tolerance for pessimism (though, with Chesterton, I regard optimism as the more morbid mood).
On the other hand, your auguries of American decadence are altogther plausible. Our days are numbered anyway: who can say that our time is not nigh?
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