The elusive Osama bin Laden has offered his own advice on how to end the Iraq War: we all embrace Islam; otherwise, al-Qaida will escalate the fighting and the killing. By Islam he means his version of it, which he can't even get the Middle East to embrace. I don't know how he'd ever manage to convert the whole of the secular West.
The truth is he can't. His stated goals are idealistic and Utopian, not to mention evil. Osama bin Laden may be a threat to our safety, but he's no threat to our civilization. He's a dangerous aggressor, especially if he were to acquire a weapon of mass murder, but his movement will die long before the West perishes.
President Bush, ever faithful to his ideology, places his hope and faith in supporting young democracies. To him Democracy is the answer to a dangerous world with monsters like bin Laden, never mind that Democracy has a history of producing or supporting monsters worse than bin Laden. At least George Weigel, never wavering from his cause against jihadism, has the sense to put his faith in more than flawed human institutions. Though even when speaking of prayer, he doesn't retreat from the metaphor of war.
I'd like to see an alternative to war myself, but I don't see that alternative being a world-wide embrace of either bin Laden-brand Islam or Bush-brand Democracy.
As for alternatives, Pope John XXIII was on to something.
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