Carl and Slap,

Political Correctness is an illness in our society that needs to be aggressively eradicated to ensure our people remain free to think independently and state their opinions without being condemned by a leftist movement that leads an assault on anyone that disagrees with their views. That said, I don't think that is the root of our challenges.

Despite PC, America still has an attractive moral power that many, maybe even most, people around the world respect to include the majority of Muslims. We can forfeit that critical advantage if we act in a way that is perceived as a war on Islam instead of a war on extremists. The terrorists will not be deterred by economic development and democracy, in fact democracy actually inflames the situation for many fundamentalist Muslims who are not terrorists.

When we occupy Muslim lands and attempt to transform we generate the propaganda the extremists need to recruit those who find their narrative of interest. I really think, but of course can never know, it would have been a very different situation if we conducted a punitive expedition in Afghanistan and then left. We would have been respected my many Muslims for defending our honor while respecting their land. Even Clinton's weak cruise missile attack on Sudan resulted in Al-Qaeda being shown the door. Instead we fell for Al-Qaeda's publically stated objective of dragging us into a quagmire where they could attack our will to sustain the effort, and bleed out our economic power. I don't think they anticipated staying this long, but they're still achieving their stated ends, and they did so my targeting our will to fight instead of compete for who has influence over the population.

Al-Qaeda should have been defeated a long time ago, and I'm currently under the belief our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq have played in their favor over time despite the core of Al-Qaeda being largely eliminated. Winning over the population and the metrics associated with doing so is not a substitute for strategy.