At the start of this year, the UK Prime Minister opened a speech with the following:

"Our response to the September 11 attacks has proved even more momentous than it seemed at the time. That is because we could have chosen security as the battleground. But we did not. We chose values. We said that we did not want another Taliban or a different Saddam Hussein. We knew that you cannot defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas". http://www.foreignaffairs.org/200701...al-values.html

My question is this: Is it possible to fight ideas with ideas in the current environment and has it been done successfully before, not just in the recent past, but back to even biblical times. Blair goes on in his speech to suggest the spread of the Moslem Empire was itself a triumph of ideas rather than military might. The same could be said of the Roman and Macedonian Empires. Has the study of history concentrated too much on the military maneuvers rather than the moral and intellectual issues underpinning them?

JD