to finally openly reflect

so much has happened in the past four years that often it's difficult to put into perspective. on the one hand, I can hardly think back to the days right before September 11th. It's as if my mind has placed those days in the same category as virtually all of my childhood--the time before anything really mattered. The time when really, as far as the eye could see, there was nothing that would challenge Fukyama's prediction that we had reached the end of history. That representative government, the rule of law and market economies had solved most of the problems that had plagued mankind since the first people thought it was a good idea to chop down a bunch of wheat they had planted a few months prior and wandered in to harvest it. The problems of government really boil down to one simple idea: power cannot be concentrated in the hands of the few, it must instead be dispersed, decentralized throughout society so that everyone within that civilization has the opportunity to achieve. The guarantee of achievement is one that authoritarian civilizations provide plenty of, so long as you participate in the brutal subjugation of your fellow citizens. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that one day you yourself might be purged, feared because you had achieved so much and had so many admirers that you were a threat to the ubercitizen in charge of it all.
But like childhood, eventually we must all grow up. So has the United States been forced to grow up, grow up quite a bit from our preconceived notion that the end had finally come. That finally everyone else just wanted to be left alone and to do with their lives what they willed. The very idea that we, and virtually we alone (not to discount our many allies in Dubya's "coalition of the willing" but in purely nominal terms, we're doing the heavy lifting") would be forced into becoming the Martin Luther of the Muslim world, well, let's just say it's a little crazier than one German monk starting the Reformation that would lead to the creation of modern nation-state as it is today. One glaring difference between the modern world, and the world of pre-Reformation Europe is that the axis of power between religion and state has been broken. The West has now enjoyed nearly three full centuries of separation, and to that degree, one of the major power axes first formed in civilization, the union of strong man and witch doctor, no longer exists. That's a pretty fundamental shift in the context of history. But the Muslim world has never had a Reformation. Nor would a Reformation really work within the context of Islam. It's a diverse and diffuse religion, with various sects in which their is no central political power, like the Holy Roman Catholic Church. There is no Church to Reform, but their certainly are mosques to reform.
The Muslim world, for the most part, is still beholden to the flawed concept that faith must have a stranglehold on the state in order to ensure God's will is carried out here on our little blue planet. Thus, this conflict, is indeed a fight not against terrorism, it is a fight to secularize the Muslim world. The global terror network realizes this. They realize that when the union of mosque and state is broken in the Muslim world, their power will have evaporated. "Blah! Islam is a fundamentally different religion from Christianity. For Muslims, the Koran is the law." Well, you know for serious Christians, the Bible is the law, too. But serious Christians in Western civilization also know that they can't go out and enforce the law that they believe in upon believe who don't believe it. What Muslims of genuine and virtuous faith must realize, is that they cannot force their faith upon others. To do so is a violation of a fundamental human right. People must be free to choose their own faith, or no faith at all, and must be free to do so without intervention from state backed religious instituions, of whatever faith they may be.
This is the stuff that someday, a future Tom Hanks and Steve Spielberg will make a feature series like Band of Brothers and our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will all be amazed at what we accomplished simply by planting the seed of rebirth in the birthplace of human civilization. The only thing they should have done differently, was have every Iraqi dip their middle fingers in that indelible ink. That way they could have given every naysayer, every person in blue-state america that had to go to therapy because of the election, every complacent European sitting with their welfare check and their doctor's office appointment nine months from now, every terrorist, they could have given all of those and more, the finger.