The war on terror cannot be won by following the antiwar crowd. Pure defense of the homeland will eventually lead to a police state in order to 'protect us' from the individual suicide bomber.
The war on terror cannot be won by the "all Islam is evil" crowd. Aggressive bombing of a people back to the stone ages would only confirm what radical Islam has purported all along...that the western nations cannot co-exist with Islam. This would result in the creation of hundreds of millions of suicide bombers trying to find their way to our shores....and the eventual creation of a police state to 'protect us' from those suicide bombers.
The war on terror can only be won by supporting those clerics that are pro-democracy over those that espouse radical fundamentalism. That means we need a combination of military action, political action and economic action to create the premise that Islam is a religion of peace and that a prosperous life can only be achieved if you reject the fundamentalists and join the democratic clerics. This requires us to try to understand Arab culture like never before. It requires us to sacrifice lives and money to train and construct the underpinnings of a democracic state. It requires many, many years of hard work.
We need to take the war to their nations. First and foremost is the concept of religious freedom. They must acknowledge the rights of others to NOT be muslims.
Not just "people of the book" (Jews/Christians) but Hindus, Buddhists, etc.
They sentence muslims who convert away from the faith to death. They murder clerics who call for "reforms" (Mohammed was the last prophet and so any reformation is blasphemy).
If the rest of the world is going to look down their collective noses at the US for prohibiting same sex marriage, then certainly the same international pressure that was brought to South Africa could be brought to Islamic nations to push for the concept of religious freedom.
Islam is a supremacist ideology (like Nazism). It is a birthright. Imam have said it is okay for a muslim man to marry a woman who converts to Islam but not okay for a muslim woman to marry a man who converts to Islam.
Islam must come to terms with the unchangeable fact that there are other beliefs in this world.