YES, WE CAN WIN

But not if we keep up our current half-assed, under-funded war on terror. Mark Helprin explains why here. Money quote:

To coerce and punish governments that support terrorism, until they eradicate it wherever they exercise authority. To open for operations any territory in which the terrorist enemy functions. To build and sustain the appropriate forces and then some as a margin of safety, so as to accomplish the foregoing and to deter the continuing development of terrorism. To mount on the same scale as the military effort, and with the same probity, the necessary civil defense. To reject the temptation to configure the defensive capabilities of the United States solely to the War on Terrorism, as this will simultaneously stimulate China’s military development and insure that we are unprepared for it. These should be our aims in this war.
They are neither modest, nor without risk, nor certain to succeed-by their very nature they cannot be. But they are a model of discipline and restraint when compared to the infinitely open-ended notion of changing the nature of the Middle East, changing the nature of the Arabs, changing the nature of Islam, and changing the nature of man. No army can do that. No army ever could.

I don’t agree with all of this, but it’s stimulating nonetheless.