Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all ranks.
He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
Victory lies in the knowledge of those five points. Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
~Sun Tzu

Knowing the Enemy

America's current foreign policy malaise is the result of our unwillingness or inability to properly diagnose the roots of the current conflict. A doctor cannot treat a disease until he diagnoses it; similarly, we cannot combat our enemy until we define and understand him. Unfortunately, our enemy is a religious ideology that produces an endless number of soldiers who are either eager to die so that we in turn will die, or otherwise live in fear; or who are attempting to overwhelm our cultures demographically. The latter pose a far greater threat to our civilization than the former. Unfortunately however, currently, the former attract the most attention.

The first and foremost issue facing America is, how do the terrorists get here in the first place? Currently, no Islamic state possesses the technology to strike America by military means. Nor does any independent jihadist entity, such as al Qaeda or Hezbollah. They have no navy, no air force, and, currently, they lack the missile technology to strike us.

September 11, 2001 is the root cause of America's involvement in the "GWOT". One of the most common questions asked in its aftermath was, "Could we have prevented this attack?" The answer is most definitely "yes". It had nothing to do with "connecting the dots" or sharing intelligence between the CIA, FBI, and local law enforcement. Not one of the 9-11 hijackers had any business being in America. How did they get here?

Again, this is the result of our inability to diagnose the problem. Currently we do not recognize Islam as the root cause of "terrorism", so we lack the foresight to see that allowing foreign Muslims to roam free in our country is inherently dangerous. If we had recognized this threat prior to 9-11, and had the moral courage to resist political correctness and act on it, September 11 would've been a completely meaningless day in this country's history.

Removing the tragedy of that day, it's obvious that we would not be in Afghanistan right now. Nor would we be in Iraq. Even if we erred in allowing 9-11 to happen, we wouldn't have to worry about Saddam's WMD or terrorist connections if we would have learned our lesson that day, because he and his cohorts in al Qaeda would have no way of getting them into the country. But in the name of cheap labor we allow our borders to be unprotected, and thus we are perpetually and unnecessarily at risk.

Many worry about the costs of fully securing our ports, both air and sea. Considering the alternative - endless billions being wasted in Afghanistan and Iraq - the cost of implementing proper security measures would be of little concern. Nor would the ability to police our borders, as tens of thousands of our soldiers would be in America where they could properly and effectively guard the homeland.

By simply addressing the security of our borders, the mantra "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" becomes devoid of any logic or meaning. This however is only a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

The mantra of our current foreign policy also becomes meaningless in the face of home-grown jihad infesting many European nations and even America. Fighting terrorists abroad means nothing if they're being created within our own borders. How do we begin to address this problem?

To begin with, as an extension of border security, immigration and travel to and from Islamic lands should be banned, or otherwise severely restricted. The true intentions of Muslim foreigners entering the country can never truly be determined, until and if they act or conspire to murder Americans. How many times have we heard a jihadist's family and community express shock that he had attacked, or was caught conspiring to attack, America? Or Britain? One of the London tube bombers was a school teacher. Even if the Muslim traveler is not a threat, there is no guarantee that, like this school teacher, should be be allowed to stay, he or his naturalized offspring will not discover the roots and true meaning of their faith, which is jihad.

By pure demographics alone, much of Europe will develope Muslim majorities within many of our own lifetimes; certainly within the lifetimes of generations in the near future. This cannot be allowed to happen in America. The conditions of non-Muslims living under the heel of Islamic states has never been acceptable in all of Islam's history. Never. Even in what is considered Islam's most tolerant and enlightened era, non-Muslims were treated harshly. The laws that governed these states - the Shari'a - are not a relic of a dark period of Islam's distant past: 81% of Muslims in Detroit somewhat or strongly (59% "strongly") agreed that shari'a should be the law of the land. Christian populations are persecuted in Egypt and the Palestinian territories; Buddhists and Christians are under attack in Thailand. The murder of Theo Van Gogh (carried out in the tradition of the prophet), the cultural festering in Sweden, the home-grown jihad in Britain, the riots in France: these are all but a taste of what's to come in America if we continue to turn a blind eye to jihad.

Not only must we restrict the flow of Muslim immigrants into our country, but we must completely eliminate the influence of foreign Muslim entities in American Muslim life. Eighty percent of US mosques "have been radicalized by Saudi Money and influence". This is done by offering to build mosques more splendid than Islamic communities could afford to build, with the condition that the congregation be led by a Saudi-approved imam. Is it a coincidence that the same percentage of Muslims in America's most populous Muslim community advocate a grotesque and offensive legal code such as the Shari'a? The Fiqh Council of North America, the Muslim organization that produced the ridiculous fatwah condemning "terrorism", is linked to Saudi Arabia, Pakistani extremists and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was founded and is funded by terrorists organizations. Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, CAIR's founders, are former officials of the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), and IAP’s president, Rafeeq Jabar, is one of CAIR's founding directors. Former FBI counterterrorism chief Oliver "Buck" Revell has described the IAP as a "a front organization for Hamas," and this accusation was affirmed when a federal judge in Chicago found the IAP guilty of aiding and abetting Hamas in the murder of David Boim, a 17-year-old American citizen. Further, it was discovered that CAIR exploited the 9/11 attacks to raise funds for two Hamas-linked fundraising organizations, the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation.

The truth of the matter is, 'Moderate' Muslims are either ignorant or lying about the basic tenets of their faith, most important to us is the pillar of jihad. In either case they are dangerous, because the former promotes the idea of benign Islam, which a simple overview of their basic texts proves impossible; the latter is simply a clandestine agent of jihad, spreading propaganda about Islam to throw us off their scent.

You may ask, "what's wrong with the idea of benign Islam, even if, fundamentally, it's a lie?" First of all, it makes it easier for demographic jihad to take hold, because nobody will pay attention to what they're doing - such as exploiting terrorist attacks they claim their religion is not responsible for to raise money for organizations who fund and aid similar attacks. Second, it allows the PC-elite to declare that the terrorists are not true Muslims, and that this "extremist" movement is something new and can somehow be defeated by promoting freedom and democracy, concepts which are not only alien to Islam, but fully contradict it.

Long-term Foreign Policy

The likelihood of an Islamic state acquiring the military might necessary to strike directly at the American heartland is slim to none, with one exception: nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In the current environment this is the one case where military action would be warranted. However there are steps we can take to halt their progress by non-military means.

The Islamic world is pretty much the most worthless tracts of land in the world, save for one resource: oil. Restricted in free thought and innovation as they are by their religion, which recognizes no better or otherwise acceptable guidance than itself, it is small wonder why little of worth originates in their lands. Without oil the Islamic world would be mired in squalor and decadence. History bears this out. Before oil the Islamic state was sustained by jihad alone; its wealth and knowledge were stolen from the host civilizations: India, Byzantium, Europe. Without oil jihad will be Islam's only recourse to sustain itself, but without oil and with its dilapidated military, and, again, mentally confined by the oppresiveness of their religion, Islam will lack the capabilities to survive at all, much less pose a threat to the rest of the world by developing nuclear and long-range missile technology. Utilizing their oil wealth is the only means available to them to bridge the military gap between the Islamic world and the Western powers.

The solution is not to cease purchasing oil from Islamic states; other nations will pick up the slack. The solution is what many term a "New Manhattan Project" to develope an alternative to oil that could be shared with the world so that oil would become a useless commodity to the enemies of Western civilization, in whose lands the majority of the world's oil reserves rest. We are purchasing our own destruction by continuing to suck up an energy source that should not be necessary given what it is used for (jihad) and given the potential for us to develope other sources that cannot be used as a weapon against us.

Know Yourself

It is a sobering but acceptable fact that, unless we resort to barbaric and immoral methods, we lack the will and the ability to win this war. Yes, we could easily fight this war until the end of the world, and the death toll for the jihadists would be catostrophic. This of course ignores the fact that we are fighting an ememy that not only does not care about their death tolls, but views these deaths as glorious to their cause. And given the fact that we live in a society where even a single death is focused on like a laser beam and exploited to advance political agendas, it is clear we lack the will to fight this war forever. As Sun Tzu said, he will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.

Killing "terrorists" is like engaging an enemy on the battlefield by shooting at the ammunition he is firing. The terrorists are the ammunition; Allah is the one firing at us. Since we can't kill Allah, it makes no sense to fight his followers. With 1.2 Billion Muslims in the world, and with Islam the fastest growing religion in the world, we cannot stem the tide killing a few dozen jihadists a day. We can't stop future generations from devoutly practicing their religion, which rejects the very ideas we're trying to inject into their civilization. And again, killing them in their own lands means little if they're allowed to establish a foothold and conspire to destroy our society within our own borders.

So in this conflict, knowing the enemy goes hand in hand with knowing yourself. We need to know ourselves, and have the courage to see what we see and say so: that a religious ideology is the root cause of the conflict that plagues the world today and threatens our way of life. We need to have the conviction to stand up and say that plain truth is not hate speech, it is not discrimination, and it is entirely different than what Hitler did to the Jews. Hitler lied about the Jews to stir up hatred for them and support for his anti-Jewish programs. The "Jewish Blood Libel" and the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" are not the equivalent to jihad. The former were myths promoted for propaganda purposes; the latter is reality. And while Hilter's solution to the "Jewish question" was genocide, our solution should be simple disengagement. If Muslims want to practice Islam, and all the aspects of it that we in civilization find so offensive, let them - in their own lands. We need the courage to determine that our civilization is worth saving, and worth accepting uncomfortable truths in order to save it.

Do we possess it?