WE have lost lives pointlessly combating Islamists on the ground in their own miserable lands. The West is smarter than that. Let's kill them from a safer distance.
Samuel Huntington died three years ago, and we still debate his idea that after the collapse of Communism, the world began splitting along cultural rather than ideological lines.
The eminent political scientist first collected his thoughts together as a provocative essay in 1993 published by Foreign Affairs magazine titled The Clash of Civilisations?
He was more certain of his ideas when expanding on them for a book three years later: The question mark had gone.
Eight years before the World Trade Centre was levelled by 19 Islamic terrorists dedicating their handiwork to the greatness of their god, Huntington saw future conflict arising from such cultural tensions and by lunchtime on September 11 many of those who remembered reading his theory thought he had seen the future clearer than Nostradamus.
But like the infamously vague and fraudulent French seer, Huntington's ideas have less purchase the further we move from 1993.
Early on the public enthusiastically took to Huntington's ideas, notwithstanding the flight of intellectuals. But components of his arguments seem profoundly correct, even if it is possible that their embrace might make them self-fulfilling, particularly the existential fight that significant parts of Islam imagine they are having with the West.
The West is not at war with Islam. We have launched a War on Terror, and the targeted terrorists are mostly Muslims, and we should kill them.
You can't negotiate with an extremist quoting the Koran as the reason he must murder your family.
We must kill him. Or her.
Nor can we negotiate with the mums and dads taking pride in their children strapping explosives to themselves to kill strangers in public places because they are envious of the fruits of advanced Western notions of democracy, education and equality.
Neither will we negotiate with those among us - right here in suburban Australia - who wish for sharia law and other sixth century accoutrements of the more primitive brand of Islam that have taken deadly hold elsewhere.
Australia is part of the arm wrestle against Islam's extremists and has troops on the ground trying to kill the Taliban in Afghanistan. More Here
