Winning is not an Option; It is the Only Way to Defeat an Enemy Determined to Defeat You

To win in war, you must break the enemy's will to fight. This is not the goal of the war against Islam, that we are fighting today.

Yes, "Against Islam," not against militant Islam nor Islamic fundamentalism nor Islamists (as differentiated from Islamics), because it is the ideology of Islam that is being tried to be imposed on us by Moslems--and the name of that ideology is Islam.

I do not care what the present president of the United States thinks of "victory," it is either that or "defeat."

Which shall it be?

Excerpts from 'No Substitute for Victory': Replies to Criticisms
Posted by John David Lewis in The Objective Standard:

Regarding my article "No Substitute for Victory": The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism in The Objective Standard, readers have brought up several questions that I'd like to answer. Among them are two of great importance: (1) Isn't the enemy stateless, i.e., without the kind of centralized political state that controlled Japan? and (2) Can religion and state be separated in Islam, which is a social-political-legal system as much as it is a religion?

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. . . we do need to demonstrate the will to remove an Islamic government that we deem a threat, without apologizing every time a civilian is hurt. This demonstration would sweep across borders and be seen by every government in the world. It would show that while Islam might be stateless, we recognize that Islamic dictatorships are not, and that to side with such a state is to become a target of the most powerful military in the world.

Islam itself is stateless; it respects no borders. It was designed precisely to unite all those who submit to Allah, regardless of where they live and what tribe they belong to. We have to adopt the same attitude, only with freedom and individual rights as our uniting ideals. By defining the enemy as Islamic Totalitarianism—government imposition of Islamic Law— we exempt no such state from our reach and yet enable every state to avoid the title and our wrath.

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Islam . . . . is an all-encompassing way of life. But it is not true that unserious Muslims cannot live under non-Muslim laws; the majority in western countries do—they compromise Islamic law to obey the laws of civilized society.

Identifying the enemy as Islamic Totalitarianism would enable us to end attempts to import Islamic Law into our own country, and it would empower our allies to end such attempts in their own countries. It would enable individual Muslims to comply with our demands, and it would expose those who refuse. It would also demonstrate the failure of Islam as a political movement, and thus challenge the premise, in the minds of many, that the Islamic Totalitarians are some kind of misguided idealists, right in principle but going too far.

As to the issue of realism: There can be no realistic discussion of a proper "strategy" (a means to attain policy ends) without a proper statement of the end that the strategy is intended to achieve. There is nothing more un-realistic than trying to create a plan without knowing where we are going—or assuming that no plan is possible since reality is "really" always in flux. The realism that we need is the recognition that those supporting Political Islam—rule by Islamic Law—are the real enemy. I'll gladly listen to anyone who has a different strategy for eliminating Islam as a political power and ending the threat it poses to us—but I've not yet heard anyone offer such a strategy.

John David Lewis