The Long War

This is a thought-provoking post by Wretchard at The Belmont Club regarding a statement in Newt Gingrich's testimony before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, in which he characterized the War on Terror as the "Long war" against the "Irreconcilable Wing of Islam". He believed this struggle could take centuries to reach a decision and would be fought largely by words in rooms and city streets.

Wretchard postulates:

Islam has always been militant and the West only recently supine. In fairness, Islam's only fault may be that it retained a belief in itself long after the West embraced self-disgust. It may be that Gingrich's Long War is less about fighting Muslims than about the West rediscovering itself. While it's apparent battlefields may be in the mountains, jungles and desert fastnesses, the only frontier that matters is in its own heart.