The war for prestige is not like a war to gain concrete objectives, such as territory. Concessions are largely irrelevant except as a way of enhancing the prestige of whoever gains them. It would not, for example, matter very much to those involved that most Palestinians were much better off economically before the current war against the Israelis. the object is not to improve their lot. It is to prove that whoever damages the enemy is more fit to rule the Islamic world.
Almost certainly we cannot remove from the Muslim world the sense of overall hostility that our enemies exploit for their own purposes. Even to abandon Israel completely would not solve the problem, although whichever Muslim leader could claim credit for its destruction would surely benefit. We can decide which Muslims leaders to back, although it is not clear that we can give them any measure of prestige sufficient to balance that gained by simply killing as many of us as possible, as in 9/11. We can hope to undermine the more dangerous leaders preferably by convincing their own populations that they are being led to mass suicide.
We should, however, remember that we are suffering the side effects of a war within the Islamic world, not of a concentrated assault on us. Ultimately that war, like the Thirty Years War that followed the Reformation in Europe, is likely to exhaust the participants and lead to a more secular and tolerant view of the world. We have to ride out the storm first. That will mean propping up friendly regimes in enclaves, probably with access mainly by sea, and fighting off attempts to gain prestige by attacking us. Doing that will be a largely naval task, and it may well justify the deployment of sea-based ballistic-missile defense on a much larger scale than we currently imagine.
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Originally Posted by Anthony Jacob
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