Excellent post, Ivan, though I take issue with this bit:
I don't believe it is possible to "intelligent" our way out of this, because the 'other side' is driven by faith rather than judgement. I think we can develop more robust coping-mechanisms to contain the problem, but the Islamist mind-set does not avail itself to intellectual persuasion. Indeed, independence of thought is highly-discouraged in radical Islamist circles, because the only truth is Allah's truth, and anything else is heresy.
I tend to agree and if I’m advocating anything here it is ‘strategic patience’ if that makes sense. Ideological shifts and softening of historically forged entrenchments do occur.
Maybe the realignment needs to be multilateral. If we are naïve enough to think that this will simply be a case of us sitting around waiting for Islam to ‘see the light’ and hop on the bus to ‘civilisation’ we are going to be very disappointed.
I don't do all the Western self-hate stuff but some element of self-examination surely has to be in order at some point.
As you have said yourself, the idealogical gap is unbreachable, hence we can never reach an accommodation/understanding with an entity like ISIS, no matter what intellect we bring to the argument. The perspectives of the West and Radical Islam are a clash-of-worlds that can never be reconciled, and whatever measures we take to mitigate the problem, we seem destined to be containing this as best we can, for many years (and probably decades) to come.