The issue of fundamentalist jihad/terror, can ultimately only be addressed by Muslims themselves. All "everyone else" can do is try to contain it, and deal with the fallout when an atrocity is committed.
But here the beef.
When 'moderate' Muslims appear to support medieval practices such as death for apostates, female genital mutilation, treating women as second-class citizens etc, then it's my belief that the desire to tackle extremism simply isn't there......because even so-called Moderates support positions which I would describe as 'extreme', in a 21st Century context.
It's for this reason that I think that a religious conflict between Islam and 'everyone else' is verging on unavoidable.......because I don't believe Muslims are motivated to do the required house-keeping, to prevent it from happening.
About the only thing which might prevent it, is if there is a global purge within Islam, to root-out the fundamentalists, and hand them over the the authorities in whichever constituency they are found. However, given the vast majority of fundamentalists live in states which actively support the medieval practices outlined above, I have next to no expectation that this will ever happen.....hence my overall pessimism.
It will start with small scale, localised victimisation of Muslims in Western states, and be followed by non-Muslims being attacked in Islamic states in response. In practice, this second aspect is already happening (and not only under IS jurisdictions either - just ask any Coptic Christian from Egypt), and it will escalate from there.
I don't call for a War........but history has told us that it's the inevitable outcome of any conflict (on a big enough scale) between humans.
It's pretty much the conclusion I've come to as well. Dismal isn't it? But I just don't see how any accommodation can be brokered here
The only unknown factors for me now are timings, scale, and location. Is it possible that it might lumber on as a perma terrorist war indefinitely ?
There is sadly, an over-riding logic once you accept that a future war between what we might crudely call the crescent and cross is unavoidable, and that is that if it were fought this decade, we (the west) have a distinct advantage in weapons technology and population dynamics (particularly in western Europe which is where I can easily see much of it playing out). In fifty years time however this advantage could be much closer, especially if we're unable to ascimilate new cohorts of muslims into our societies (which doesn't seem an unreasonable expectation based on what background music is likely to be playing). I'm also a little conscious of the lessons from the fall of Rome, when the exponential growth of barbaric tribes that went unchecked and who were eventually able to destroy a decadent civilisation from within once they acheived critical mass. This period plunged us into about 600-700 years of dark age as civilisation regressed. It can happen.
If in say a 100 years time you're looking back at the carnage of a third world war you could easily be forgiven for saying why the hell didn't they fight it circa 2020 when they had so many advantages? Having talked about the Spanish civil war earlier, there is another paralell there even, concerning the mobilisation of the civilian population. Had the republic moved to arm civilians straight away, they'd have probably beaten fascism in Spain in 1936 (and who knows what the implications would have been of that?). Instead they tried to contain it from within their established instruments of societal order, started to lose ground, and when they eventually agreed to arm the civilian population it was too late.
At the very least I now think the case for preparing for war is becoming overwhelming and the west needs to be seriously thinking in those terms now. That means building powerful coalitions (not historical ones). The Chinese offered talks about 2 weeks ago but the decadent west rebuffed them. We need to clearly rethink what the hell we're doing with Russia, and of course there's the Indians to consider. If the events of the last couple of weeks have demonstrated anything to me, they've really underlined the role that Europe is going play. The French reported that they had 88,000 police engaged in the pursuit of the Kouchai brothers and another 10,000 troops have been put on the streets of France. Just for context, the UK's standing army numbers just 80,000 now. Our contribution (Europes) is going to be minimal. We're going to be at full stretch in defensive mode
It's going to be brutal and horrible and involves hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths (probably millions if we resort to some of the weapons available to us). That's what war does though. But I really don't see any other outcome, then the slide that you describe. Every scenario I try and sketch out finishes with a doomsday armagheddon at some point in the future, so there is a cold logic that says bring that to a head sooner rather than later when we're in a position to win it and minimise our own losses. If I could see that there might be an accommodation somewhere then it has to be worth exploring of course, but I just don't see where the scope is for that
