Telling only half the story.

Pat Buchanan has headed for town but stopped half way there to dangle his toes in the creek.

Of the opinion that Pres. Bush's "ideological struggle" with the jihadis is less than wise, he states that

[O]ur enemy has rooted his cause in a 1,400-year-old religion . . . .

This sounds a lot like an ideological struggle with the West to us, or at least with that segment of the West that hasn't gone all wobbly at the sound of the muezzin's warble over Westminster, Bremen, and Marseille.

He is off the mark, too, when he says in the same sentence:

[Our enemy] has survived crusades, invasions and occupations, and is growing again in militancy and converts.

Mr. Buchanan, whom I revere for a host of reasons, mistakenly implies that the Mohammedans have withstood the worst that we had to dish out. The West launched "crusades" (lasting 200 years and affecting only a sliver of Muslim territory) and "invaded" and "occupied" Archaicistan and, lo, Islam still flourishes.

Women and children first!

Okay. That's not fair. Mr. Buchanan is anything but a surrender monkey.

Nonetheless, crusades, invasion, and occupation are far less than what the West could have done. Would that we had, when we had the chance, resorted to the methods used by Muslims to convert recalcitrants and eradicate competing faiths within their jurisdictions!

What the West did was child's play when it came to the real business of acting like you’re top dog.

It's time the West took a hard, hard look at what this bastard "ideology" is all about and resorted to the precise and beloved methods of the Muslims to solve the world's Muslim problem: draconic discrimination, forced conversion, expulsion, doctrinal litmus tests (absolute freedom to leave Islam, abjuration of sharia as an acceptable legal system, a bowdlerized Koran, abandonment of theocracy, etc.), non-repair of mosques, heavy special taxes on Muslims, and second-class citizenship, if that.

"Invasion" and "occupation" are nothing -- meaningless -- without effective follow up. And at "follow up" the Muslims excelled. They should expect nothing less from us than what they so enthusiastically dished out over the vicious and bloody history of Islam. Okay. Hold the indiscriminate slaughter!

Simply put: "Regression" anyone?

The left wants traditionalists to abandon their principles without skipping a beat but will, of course, scream bloody murder at the demand that their "progressive" substitute principles be cast out and naked common sense resorted to.

That kind of regression is what we crave. Back to times when men didn't wear earrings, use body wash, or have flowing tresses that float in the wind like Fabio's in a wind tunnel.

"Can We Win the Ideological War?" By Patrick J. Buchanan, The American Conservative, 8/27/07.