Foreign Affairs - Can the War on Terror Be Won? - Philip H. Gordon

Terrorism is not a strategy with which Muslims will forever want to be associated, and eventually it will create a backlash within Muslim societies. With time and experience -- and if the United States and its allies make the right choices -- Muslims themselves will turn against the extremists in their midst. Somewhere in the Muslim world, at some point possibly sooner than many realize, new Lech Walesas, Václav Havels, and Andrei Sakharovs will emerge to reclaim their people's future from those who have hijacked it. They will seek to put their civilization on a path toward restoring the glory of its greatest era -- when the Muslim world was a multicultural zone of tolerance and intellectual, artistic, and scientific achievement.