[x-factor]

Wow. I just finished skimming all 51 pages...an excellent exchange. My post is going to be mostly a recombination of what others have said, but maybe it will be useful as a summary/synthesis.

Are we at war with Islam?

Islam writ large? No...but we are in a zero-sum fight to the death with the Salafi/Wahhabi/Jihadi faction of Sunni Islam. (Incidentaly, I don't like the term Islamofascism. Its trying to fit a square peg in a round hole just because its a pre-existing easily understood hole.)

There are three factors that put us necessarily in a state of war with this faction:
1) they are violent not by temporary necessity but as a matter of philosophy
2) they reject compromise out of hand as a metaphysical sin
3) they are aggressively expansionist, again not as a matter of opportunity but as a matter of principle

If they were not all of these, we could find a way to coexist. (Incidentally, I would not put Iranian fundamentalism in the same category, as I do not believe they are all of these things.)

The issue of course is that there is no Salifistan. Salafism is as much a part of Islam as Baptists are of Christianity. The crux of our strategy has to run along counter-insurgency lines:
1) distinguish friend from neutral from sympathetic from enemy
2) respect all, aid the friend, woo the neutral, watch the sympathetic, and kill the enemy
3) employ all capabilities (diplomatic, economic, cultural, military, etc) in concert against the problem

For my money, the best historical example of this type of strategy is the Brits in Northern Ireland...in that its the best example of hard and soft power being used in tandem towards an identifiable end.