Does anyone doubt we must win this war?
And does anyone still doubt that we really are at war?

Kidnaped American civilian Paul Johnson, Jr., held as hostage by al Qaeda terrorists in Saudi Arabia, was murdered (not executed, murdered!) by having his head hacked off either today or yesterday.

The terrorists gave photos to Arab media of Johnson's head resting atop his corpse. Caution, these photos are sickening (link may be perishable). But don't avert your eyes. This is what these adherents of the so-called religion of peace are doing.

Johnson was the third American slain by this brutal method. Reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan in 2002 by al Qaeda and freelance contractor Nicholas Berg was beheaded in Iraq earlier this year.

I've said it before (in a different context) and I'll say it again: There are only four basic possible outcomes of this war:

1. Over time, the United States engenders deep-rooted reformist impulses in the Islamic lands, leading their societies away from the self- and other-destructive patterns they now exhibit. It is almost certainly too much to ask that the societies become principally democratic as we conceive democracy (at least not for a very long time), but we can (and must) work to help them remit radical Islamofascism from their religious and political cultures so that terrorism does not flourish.

2. The Islamofascists achieve their goals of Islamicization of the entire Middle East, the ejection of all non-Muslims from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Persian Gulf, the destruction of Israel, and the deaths of countless numbers of Americans.

3. Absent achieving the goals stated just above, al Qaeda successfully unleashes a mass-destructive, mass-casualty attack against the United States and total war erupts between the US and several Islamic countries.

4. None of the above happen, so the conflict sputters along for decades more with no real changes: we send our troops into combat intermittently, suffer non-catastrophic attacks intermittently, and neither side possesses all of the will, the means and the opportunity to achieve decisive victory. The war becomes the Forever War.

The process of liberalizing Arab societies will take many years, decades in fact, or wqhole generations. But from the standpoint of our security all that has to happen is for certain Islamic societies to become convinced of one thing is the short term and one in the long term. In the short term, they need to realize that America's will and capabilities to survive and prevail are greater than their will to destroy us or support those who wish to. They have to see that terrorism is a loser's game.

In the longer term, the Arab ummah, the masses, must enjoy the fruits of liberalized political structures that support human flourishing. That is, they have to live better, more freely, more educated, more informed and more well off each year than the year before.

If that occurs, the entire raison d'etre for Islamic terrorism will wither, for Islamofascism holds that the plight of the ummah - poverty and political repression - is due to Western influences that must be purged for true Islam to be realized.

The conundrum of our task is that our long-term objectives are exactly those which Islamofascists say will ruin true Muslim society. Every success we gain, in Iraq or elsewhere when the time comes, will be fought tooth and nail by our enemies. But early this year, the high-ranking al Qaeda operative in Iraq, Abu Zarqawi, wrote to his superiors that democracy is "suffocation" for recruiting Iraqis to fight against Americans.

What this means is that the status quo ante bellum cannot be allowed to be reestablished. It was, after all, the womb of the war. The present status quo cannot be maintained either, for it is merely significantly, not decisively, better than before. We must remain focused on the long-term goals and vary our short-term tactics and strategies as we need to in order to obtain them.

A terrible danger is that we could someday be well underway to achieving our long-term objectives and still get struck by a catastrophic attack inside the US. Just yesterday, the head of Britain's MI5 said,

... the war against terror would not be won quickly, and cautioned that it was "only a matter of time" before a "crude" nuclear, biological or chemical attack.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, making her first public comments on the terrorist threat, spelled out a grim reality that there was an inexhaustible supply of potential terrorists being groomed by extremists to attack the West.

She said: "The supply of potential terrorists among extreme elements is unlikely to diminish. Breaking the link between terrorism and religious ideology is difficult."