Despite being “disturbingly Leftist,” “shrill and uninformed,” and all sorts of generally awful things that place me entirely beyond the pale, I will manage to climb out of my hole of invincible ignorance to crawl next to the self-appointed Diogenes of Democracy, Andy McCarthy, and say that he has cast his lantern’s light upon the key question of our time. Can a Muslim nation ever be a functioning democracy? Andy offers the indictment. But he cannot secure a conviction, because he does not have sufficient evidence. The “democracy project” has not even had five years yet, and it is already declared a monstrous failure because in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, monstrous things are still going on and the governments include monstrous people in them. (I am excluding the Palestinian Authority, run by terrorists, because it’s not a country and the way things are going, will be waiting a long, long time for the statehood it doesn’t really want.) That is worrisome, and the accusation that we have claimed too much success is a legitimate one.

Andy is, I think, distressed beyond measure because he believes America has to treat the confrontation with militant Islam as a war in every possible sense or we will lose it in the long run. That is a rational concern, and I have it as well. That’s why I wrote my now-infamous column asking whether democracies have achieved such a high level of civilization that they cannot do what is necessary to defeat an enemy that operates without restraint — a column that, by the way, led to accusations that I was arguing on behalf of genocide. Right now, the disturbing conclusion of the Israel-Hezbollah war (if it is a conclusion) offers another reason for worry. If Israel can’t bring itself to let slip the dogs of war against Islamic extremist terror — and it was Israel itself that blinked, not the United States — who else can?

In the absence of an ability to wage total war, to crush the will and spine of our enemy so completely that it dies the way Imperial Japan died almost instantly and permanently after the atomic strikes, is there no way to win? I say it’s still the case that the only way to win under these conditions is to offer up a rival doctrine to Islamism — liberty rather than submission, the rule of law rather than the rule of Sharia. And this war against Islamism is going to take a very long time, as I think even Andy can agree. The creation of democratic institutions takes time. And the thing is, we have time. Unless he can demonstrate how the “democracy project” is actually harming our national interests, then Andy is arguing against it simply because he believes it is futile.

Do we imagine we or Israel would be better off today with the Lebanon of 2004, completely under the thumb of Syria? Almost certainly that’s a wash. Would we have been better off in Iraq bombing, leaving and allowing the Sunnis and Shia to slaughter each other? I don’t think you can successfully argue that, though you could successfully argue that we’ve been tied down when it comes to other challenges, like Iran. And if we were not trying to strengthen the forces of liberalization in Afghanistan, wouldn’t the Taliban be back in power there?

I am raising these questions as questions because I think there is enormous room for debate on them. Unlike Andy McCarthy.