NEW YORK — What's the one major issue the West absolutely and totally must get right in the years ahead? If the obvious answer is not peaceful international relations with an increasingly assertive China, then it has to be the West's ever-more complicated relationship with the world's Muslims.
Certainly the would-be "clash of civilizations," as the famed late Harvard professor Sam Huntington dubbed it, seemed all but inescapable in the wake of the horrific leveling of the World Trade Center Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, by Islamic hyper-terrorists.
Sensible people on both sides of the Islamic line accept that demented terrorists of all stripes will always exist, whether in the mountains of Pakistan or in the flatlands of Oklahoma. They can be contained but not eliminated.