Fascinating interview with Victor Davis Hanson, posted on his personal site. Here's but an excerpt:

This conflict with radical Islam has much in common with long struggle of the Cold War, but radical Islam has none of the marquee appeal that socialism offers to the naive. Socialism and communism have this chimera of egalitarianism: Give the state enough power and we’ll make you all equal. And that can be appealing to the young and poor. Radical Islam says in contrast, Give us the power and we’ll take you back to the 8th century; we’ll stone homosexuals; we’ll circumcise women; well make you live by a code found nowhere else in the modern world. In other words, Islamic fascism has no real resonance, aside from its showy anti-Americanism.

Plus, in this age of globalization, with the Internet and open media, Middle East dictatorships cannot censor information and news the way they did before. They cannot blame Israel and America for their own failures and expect to shield their population from all other exegeses. In addition, radical Islam has to compete with everything from Britney Spears to McDonalds to John Locke. So far the West, not Islamic radicalism, has proven to be the more dynamic and appealing creed, for better or worse.

So while we have a whole bloc of autocratic nations, as we did in the Cold War, the situation is much more explosive and unpredictable, and can turn in far less time.

Now that we've established that the United States is unpredictable, muscular and resolute, we need to undermine through democratic pressure the dictatorships in Syria and Iran, insidiously through principles of transparency and freedom, through the backdoor if you will, rather than necessarily confronting them head-on with more force. In other words, if Syria wants to undermine us in Iraq, we need to encourage idealists to push out their agents from Lebanon. We need to pressure Iran through Afghanistan and Turkey and other democracies to rise on its perimeter. We can agitate for democratic reform in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt, through policies that govern aid, sales, largess, and travel, and build a democratic consensus of reform — until Iran and Syria realize they are the odd men out, the Cubas so to speak of the Middle East.

This is all only possible because of the credibility of U.S military force — and only because the U.S. dealt with the worst problems first in defeating the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and scattering al Qaeda. When you deal with the most frightening and controversial obstacles first, the rest becomes much easier and is ironically not always in need of the same initial tough responses.