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Are such Islamist beliefs not intolerable and perilous for our republic?

Clearly, the West is in a civilizational struggle, with the outcome in some doubt.

Four years after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese empire had ceased to exist. Japan was smoldering ruins, its navy at the bottom of the Pacific. An American proconsul, Douglas MacArthur, was dictating to the Japanese from the Dai-Ichi building.

Today we are in the 16th year of a war begun on 9/11. We are mired down in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Our victory in Afghanistan is being reversed by the Taliban.

While the ISIS caliphate is being eradicated in Raqqa and Mosul, its elements are in two dozen countries of the Mideast. Muslim migrants and refugees, ISIS and al-Qaida among them, are moving into Europe.

Terrorist attacks in the West grow in number and lethality every year. The new normal. Now, second-generation Muslims within Europe seem to be converting to a violent version of Islam.

To fight them, we are being forced to circumscribe our sovereignty and empower police and intelligence agencies of which free men were once taught to be wary.

Wars, it is said, are the death of republics. And we now seem to be caught up in an endless war.