(via LGF) Victor Davis Hanson provides his Recap of the who, what, where, why of our current troubles.  Keep this link handy as a "Cliff's Notes" guide for your peacenik friends.

A few excerpts:

But who exactly are our enemies?

The hard-core group of Islamic fascists, known as al-Qaeda, involves perhaps no more than 10,000 or 20,000 loosely coordinated killers. But like the Italian fascists, German Nazis, and Japanese militarists, their largely pampered leaders hope to capitalize on latent anger against the West among Islamic populations at large — to bully, threaten, or hijack weak regimes in the Middle East to obtain de facto political power. Post-9/11 cheering on the West Bank or amused smiles in the salons of Beirut and Cairo were seen as initial successes. Without at least tacit support from civilians, the terrorists could not exist.

What do they really want?

It is hard to tell, inasmuch as their grandiose schemes are as illogical as Hitler's — but no less dangerous. But if we take them at their word, their Middle East would look something like the Taliban's Afghanistan or the mullahs' Iran — a vast tribal, patriarchal, and theocratic society on a continental scale. It would be run by zealots and religious extremists who would institute a medieval sort of Islamic law, even as the leaders themselves, like Ottoman grandees of old, would continue to be parasitic on the West — importing their own eyeglasses, medicines, videos, and electronic technology. Politically, they would hope to expand on the model of Iranian theocracy and terror, using vast oil revenues to buy missiles and eventually components for nuclear weapons — first to obliterate Israel, then to either blackmail or attack us. The ultimate goals of demented thugs like a Mullah Omar or bin Laden are, of course, contradictory and absurd — how can one hate and wish to destroy the West, when it is the only source of everything one uses — from oil-drilling equipment and SUVs to machine guns and cell phones? So they are a lot like the Visigoths and Vandals who liked the appurtenances of Rome yet on their own accord could not create, but only ransack them. Take a look at present-day Iran and recent Afghanistan to ponder the ruin and barbarity that their rule could bring to hundreds of millions in just a few years.