Much of this post is excerpted from the intelligent and insightful Alan Dowd article from February 26, 2018, entitled A Quarter Century War.  In actuality, this war has been being waged for over two and a quarter centuries.

"We’re turning the page on a decade of war,” Marxist Muslim President Baracka Hussein Obama promised Americans in 2012. He was definitely in tune with the American people—wearied, as they were, by the costs of open-ended military interventions from Afghanistan to Africa—but he was way off on the war’s length.
In fact, by the time Manchurian Candidate President Obama reassured the American people they could turn the page on a decade of war and “focus on nation-building here at home,” a Saudi terrorist had been waging global guerilla war against America for the better part of two decades. The attacks of September 11, 2001, merely marked the moment America awoke to the nightmare.
Few Americans remembered on 9/11 that Osama bin Laden’s henchmen had attacked the World Trade Center years earlier, on February 26, 1993, when Ramzi Yousef detonated a van full of explosives in the underground parking garage of the north tower. The blast blew a hole 100-feet wide and five stories deep into the bowels of the tower, killing seven and wounding 1,500.
Image result for barbary piratesFewer Americans realize that Islam in general has been at war with America since October 11, 1784, when Moroccan Muslim pirates seized the US brigantine Betsey.  Though Spain negotiated a release of that ship and her crew, this same type of Islamic revenue raising war fighting continued for a decade and a half.  Shortly after taking office in 1801,  President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay $225,000 to Islamic Pasha Yusuf al-Qaramanli.   That is roughly equivalent to $3.39 million on today's dollars.  TJ had witnessed his presidential predecessors pay out multiple millions of 18th century US dollars to Muslim pirates/kidnappers/ slavers to rescue our merchant sailors and recover our ships.  In 1786, future presidents Adams and Jefferson asked Islamic ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja why they "make war upon nations that have done them no injury".  Abdul replied that it was written in their Koran that it was the right and duty of the Muslims to plunder and enslave all who do not acknowledge the bisexual gigolo who founded their stupid ass, most irrational and unreasonable religion.  All religion is irrational and unreasonable, in that they were all founded by ancient man to answer the questions that they couldn't answer through their limited reason and rationality, particularly the utmost question of what happens after death.  Islam has overtaken 16th and 17th century Catholicism as the epitome of ungodly repressive religion.      
Following President Jefferson's refusal to pay tribute, the Pasha symbolically declared war on the US by chopping down the flagpole in front of our consulate.  With a bellyful of the bull squeeze, President Jefferson dispatched our new, little twenty ship Navy,  deploying US Marines and mercenaries, giving us the "to the shores of Tripoli" line of The Marine Corps Hymn. 
 As a tangentially relevant sidenote, many, if not most, or even all ill- and uneducated contemporary American Negroids and guilty white liberal Caucasoids believe that history's only slavery was practiced here in the US, between 1619 and 1865, with American and European Caucasoids capturing and enslaving African Negroids.  Many, if not most of those enslaved African Negroids were sold into slavery by other African Negroids.  Of course, slavery has a much more diverse history.  The Egyptian Semitic Arab Mullatoids enslaved Moses' Semitic Hebrew Mullatoids.  And these north African Muslims enslaved well over a million Caucasoids between the 16th and 19th centuries.  It is a practice that continues to be practiced by modern day Muslims.      
With allies Sweden and Sicily, the US stomped the Shiite out of the pre-Marxist Muslims, winning the war, resulting in the May 10, 1805 formal Islamic surrender/peace treaty signing.  
This American victory was so resounding that we heard little or nothing from the Islamic world until 1970, when Palestinians hijacked five airliners as a terrorist tactic.  This was a practice throughout that decade, culminating in the 1979 capture of our embassy in Iran, and holding hostage its diplomatic staff.  That ploy was abandoned at the mere inauguration of President Ronald Reagan in 1981.  It was a dozen years later, during the feckless administration of Slick Willie Clinton that they earnestly resumed their war against us (US).    
We later learned that one of Yousef’s co-conspirators was related to bin Laden; that Yousef had stayed in bin Laden’s guest house before and after the attacks, as NBC reported; and that Yousef was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the man who described himselfas al-Qaeda’s “military operational commander for all foreign operations around the world” and took credit for that first attack on the World Trade Center.
In the months and years that followed, the attacks increased in frequency, ferocity, and audacity.
In October 1993, Somali warlord Farah Aidid’s militia brought down two American helicopters and cut down 18 American troops in a daylong gun battle in Mogadishu. “My colleagues fought with Farah Adid’s forces in Somalia,” bin Laden later smilingly revealed.
In November 1995, four “self-described disciples of bin Laden” used a truck bomb to kill five American servicemen in Riyadh.
In August 1998, al-Qaeda conducted simultaneous attacks on United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 240 people, including 12 Americans.
In October 2000, al-Qaeda suicide-bombers attacked the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 Americans.
Then, in September 2001, al-Qaeda maimed Manhattan and scarred the Pentagon, murdering 2,977 people.

Targets

Bin Laden had warned us that his cult of killers “do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets.” That became obvious on February 26, 1993, and again on September 11, 2001, and again and again in the years that followed.
After 9/11, the jihadist war on civilization bloodied Morocco and Mumbai, Manchester and Madrid, Pakistan and Paris, Saudi Arabia and San Bernardino, Istanbul and Indonesia, Ottawa and Orlando, Britain and Brussels, Boston and Baghdad, Ft. Hood and the Philippines, Nairobi, Nigeria and North Carolina, Ankara and Amman. The list goes on and on, including the 9/11/2012 attack on our Benghazi facilities.  For that one, I want Hitlary Clinton shot in her fascist, feminazi face for high treason. She may have not been complicit, but she allowed it.  Either way, she gave aid and comfort to the enemy. 
Some of the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, some by its offshoots, and some by organizations and lunatic lone wolves that used it as feedstock for their rise. But all of them were inspired by al-Qaeda and its founding father. It’s as if bin Laden broke some sort of invisible barrier with his audacious attacks on America.
Devoid of compunction, constraint, or conscience, bin Laden’s death cult attacked commuters in London, vacationers in Bali, businessmen and children in Manhattan and Arlington and Shanksville, Christian churches in Pakistan and Baghdad, and Shiite pilgrims in Karbala, Christmas/Hanukkah party attendees in San Bernardino and students in Chapel Hill.  In 2007, long before the Islamic State (ISIS) brutalized Iraq’s Yazidi minority, al-Qaeda murdered 400 Yazidis, just because they were Yazidi.
In 2012, the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq—which had been crushed by the US surge only to reconstitute and rebrand after the US withdrawal—“morphed into the earliest version of ISIS,” as the Financial Times reported. ISIS has been called “worse than al-Qaeda,” and perhaps deservedly so. As proof of its savage piety, ISIS summarily executed thousands of Shiite Muslims; drowned and burned alive prisoners of war; conducted genocide against Yazidis and Christians; executed imams and hospital workers; ordered Christians to convert or die; conducted a systematic campaign of rape in conquered territories; sold children into slavery; and used “mentally challenged” children as suicide bombers.

Differences

This is the enemy the US military has been fighting for decades now. However, the US is not at war with Islam—after all, in the past quarter-century US troops have rescued Muslims in Kosovo, Kurdistan, Kabul, Somalia, and Sumatra—but it is at war those who would force people to submit to Islam. It is at war with those who take literally Muhammad’s injunction “to fight all men until they say, ‘There is no god but Allah.’” It is at war with those who “do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians.” It is at war with murderers and rapists masquerading as holy men. It is at war with those who seek to destroy civilization.
Make no mistake: There’s a vast difference between those who use force to defend civilization and those who use force to dismember it. Motives matter; as scripture reminds us, motives are weighed by the Lord. At its core, the primary motive of our jihadist enemies is to kill and injure innocent civilians. Yes, the bin Ladens, Baghdadis, and Zawahiris of the world have a broader political goal, but to achieve that goal they must achieve the primary goal of killing and maiming innocents. Terrorism loses its power without achieving that goal.
America is not perfect. Without doubt, innocent people sometimes die as a consequence of American military action. But the undeniable difference between the terrorist and the US soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is motive and intention. Americans do differentiate between combatants and civilians, and we go to great lengths to prevent the loss of civilian life.
We see the difference in the way the enemy defines success and the way we react to failure. When our terrorist enemies kill civilians, they cheer and use their latest atrocity as a recruitment tool. When our defenders kill civilians, they order bombing pauses; they investigate and apologize; they demote and court-martial; they change targets and scrub missions. And their civilian leaders invest in ever-more precise, ever-more expensive weapons systems to prevent mistakes.
Perhaps it is past time to abandon these restrictive rules of engagement.  Sometimes, you absolutely have to fight fire with fire.  They make no distinction between armed forces and unarmed civilians.  We should probably adopt those practices, especially considering that many of their armed combatants are disguised as face hiding women and mindless minors.  I am sick, nearly to death of the politically correct approach to warring with these people.  I am tired to exhaustion from the crapola of peaceful Islam and moderate Muslims.  We are told by these peaceful moderates that it is only a small percentage of Muslims who wage war on the world.  We need to let this overwhelming majority of Muslims know that if they don't take care of their murderous minority, we will take care of all of them, before they can do so with all of Christendom, Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Buddhism, Atheism, et al.    
 Attention
As ISIS collapses in Iraq and Syria, as al-Qaeda’s attacks on the homeland fade into history, Americans may be tempted to declare victory and turn their short attention spans elsewhere. That would be a mistake.
In December 2017, the US military killed “multiple” al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in a series of operations spanning several weeks. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats reported this month that al-Qaeda is operating across large swaths of Mali, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Kenya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
This helps explain why US troops are still in Afghanistan, why the US military is bolstering its presence in Syria, and why US weapons releases are up 44 percent in Afghanistan, 29 percent in Iraq/Syria, and almost 10 percent in Yemen.
The war bin Laden began 25 years ago—what US military leaders aptly call “the long war”—is far from over, unless we start fighting to win, rather than to bolster the military-industrial complex, of which President D.D. Eisenhower warned us (US) to beware.