The biggest threat we face: the West vs. radical Islam.

INTERNATIONAL terrorism, in its Muslim-extremist variety, is a world phenomenon. In my view it will eventually blow itself out, probably by the collapse of the Muslim world into secularism. But in the meantime it constitutes the biggest threat that Western civilization faces.

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There are various ways of dealing with this threat, all of which are being explored. But the vital way is to localize it, or rather to direct it into areas where it can do least harm to the West. Partly by accident, partly by design, this strategy has been pursued by the U.S., Britain, and their few dependable allies.

The 9/11 attacks, followed closely by the terrorist operations in Madrid and London, were an attempt by Muslim extremists to break out of their traditional localized theater of operations and carry their war into the heartlands of their enemies. One of these operations succeeded. The Madrid attack showed how terror can work politically on a national scale. For the bombing panicked a sufficient proportion of the Spanish people to oust a conservative government which was committed to supporting America's operations, and replace it with a quasi-pacifist left-wing one which is willing to appease the terrorists.

The operations against the American and British heartlands failed, however. Not only did both nations place themselves on armed alert at home, in a way that has made it difficult to repeat 9/11-style attacks, but both also determined to carry the counteroffensive into the terrorists' heartlands by toppling regimes which supported them, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Allied occupation of these two Muslim countries, and the accompanying attempt to install democratic institutions there, has been criticized in the Western media, and by the appeasers of the European Union, as unsuccessful, inconclusive, wasteful, clumsy, and costly in life. Some of these criticisms are justified in part. But what is left out is the success in transferring the theater of conflict from the West to the Middle East.

Essentially, the fighting is now taking place in the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is being conducted on our side by American and British professional armed forces, using all their advantages in military technology. Of course there have been casualties, and no doubt there will be more. But they are very few in comparison with wars of comparable political importance, and we are learning how to minimize them.

The important result is that the civilian populations of big Western cities are no longer on the front line. It has shifted to the Middle East. Any destruction is taking place in Muslim territories. The overwhelming majority of lives lost are Muslim. Fanatics all over the Muslim world who wish to become active terrorists--or "fighters," as they call themselves--instead of infiltrating Western cities and forming cells there, have concentrated in Iraq, where they have been killed by Allied firepower in huge numbers. They have been putting themselves where we want them to be: in direct opposition to professional armies.