Only U.S. strength can defeat Islamism: the politics of honor and humiliation in the Middle East.

Military commanders from Julius Caesar to Norman Schwarzkopf have paid as much attention to the group psychology of their opponents as to the quality and quantity of their arms. National character and shared temperament, after all, bear directly on a population's fighting spirit.

Such moral and psychological judgments of our Islamist enemies are currently off limits to our strategists and commentators, however; whether accurate or not, they are considered to smack of ethnic profiling, a contemporary sin. But in wartime, hard-won street smarts about national character are a military resource that should not be ignored, and at present we keenly need intimate ...