I don't think that Bernard Lewis was saying this at all in his recent WSJ op-ed. The point is not that "all Muslims" are violent butchers bent on destroying the West. At no time has any group been completely single-minded in its pursuit of another group's destruction (except perhaps the Nazis, but even they were "only" one aspect of a larger militaristic German culture); there are always those who buck the trend.

Rather, the point is that today, the principal threat to Western civilization comes from within the Muslim population and from certain aspects of Islamic philosophy. The real straw man is the idea that all Muslims are the problem, and it's typically raised precisely in response to one's pointing out that, in the current milieu of atrocities being conducted around the world, Muslims of one flavor or another are at the center of most of them. Articles such as the one linked above focus on knocking down the straw man to obfuscate the reality of contemporary Muslim crimes.

The fact is, there are those Muslims, such as bin Laden, who wish to rip down the Western world and replace it with an Islamic caliphate of their creation. It matters little whether this is due to religious determinism, revenge for past geopolitical events, or pure nihilistic disdain for the modern world. The dead victim of a suicide bomber remains just as dead.

Consider current events in Iraq, in particular the attacks against Iraqi citizens that are essentially worthless militarily. If the "insurgency" were a typical one, it would be just as concerned with protecting Iraqi lives as driving out the occupying American forces. Instead, the "insurgents" target either completely random civilian victims, to create as horrendous and newsworthy an event as possible, or they target other religious sects in what must be either a smokescreen to hide their true intentions or a demonstration of their underlying religious collectivism. Few of their attacks against military targets achieve anything but to bleed American support for the war. In all cases, the ultimate goal has nothing to do with Iraq, but is to drive America out of Iraq solely to claim a victory against the Great Satan (and/or, peripherally, to give one religious sect ascendancy over the other).

Given the long-term effect on their cause, namely that a group such as al Qaida can't get away with indiscriminate killing forever before even the radical imam must denounce them eventually, there must be a reason for such behavior. The only reason that makes sense is that the al Qaida leadership believes that America is too weak in character to take the necessary steps to crush them. Our ability to crush them militarily has already been demonstrated.

And so, one must conclude that Lewis is correct in his assertion that radical Islamists understand only strength, and respond to weakness precisely as in Iraq and elsewhere. Were we to have shown true strength at the very beginning of the conflict, then perhaps Iraq and the rest of the Middle East would be at least marginally more peaceful than it is today.