Considering that in the recent troubles far more Muslims have been killed by Muslims, I think we are participating in a Muslim civil war on a grand scale, more or less their version of the Thirty Years War that bloodied Europe.

Islam is a much younger religion than Christianity and is experiencing its own internal 'rightist' or 'fundamentalist' movement attempting to reverse the move into a secular globalized world. Since the globalized secular world comes for the most part from the West, this fundamentalist group attacked the West using their own open-ness and technology as their weapons.

Just as their are interfaces within the spectrum of the Islamic world which incorporate different views from secular to preservationist to fundamentalist, so the secular world has its own spectrum of attitudes to bring to the party. There are secular anti-globalists who may find within the Islamic insurgency something to admire, there may be Christian fundamentalists who are one to one in agreement with the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood (if they bothered to research it), but will fight them to the death in the real world in the NAME of their particular belief set.

The ultimate trial is between the open society and the closed society. Each has its own particular advantages and weaknesses, Each comprises a bit of the soul of the other.