Fighting them there/fighting them here misses the whole war

From a Christian Science Monitor article discussing the merits of the "we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here" argument.

Nor are Islamist terrorists just burning to break through the US lines in Iraq and race to America, say some. They are fighting a battle of ideas, not a battle for territory. Operations in Iraq allow Al Qaeda to appear to many sympathizers in the region as if it is struggling on behalf of an oppressed Muslim people.

"Getting us to fight in a Muslim country is something they want to do," says Jessica Stern, a terrorism expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.

The US conception is that it is fighting wars in a physical space, but by "fighting them there," the US is fighting the battle of Al Qaeda's choosing. (Perhaps that misconception is not so surprising as the entire modern US defense planning and policy structure evolved to fight territorial battles with the Soviets.)

Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is fighting a war for a definition of Muslim identity, a liberation theology of their own, and every territorial war by the US simply adds to that definition. It's not about the violence except as it's useful towards the ends.

In this interpretation, they're not attacking us here because they don't need to. They're already winning.