"But if they choose to go to war with an ideology, they certainly will, and have...That the leadership of the US refuses to see the true nature of Islamic ideology, and why a war should be waged against it, only helps the enemy, and puts the citizens at greater risk...A change in leadership is coming..."
You can not and should not go to war against an ideology, and it does not matter if the truth of the ideology is founded in religious belief or in secular or atheistic belief such as Marxism-Leninism was.
If you make war against an ideology you make war against the very foundation of democracy itself because the cornerstone of any true democracy is the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.
What you can fight and should fight is the empirical manifestation of an abstract ideology that pose a concrete threat to your country and/or democracy ifself.
You can not declare war against an ideology only against a speficic country og concrete group of people who may or may not have declared war on the US. You can not find one example in the history of the US, or other democracies for that matter, where war has been declared against an ideology and not a specific national state or group of states or groups of non-state actors.
Also you can not declare "war on terror" because terror is a means to an end - a strategy to get control over people internally - state terror - or externally as a war strategy. All political systems including democracy (in the past) have used terror in order to achieve a political objective. "War on terror" is a meaningless phrase that may be convenient for purely propaganda or political purposes.
You can however declare war on Afghanistan with the objective of regime change, and you can make war on Al Qaeda (now a non-state actor) and its speficically named affiliates and collaborators, defined as "terror organisations", because they believe in an ideology that legitimize or rather demands the use of terror and unrestricted warfare against all enemies of Islam if Islam is percieved "attacked".
An ideology may be almost totally eradicated if your war objective of unconditional surrender of the enemy is achieved, as it was in WWII against the Axis powers, but even today Nazism (or neo-Nazism) as an ideology exist in the heads of some people. They are now fringe groups and pose no special danger to any nation or to world peace.
In a democracy ideologies should be fought in the political process through free and open discussion based on rational arguments in the defense of democracy and the values and principles that make democracy possible. Democracy may loose the discussion against fascist and supremacist ideologies as it happened in Germany in 1933. You can never eliminated that risk completely without restricting the rights and liberties the democracy rest upon and the consequences could easily be that the society is turned into a fascist dictatorship.
It is a very delicate balancing act and that is what makes the ideological fight against islamofacism so extremely difficult.
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