Americans are regularly shocked by the phenomenon we call road rage. Some people, it seems, are willing to kill other people over the slightest breach of driver etiquette.

Imagine, then, how we might react to being without electricity or clean water for months. Or, if we came home one day and found a pile of rubble where our house once stood. Or, if we were called to the hospital and found our child without an arm or a leg. Then imagine if we could blame a wealthy foreign occupier for any of these very personal disasters.

Do you think we might be angry enough to fire a rocket, plant a roadside bomb or, perhaps, even drive a explosive-laden auto into a building?

We are not winning the war on terror, not according to the terrorism experts who gathered last month in Washington to analyze a year’s worth of reports from the front lines.

Yes, our troops are valiant and the best trained on Earth. But, the experts say, the war on terror is truly global, and it is contested every day in the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims. This is the war we are losing and losing badly. Every day, television and the Web bring fresh imagines of U.S. or Israeli tanks, helicopters and jets hammering away at young Arab men wearing scarves on their heads and sandals on their feet. What effect does this have when it is seen day after day, week after week and year after year?

That’s simple: Every day, in some corner of the Arab world, a youngster becomes a jihadist. Someday, he will replace the young radical our troops just killed on some dusty street.

Bin Laden is right, unfortunately. Unless this equation changes, we will bankrupt ourselves paying for foreign wars or trying to assure security not only on every jetliner, but also at every chemical plant, nuclear plant, refinery, tunnel, bridge, dam, tall building and football stadium.

It may be difficult to imagine, but what if we conducted a constructive, rather than destructive, war on terrorism?

What if the United States was ready to respond with massive assistance to the largely Muslim countries recently affected by the deadly tsunami? What if the United States showed leadership in halting the genocide in the Sudan? What if the United States had put $80 billion into building a Palestinian homeland rather than knocking down buildings in Iraq? What if we spoke out forcefully against torture and in favor of human rights, instead of suffering our own torture scandals and gradually repressing freedoms at home? What if we poured millions of dollars into the Peace Corps, a program in part founded to combat the spread of communism 40 years ago?

Imagine now how all of this would undercut the support for the hateful minority of Islamists intent on killing Westerners? Of course, the men now committed to radical Islamic organizations like al-Qaida are lost to us forever. We will have to hunt down and kill the plotters and bombers, including bin Laden.

But, absent an equally strong program to turn the tide of virulent Islamic anti-Americanism, the war on terror will be, as our president often suggests, endless.

Rhoades is executive editor of the Sun Journal. Readers should know that his opinions – like those of all columnists on these pages – are not intended to reflect those of the newspaper’s owners, employees or carriers. E-mail him at [email protected].