A few days ago, David Moles asked how we would know if we'd won the War on Terror. In the ongoing liberal hawk roundtable, Paul Berman answers that question this way:

The war was brought on, in my view, by the mass totalitarian movement of the Muslim world—the totalitarian movement that, in its radical Islamist and Baathist wings, had fostered a cult of indiscriminate killing and suicide. The true strategic goal of such a war can only be to discourage and defeat that movement. The goal is to cause people all over the Muslim world to abandon the cult of mass death and suicide. What would be a complete victory? The rise of liberal societies and liberal ideas. That is because the opposite of totalitarianism is liberalism. And so, our goal has had to be: to damage and discourage the Muslim totalitarians and to hearten and aid the Muslim liberals.

Are these strategic goals so impossible to see?

I can already hear the argument that such goals are still too sufficiently vague. Does that mean the struggle Berman describes doesn't exist? Or shouldn't be fought?