The roots of terrorism actually lie in the primitive, superstitious ignorance that pervades the Arab world (thanks in large part to their own totalitarian leaders).
I don't at all disagree with your characterization of radical Islam, but here's where I diverge and why I think the middle east domino theory is hopeless idealism... it's predecated on the belief of American moral and cultural superiority. It's easy to sell American's on the idea that the American way of life should be our chief export. We've been raised on a steady diet of nationalistic propaganda for our entire lives. The problem is that mentality itself is a kind of religious fundamentalism. Democracy is great and all but look at it from the rest of the world's perspective. How are we so different than fundamentalist Islam? We're both claiming that ours is "the way" and woe to those that oppose it. It's painfully ironic that we're so willing to give up even a pretense of privacy and take such a wild swing back towards 50's style McCarthyism in the name of promoting freedom and democracy (or cramming it down people's throats as the rest of the world is more likely to see it). It's a bit oxymoronic don't you think?
Neo-con may have become a buzzword, but that philosophical movement underlies this belief that we should use our power to force the rest of the world to "see the light." Our invasion of Iraq, the changes Rumsfeld has made to the military, and even the opportunist possibilities of a cataclysmic event like 9-11 are all laid out in the PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" position paper. This isn't just crazy leftist conspiracy theory. The principal authors of that paper went on to form the core of the Bush administration.
Of course fundamentalist Islam needs to be dealt with and we need to learn from 9-11 but does that mean swallowing the whole pill? How much are we swayed by our own fundamentalism? How much are we willing to sacrifice in its name? We need a debate about a hell of a lot more than the best way to keep some maniac from crashing a plane into a building. We need to deeply examine our motives. As tragic as 9-11 was and as successful as Al Qaeda has been at poking the hornets nest I simply can't see either as adequate justification for swallowing a new philsophy and everything that comes with it.
