KENNETH SILBER WRITES:

It is sometimes suggested that “you can’t kill an idea.” But actually some ideas can be killed—literally, on the battlefield. In particular, ideologies that glorify military conflict tend to fare poorly after their exponents suffer crushing military defeat. And this bodes well for the aftermath of the Iraq war, as well as for the broader war against terrorism.

Political ideologies can be divided, roughly, between those that believe “might makes right” and those that do not. Nazism, Fascism and Japanese militarism all were in the former category; each extolled its own military prowess and saw it as an indicator of racial or national superiority. Hence, losing World War II took away not only the institutions and resources of these might-makes-right ideologies but also their intellectual legitimacy. Their claims to superior power were refuted by Soviet tanks in Berlin, American planes over Japan, and so on.

Guess which category Saddam fall into. Osama, too. Read the whole thing.