Crunch time is fast approaching for America’s wars. The mighty American establishment, with all its intellectual, military, intelligence, and academic components, is fully engaged in a search for “the way forward.”

The answer should not be limited to Band-Aid-style, one-dimensional military steps but must take into account the global nature of jihadist movements, the future of Islam, and the contours of its assault on the West, which long predates the attacks of September 11, 2001.

It is crunch time because a new Democrat-controlled Congress takes office next month. Meanwhile, every public opinion poll shows that Americans are clamoring for a new course; in addition, the American military command conducting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is due for a reshuffle with the upcoming retirement of General John Abizaid and other top service members.

Also pressing is the new leadership at the helm of the United Nations, with the departure of the obstructionist Secretary-General Annan; a growing sectarian war between the Shiites and Sunnis, which gives every indication of destabilizing more than Iraq in a region that holds strategic energy resources; and Iran sprinting, regardless of any sanctions, toward nuclear weapons capability.

Indeed, in congressional testimony and several interviews over the past month, General Abizaid argued that a broader approach than a simple call to arms is needed. “You have to internationalize the problem,” he said. “You have to attack it diplomatically, geostrategically. You just can’t apply a microscope on a particular problem in downtown Baghdad and a particular problem in downtown Kabul and say that somehow or another, if you throw enough military forces at it, that you are going to solve the broader issues in the region of extremism.”

In other words, this is not about troop deployments or secure army bases around Iraq, but about re-examining our purpose there and elsewhere in the war on terror. Among the questions that come to mind:

• Is it America’s business, responsibility, or even concern to adjudicate a 13-century-old blood feud between Shiite and Sunni Muslims? Or is it a matter for the world’s 1.1 billion Muslims to handle themselves, under the leadership of Islam’s elders as well as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the religious leaders of both the Sunni and Shiite sects?

• Can Republican and Democratic candidates for president in 2008 limit their discourse on the war to more troops or no troops? Or is it more pertinent to connect the dots on how America’s war on terror relates to the defense of the Western home fronts in Europe and America — and at which borders it stops and starts? What indeed are the West’s terms and conditions for a future relationship with the vast world of Islam? In other words, what is acceptable and what is not, and when do we go to war?

• Shouldn’t the entire apparatus of the West’s intellectual, academic, and information apparatus — including NATO, the OECD, and other components of the larger Western security alliance — have their own powerhouse conferences focused on finding answers to the challenge of worldwide jihad?

The fact is that no solution to the impending civil wars among the factions in Lebanon, among the Palestinian Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank — or indeed between the Taliban and others in Afghanistan or the Russians and the separatists in Chechnya — will be found in the isolation of their supporters. Nor will it be found in the tribal loyalties in Pakistan; the Shammar tribes of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; the stranded Muslim communities in Europe; or the ungoverned corners of Africa, with their trillion storefront mosques, where wild men of little education preach alienation, suicide, and the cult of death in the name of religion.

General Abizaid spoke of “the long war” in terms of terrorism, especially radical Islamic terrorism. He did not confine himself to a little battle in Iraq, Somalia, or Afghanistan.

Such a war requires the best minds of the West, minds of the same caliber that mounted the long Cold War from the end of World War II in 1945 to the defeat of communism in 1990. It is a war for which the West is superbly equipped, with unsurpassed economic might, intellectual superiority, control of world commerce, banking, and with much sympathy from secularist Russia and China, superpowers that have no time for fanatical religious wars.

As the president deliberates, after his Christmas message on “the way forward,” our fervent wish is for a 360-degree vision.