Growing up in the waning days of the Soviet Union, it isn’t hard to remember the doom and gloom analysis of nuclear holocaust. Who envies those elementary teachers who explained to kids if the communists launch their nukes, most would be vaporized — and those would be the lucky ones? And why not stress the fact that we could blow up the earth several times over with a tanker full of intercontinental ballistic missiles?

It was enough to give a kid nightmares of a looming blast that would destroy his house and cause his skin to peel off Hiroshima-style. No one bothered to explain to us that communism wasn’t economically sustainable. Doom and gloom was always sexier than hope. Unfortunately, the same goes for today.

Now, some Islamic terrorists finally have a plot that really works and we all of a sudden have another great fear. Is this plane going to be hijacked? Is this city going to be dusted with anthrax? Is this burger a bomb?

This time our imagination is the only limit to how we’re going to be attacked. And this time there is nothing like mutually assured destruction to deter an attack.

These threats come from an elusive enemy without a hard target to retaliate against. There seems to be less hope than there was with the communists.

Some have taken this opportunity to insist that the way to defeat this elusive enemy is by defeating Islam because Islam is a violent religion and the cause for terrorism. Defenders say that Islam is a religion of peace. Of course, the right-wing extremist inside screams out that Muhammad led an army back to Mecca from Medina. Also, the Sunni/Shiite split was over which general inherited the Caliphate.

Indeed, it is hard to say that Islam is a religion of peace when Muhammad’s first significant act was to disturb the peace by attacking the polytheistic religion of the desert. But haven’t there been peaceful Islamic societies? Of course there have. In a truly ironic moment in history, the Pope bastardized the meaning of Christ by inspiring Crusaders to attack the Holy Lands while Christians, Jews, and Muslims were living in peace in Cordoba under the rule of Muslims.

So Islam has a history of living in peace, but what about now? Is there a place that has a lot of Muslims that isn’t churning out terrorists? How about the country with the second-largest Islamic population. It is exactly there where we can find hope.

The country with the second largest Islamic population isn’t war-weary Iraq or extremist Iran. It is India, which happens to be the largest democracy in the world. That is not merely a coincidence. That is the hope for the end of terror: democracy.

The defeat of terror will come with the spread of democracy, not the end of Islam. India has more Muslims than Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia combined, yet it is not a significant source of terrorists.

This fact is the hope we can cling to in the face of terrorism and those who celebrate it.

And, those who cling to the hope that defeating Islam will end the war on terror are deluding themselves. There is literally no hope of converting more than a billion Muslims. But there is hope for the spread of democracy. It has grown in the last century, and it can keep going with the support of the Western world.

Actually, this is not a new fight. We are just continuing the long struggle against tyranny. We converted Nazi Germany into one of our allies. We lowered the Iron Curtain and gained more allies in the Baltics.

We can defeat the extremists in the Middle East and again gain more peace for the world. There does seem to be some hope for us yet.