It is kind of amusing to see that conservative newspapers still talk about the war in Afghanistan and Iraq as defending the west. From here:

Barack Obama this week vowed to defeat what he described as a confidence-sagging fear that the US faces an inevitable decline that would force the generation of his daughters Malia and Sasha to lower its sights. That could leave the US stranded in a decade of recession, bruised by massive wealth destruction from collapsed housing and stock prices, saddled with crushing debt and yet still responsible for defending the West in hot spots such as Afghanistan.

Anecdotal, however, despite living in a red state in the US I have not anyone here term it as a fight to protect the West. Maybe it is a submissive and cringe-inducing justification for bit players like Australia and their cheer leaders - namely Australian conservatives - to involve themselves in the nation-building going on in Afghanistan and Iraq. In terms of American politics, Australia's contribution has never been so insignificant. The only reason it was with Bush was because Bush, his policies and the implementation of those policies, were so unpopular that he sought some kind of justification through international support by lackey nations such as Britain, Australia and Poland.

The 'West' or more accurately in this day and age, nations who use liberal-democracy and capitalism as their guiding forms of social organization, are safe from any intrusion by terrorism. The late 19thC saw spates of terrorism, including one that helped propel Europe into a World War, however the forms of organization that define western attitudes have been more resilient than any anarchic forms of violence.

Despite conservatism's overly patriarchal fear of cultural regression, there is no need to believe that liberal-democracy and capitalism will collapse from external violent pressures. As the last two years have shown it is more in danger from destruction from within via politicians and capitalists and their immoral pursuits of absolute power and greed.

Both liberal-democracy and capitalism have mechanism for dealing with this, except when criminal political behavior is pardoned or avoided, or when failed capital enterprises are not allowed to fail, both issues which have occurred recently. Violence is a pin-prick in comparison.