"What does it matter what they tell eachother at night around the campfire? What matters is that in the end, Al Qaeda ceases to exist and we don't. The average citizens in Japan thought the war was all but won all the way up until near the end. We still won."

But the Japanese flew their airplanes into US warships.
This practice would not change the final result of the war. It was not a viable miltary option.
If the Japanese had not chosen the concept of "complete war"- that the kamikaze represented. If the average citizen in Japan wasn't deluded. If the Japanese had made the choice of not slaughtering millions of Chinese, and treated their prisoners as sub-human. The fire bombing of Japanese major cities and the final dropping of nuclear bombs may have never happenned.
It matters to the Japanese pilots and the US sailors who died unneccesarily. And it matters to the millions of Japanese who died, as result of the US planner perhaps correctly assuming that this was neccessary in order to end the war.

Al Qaeda can not win. But they can murder more people.

You can get "philosophical" about this- you can imagine alternative futures. Maybe it was a good thing that we nuked Japan- it led to a nuclear arms race which resulted a relatively long period of no major wars. Japan is now, a peaceful and very prosperous nation. Etc.
You can imagine that the policy of kamikaze was a key and neccessary part of this.
You could say that both Afghanistan and Iraq would not have been transformed into what they are today, without Al Qaeda. You can point to many benefits which have resulted from our response to this threat.
US miltary has improved. CIA is improving. UN is transforming into something hopefully better. It's probably unlikely Bush would have had the political capital to do AIDs prevention in Africa [at least at the present scope of program- because it was seen as actually part of national security. Btw, it *was* part of our national security and national interest to do something about this a decade ago, but it wasn't *seen* to have as direct of a connection].

But this misses the finer details, and not only the small stuff, but you could also say it misses God. It misses the single human life, and it misses the "entire matrix" of existence itself. It's a materialist understanding, it's human arrogance. We have seen the result of materialism. We have seen the result of dehumanizing policy. We can't help but be human, but we can attempt to be more humble.