Excerpt:
For whatever else Sept. 11 was, it was a declaration of war. The totalitarian force of radical fundamentalist Islam, like the forces of Nazism and communism that preceded it, has not disappeared. We briefly defanged it in its most important lair in Afghanistan, but even there it has not been extinguished. Saudi Arabia, the chief exporter of this murderous ideology, remains protected by the West. Saddam Hussein is currently laboring to manufacture weapons of mass destruction that his allies in the Islamist terrorist network would dearly love to use on American soil. Suicide bombers have not relented in attempting to destroy the democratic state of Israel. Anti-Semitism, now as in the past the kernel of the totalitarian mind, has metastasized like a cancer throughout the Middle East and back into its ancient home in Europe. Educated men and women who regularly find the slightest fault in democratic Western societies vie with one another to provide glib, desperate rationalizations for the murderers of 9/11: arrogant American global power somehow deserved payback, and those who deliberately kill civilians are allegedly legitimate combatants with worthy grievances.
But through all this, we know what that day showed us. It showed us that we stand deeply vulnerable to a destructive force in some ways more dangerous than even the last two totalitarian powers Americans were called on to defeat. This enemy refuses to fight with honor; it hides and disappears and re-emerges whenever its purposes are served; it may soon have access to weapons that Hitler and Stalin only dreamed of. But it cannot be defeated the way Nazi Germany and Communist Russia were defeated because it is more like a virus than a host, infecting and capturing nation-states, like Afghanistan, and then moving on to others. So we will have to act to pre-empt it this time, in Iraq and elsewhere, or it will be too late to resist it at all. For Sept. 11 showed that, for the first time in history, the American homeland is actually vulnerable to a deadly foreign enemy. Only those in deep denial can forget that.
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy. 