The War on Terrorism.
Victor Davis Hanson turns in one of the best expositions yet written on the meaning of the War on Terrorism. He writes in part:
[W]e are in a war with the latest face of an age-old enemy of civilization who hates the freedom of the individual, tolerance of diverse thoughts and practices, human rights, democracy, and modernism itself. Just as Stalinism, Nazism, fascism, and militarism hijacked the good peoples of Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan, so too radical Islamic fundamentalism, working hand-in-glove with Middle East tyrannies, turns frustrations over indigenous failures into hatred of a prosperous and successful United States. And like past challenges to civilization, such barbarism thrives on Western appeasement and considers enlightened deference as weakness, if not decadence. Thus enemies like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Baathists can only be militarily defeated, and the victims of their nihilism aided and abetted by our own efforts at reconstruction and forgiveness—but in that order only.
(*) Don’t miss this one.