The War on Terrorism must not be made a slave to the fickle winds of politics. In this war, the stakes are immense: if the leaders of the Free World fail to prosecute this war, then millions will die. In his Sunday-night address to the nation, President George Walker Bush showed that he understands this and that he is fiercely determined to take whatever actions are necessary to bring about the ultimate destruction of the terrorist forces who threaten our way of life.

Two years have gone since that awful day in September when this war began in earnest. We all recall the horror of that day: the burning buildings, the falling people, and the desperate search for the lost. We recall the aftermath as well: the dust-chocked air, the desperate New Yorkers wandering the streets like refugees, every surface covered with posters of the unfound dead. It was a day of shock and agony unlike virtually any other in American history. To find a comparison one would need to reach back to December 7th, 1941 or to the First Battle of Manassas, which began the Civil War in earnest. Perhaps the worst part of September 11th is the knowledge that it could have been avoided.

Finding the ‘Root Causes’ of War:
On that day (and ever since) people have asked: why did they do this? This is a question which has generated more nonsensical and idiotic responses than I would ever care to read, let alone relate to you. The consensus in fashionable circles would seem to be that 9-11 was the fault of the United States, the result of whatever supposed ‘crime’ of America most enraged the particular speaker (US support for Israel, and sanctions against Iraq were generally the most popular, but more than a few observers also sought to link the attacks to the Indian Wars of the 19th Century, Sherman’s March, and the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s communistic government in Chile). After two years of thought I (and many others) seem to have finally come to the real answer: the terrorists attacked because they thought that America was weak. It is only in the minds of European socialists (and their acolytes in the rest of the world) that weakness is a virtue. The terrorists interpreted the failure of the Clinton Administration to respond decisively to a decade-long campaign of terror as a giant green light, a ringing message to the world saying, “come and attack us, we no longer have the will to defend ourselves.� And so they came.

Insanely, many on the left have attempted to pin the blame for September 11th on President Bush who, I might remind you, had only been in office for months when the attacks occurred. 9-11 was not the result of a few individual security breaches: it was the result of a systematic and decade-long neglect of foreign policy and national defense by a President who, as Commander-in-Chief, appears to have spent much more time pursuing Monica Lewinsky than Osama Bin Laden. Yes, the terrorist attacks happened on that day because there were security lapses: especially on the part of the FBI and the CIA. But, had Bill Clinton lost in 1992, they never would have happened at all.

That, I think, is the greatest lesson of the 9-11 (and, indeed, of the last four decades): no Democrat should ever be trusted to be President ever again. The last four Democratic Presidents have bungled foreign policy on a colossal scale. John F. Kennedy fumbled Cuba policy so badly that he only managed to avoid starting the Third World War by cravenly appeasing the Soviet Union. Little needs be said about how Lyndon Johnson continued the policies of the Kennedy Administration by managing the Vietnam War in the most inept way possible. Had he been an agent of the KGB, he could not have done a worse job. Jimmy Carter signed away the Panama Canal, allowed Islamists to seize control in Iran, and allowed those same Islamists to hold the staff of the American embassy hostage for more than a year. After his time in the White House, Carter did his fellow Democrats proud by negotiating the worst treaty in American history with the Dictator of North Korea, thereby endangering the lives of tens of millions of people.

Bill Clinton, of course, was the worst of the bunch. As much as Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter failed: at least they tried. Bill Clinton has been called the greatest politician of our generation and, I think, that much is true: the man managed to sit in the White House for eight years without taking a single step to increase the security of the United States. Al-Qaeda would bomb the United States and Clinton would do nothing but issue a few stern-faced statements before wandering off to ogle the members of high school classes touring the White House.

In 1993, al-Qaeda backed terrorists killed eighteen American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia and Clinton responded by withdrawing the troops. It has been reported that Osama Bin Laden himself has said that this was the moment that convinced him that he could fight America and win.

From there the attacks by terrorists escalated in violence and scale. Terrorists destroyed an American barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996: and Clinton did nothing. Two years later they attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania: and Clinton did practically nothing. It has been said that Clinton’s pathetic response to the African bombings, lobbing a few hundred million dollars worth of Cruise Missiles at an empty camp and a Sudanese Aspirin Factory, is what convinced Bin Laden that he could pull off the 9-11 attacks and get away with it. In 2000 al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole, nearly sinking it and, again, Clinton did nothing. That is the theme of the opening stages of this war: Clinton did nothing. He did nothing and three thousand American paid for his cowardice with their lives. Liberals today, as lacking in morality as they are, may regard Clinton highly, but history will be a much harsher judge. History will now remember William Jefferson Clinton as two things: the second President to be impeached and the second Neville Chamberlain.

Taking the Battle to the Enemy:
We must be thankful today that George Walker Bush was elected President in the two thousandth year of our Lord, for this war will not be won by the weak and passive men. Victory will come to the vigilant, the active, and the brave. This President understands that the ‘root cause’ of September 11th was the appearance of American weakness. This President understands that the only way to defend America is by taking the battle to the enemy, waging a constant and unceasing struggle all along the frontiers of freedom.

By invading Iraq, the United States had taken the battle to the enemy. Every terrorist and terrorist-supporter who meets his bloody and painful end in the Mesopotamian sands is a terrorist unavailable for duty elsewhere. We will win this war when we, as a people, come to grasp the mathematics of the situation. There is only a limited supply of fanatics in the world. Among a world Moslem population of more than one billion, no more than a few hundred have, in the last decade, found the will to personally take part in terrorist attacks. More than that, the sort of people who would engage in homicide bombings are happily also the type of people eager to join in combat elsewhere. In Iraq we are drawing them out and we are cutting them down. We have no idea of how many have actually been killed, nor will we likely ever have an exact count, but we do know this much: the terrorists who are coming to Iraq are also dying in Iraq. The next generation of suicide bombers who otherwise would soon be on the streets of Dallas are instead rotting in the sands and suffering in Hell.

In order to defeat the terrorists we must draw upon the great William Tecumseh Sherman for inspiration. We must take this fight to the enemy: we must invade their countries, burn their homes, and make them feel the price of their treachery. It should be recalled that the civilian deaths caused by Sherman were not particularly high. Rather, he made the secessionists reckon the price of their treason. The goal of his march, Sherman said, was to fill the South which such a loathing of war that they would never rise again. In our fight with the Islamists, we must be marching after him. It is only after the terrorists, and their supporters and sympathizers are made to pay the price of their beliefs that we can truly begin the long process of reconstruction.

We cannot wait for them to come to us, for it will then already be too late. We have to go to their countries and kill them in their fields, their towns, and along rivers with exotic and foreign names. We must pursue the enemy to the ends of the earth, and then we must drive him off the cliffs. Everywhere the terrorists are, we must find them: and we must kill them. We must baste them with bombs and make them bathe in the blood of their comrades. There can be no quarter, no mercy, for such murderous cowards. They won’t fight openly? Then we shall make them fight in the open by seizing that ground which they must contest: their homes.

These are the stakes: we must create a new world, that is to say one purged of the terrorist element altogether, or we must prepare to die in a nuclear blast. There is no middle ground here, no conceivable compromise. Either we must fight, and we must win, or we must die. There is no alternative.