And William Higgins, a colonel in the Marine Corps and commander of the UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, who was seized by Hezbollah in February 1988, tortured, and eventually hanged. (As Michelle Malkin perceptively noted last week, the tape of Higgins, bound and gagged and swinging from a rope, was one of the first publicly disseminated jihadi snuff films.)

And the 241 US servicemen murdered by Hezbollah on Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber drove a truck rigged with 12,000 pounds of TNT into their barracks at the Beirut airport.

And the 19 US servicemen killed in the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

For more than two decades, Hezbollah's Shi'ite fanatics, backed by Iran and sheltered by Syria, have made it their business to murder, maim, hijack, and kidnap Americans with the same irrational hostility they harbor for Israel. Yet when Tony Snow, the Bush administration's gifted spokesman, was asked on July 19 whether the president believes "that this is as much the United States' war as it is Israel's war," he answered, "No," and then tried to change the subject. A moment later the question returned: "I don't think you really answered the part about why is this not our war?"

Snow's incredible reply: "Why would it be our war? I mean, it's not on our territory. This is a war in which the United States -- it's not even a war. What you have are hostilities, at this point, between Israel and Hezbollah. I would not characterize it as a war."

9/11, it was said time and time again, "changed everything." No longer would Americans walk around with eyes wide shut, oblivious to the threat from the Islamofascists. Not our war? Listen again to the Hezbollah hordes: "Death to America! Death to America!"

They're serious about it -- deadly serious. Why aren't we?