The questions today are: What constitutes appeasement of radical Islamists? And is it likely to make us safer?

Some of Bush's critics are quite straightforward appeasers (if not using that phrase). My friend Pat Buchanan and Michael Scheuer (former head of CIA's bin Laden unit and author of "Imperial Hubris") state that the reason bin Laden is attacking us is because of our foreign policy of supporting Israel and authoritarian Muslim governments such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They argue we should reverse those policies and thereby take ourselves out of the terrorist line of fire.

All those critics who say we should change our foreign policies because we are causing the Islamists to attack us are -- whether they use the term or not -- arguing to appease aggressors by changing ourselves in conformity with the aggressor's desires.

The politically correct crowd who say we should change the way we talk, think and behave, change our surveillance of Muslims, even here in America, because it offends Islamist sensibilities -- wish to gain safety by appeasing the violent and offended Islamists.

These arguments are not immoral or cowardly. If we could vouchsafe America from the danger of nuclear, biological and other mass slaughters of millions of our citizens, it would be reckless not to carefully consider such appeasements.

This is an issue of threat assessment. The appeasers don't see the threat as so great. Thus they think we are overreacting and even adding to the problem.

But for President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Australian Prime Minister Howard and (considerably lower on the food chain) me and millions of others, we are convinced that no amount of appeasement of the terrorists' desires will make us safer.

As I wrote in my book last year ("The West's Last Chance"), just as Hitler's Nazis, the radical Islamists are irreconcilable and unlimited in their goals. And, they are expanding their reach into the broad grass roots of Islam throughout the world (including in Europe and the United States).

A maximum effort to extirpate the malignancy is the only and best defense for our way of life.

I'm not against the appeasers because they are immoral or cowardly. I merely disagree with them because I believe that, like Neville Chamberlain, they underestimate the threat, and are thus dangerously wrong.