As the second anniversary of that other day of infamy approaches, I do not need to see TV replays of what happened. As on a DVD, the images are burned into my mind.

President Bush should stop saying the terrorists hate freedom. They do not think that way. They believe their twisted religion and evil application of it are true freedom - for them and for all who worship their angry and hard-to-appease god. They see us as living in decadent bondage.

For the West to prevail in this war, it is going to take more than the 5,000 new air marshals the president proposed this week, a Department of Homeland Security, the liberation-occupation of Iraq and a still-unsuccessful hunt for Osama bin Laden.

There is a greater enemy than terrorism facing the United States and the West. That enemy is lack of resolve, which has little to do with money and weapons and everything to do with motivation and focus.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday (Sept. 2) that the Bush administration is having trouble enlisting allied governments in its efforts to rebuild Iraq. The reason is that too many governments fear what might happen to them if they give aid and comfort to what the radical Islamists see as the Great Satan. These governments have stupidly and dangerously let too many of the extremists into their countries and, in doing so, have clutched fiery coals to their chests.

Tom Clancy addresses this grave mistake (my pun is intended) in his new novel, "The Teeth of the Tiger." One of Clancy's main characters, "Mohammed," is a terrorist leader from Central Casting. In a commentary on the fuzziness of Western thinking, "Mohammed" says about himself: "How strange that the only lands where he could feel something close to safe were the Christian countries of Europe, which Muslims had struggled and failed to conquer on more than one occasion. Those nations had a nearly suicidal openness to strangers, and one could disappear in their vastness with only modest skills - hardly any, in fact, if you had money. These people were so self-destructively open, so afraid to offend those who would just as soon see them and their children dead and their entire cultures destroyed. It was a pleasing vision, Mohammed thought, but he didn't live within dreams. Instead, he worked for them."

What the United States sees as its greatest strengths - tolerance and openness - our enemies see as our greatest weaknesses.