But aren't we also living in times of record strife? Actually, no. Just the opposite. The Human Security Centre of the University of British Columbia has been keeping track of armed conflicts since World War II. It reports that the number of genocides and violent conflicts dropped rapidly after the end of the Cold War, and that in 2005 the number of armed conflicts was down 40 percent from 1992.

Wars have also become less deadly: The average number of people killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000; in 2002, it was just 600. The conflict in Iraq has not significantly changed that picture. American casualties are orders of magnitude lower than in the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, and precision weapons have enabled us to vastly reduce the civilian death toll.

After our victory in the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that we had reached "the end of history," by which he meant the end of any serious argument over what constitutes the best kind of society. That is disputed by the Islamist fascists, who have made it clear that they will do whatever they can to inflict harm on our civilization.

As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in his recent letter to President Bush: "Liberalism and Western-style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today, those two concepts have failed."

That's obviously nonsense, of course. Free markets and democracy are chalking up one ringing achievement after another -- as we can see from the surge in world economic growth and the reduction of armed conflict -- while the Islamists can achieve their goals only through oppression and slaughter.

Yes, they can inflict severe damage on us by asymmetric warfare, as they did on Sept. 11, and we must continue to take determined action to prevent them from doing so again. Yes, a nuclear Iran is a severe threat. But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, in most important respects, our civilization is performing splendidly.