A mere 63 months after the 9/11 attack, the first steel columns for the Freedom Tower have been planted at Ground Zero. The fact that it took over five years to take this baby-step is a metaphor for a lot of things, none of them good. We were going to rebuild fast to show the terrorists that they didn’t defeat us. Somehow I doubt that if the terrorists are still watching, they’re much impressed by our progress.

One of the things critics of the Iraq war effort have delighted in saying is that the battle for Iraq has now officially taken longer than World War II. While that may be a risible comparison usually made in both bad faith and ignorance, there is something to it. It’s been five years since 9/11, and the sense of urgency that we felt in the days after that attack has long since withered.

In the days after the attack, almost everyone realized that we were in a fight for our survival. I remember four days after 9/11 being in a faculty room where I was the only teacher present who voted Republican; everyone knew the stakes and everyone agreed that suddenly the differences between Republicans and Democrats looked very small indeed.

I don’t think anyone munching on the faculty lunch of whatever vegan delights greeted us that day could imagine the fractured body politic that we’d have five years hence. At the time, we seemed such a silly and self-involved society to have spent the summer focusing on shark attacks and Gary Condit.

Well, here we are, five years later, and its whale attacks and stranded mountain climbers. There was an understanding after 9/11 that we were in for a long struggle and that the horrors of 9/11 would probably be soon surpassed. In the course of the struggle, our country has lost its unity and its sense of mission. It’s a matter of some urgency that we figure out how this happened and how we can fix it.

OURS IS NOT THE FIRST AMERICAN GENERATION to face a long war. The Civil War ran for four years, the Revolution more than twice that long. So, it’s worth asking, how did our forebears hold it together, something that’s been impossible for us?

What was present then and lacking now is moral certainty and a consensus around that moral certainty. I know the leftists reading this essay have probably had to hie to their fainting couches after absorbing the previous sentence, but it happens to be true. The true believers who prosecuted the Civil War never doubted that they were correct in trying to hold the Union together and eliminate slavery. They built a consensus around those certainties, and they were able to hold the war effort together through some very dark hours.

The same was true during the Revolution. Although the price paid in blood and treasure in the Revolution was but a fraction of the costs of the Civil War, the Revolution dragged on for almost a decade and looked hopeless on several occasions. And yet the founding generation never doubted that their cause was just and that made perseverance a certainty.

It almost goes without saying that we live in an era where moral certainty is in disrepute. Those who present themselves as certain of anything are accused of being intellectually incurious and possessing unsubtle minds. When it comes to the war, they are damned for making inadequate efforts to understand and coexist with the “other.”

The tragedy is that if ever there was an era that warranted moral certainty, it is our own. The enemy that we face seemingly offers nothing for the Western mind. While the Jared Diamonds of the world instinctively fawn over primitivism, the Jihadists aren’t so much primitive beasts as they are primal ones. The Jihadists don’t exist in harmony with anything, even each other.

It is truly a remarkable phenomenon that members of the West’s intelligentsia have developed a desire to coexist with the Jihadists. If there’s a philosophy that’s singularly and unrepentantly hostile to the enlightened Western leftist, it’s Jihadism. Whether it concerns gays (bury them alive or throw them off buildings? The debate in Jihadist circles rages on), women or minorities, the forces of Jihadism oppose everything that an enlightened Westerner purports to hold dear. And the Jihadists are clear that there can be no co-existence with those who don’t share their faith and philosophy.

And yet many Americans and many other Westerners think we’re the bad guys. How did we get so morally muddled?

Perhaps as a society we’re victims of The Jimmy Carter Delusion. Throughout his three regrettable decades on the international stage, Carter has never grasped that there are some enemies that you can’t peacefully co-exist with. Even though you might want to comfort yourself with the notion that their hearts are pure and their motives just, taking comfort in such a notion is the geo-political equivalent of fool’s gold.

When Jimmy Carter went to meet Kim Il Sung in the early years of the Clinton administration, Carter and his wife were charmed by the Kims. Carter couldn’t wrap his mind around the pure evil that Kim represented. Kim was a man who had enslaved generations of North Koreans and who slept peaceably at night in spite of causing the deaths of millions.

In a similar vein, in his outstanding “History of the Jewish People,” British writer Paul Johnson explained that the bulk of Western European Jewry failed to realize that Hitler was a crazed anti-Semite with whom coexistence was an impossibility. Through centuries, Europe’s Jews had dealt with threats and dangers and assorted depredations. But they could always ultimately coexist with their malefactors. There would be the occasional sacrifice of wealth, land and lives, but the Jewish community endured. Hitler was different – he wanted all the Jews dead. A million of Europe’s Jews realized the urgency of the situation and fled to Palestine, America, Shanghai and other safe harbors around the world. Six million didn’t realize the danger soon enough and perished.

There are some very bad people out there with whom good people cannot coexist. That’s a historical certainty, as well as a moral one.

IN MANY WAYS, we’re back in the 1990’s. In that decade, there were a few lonely “Cassandras” like Steve Emerson and Walid Phares who were sounding the alarm on Radical Islam. On a good day, they were greeted with indifference. More commonly, they were accused of racism and ignorance. But events proved them correct. Emerson went overnight from pariah status to being granted a semi-permanent seat on all the 24 hours news-channels. The night in question was of course 9/11.

In the current struggle, President Bush put it this way this morning: “It will take a while for the ideology of liberty to triumph over the ideology of hate.” He’s not wrong, but he’s not exactly right either. Can you imagine if FDR declined to use the term Nazism during World War II? Can you imagine Lincoln assiduously avoiding making mention of the secessionists and slave-holders during the Civil War?

By using only the language of abstraction, the President and his team have unwisely made this war seem like a struggle over an abstraction. But the losses have been anything but abstract. The deaths in Iraq have been real. The deaths of 3,000 of our finest and bravest have been particularly lacerating and particularly concrete. And Iran’s role in these deaths was real even though it remains painfully unacknowledged. Most importantly, future threats of almost incomprehensible horrors are anything but an abstraction.

In some quarters, our internal intellectual battle is considered finished. And guess what? The good guys lost. If John Edwards thought how to deal with Jihadism was a pressing concern for the electorate, he wouldn’t be cynically basing his presidential campaign on the aged Democratic warhorse of class warfare. If the citizenry thought its survival was at stake, Edwards’ tired promise of a new New Deal would strike one and all as a clarion call to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. But the Edwards campaign tells you where the Democrats are right now: “The war is over, let’s go to Tehran and sue for peace.” And it gets worse – they won the last election and it wasn’t exactly a squeaker.

Earlier this week, Donald Rumsfeld left his post at the Pentagon. In the days after 9/11, he characterized 9/11 as a battle in a new kind of war, a battle that we had lost. Whatever his mistakes may have been, Rumsfeld understood that the war wasn’t going anywhere until our many determined enemies were defeated.

People like me, people who understood what Rumsfeld was getting at and never lost the heart of it – we’ve lost the war of ideas. But only for the moment. We’ll reengage because this is one war of ideas we can’t afford to lose. But the real onus is on our leaders. They have to make the case, one that resonates with the American public.

Even though we’re all a little sick of politics, it’s for this reason that the 2008 presidential campaign can’t begin soon enough.

Comments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.