September 11: Beyond Mourning
For all its horror, 9/11 was not a declaration of war by radical Islam.
Rather, it was a dramatic escalation of a war that had begun decades earlier -- in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, in the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, in the first World Trade Center bombing and in the attack on USS Cole.
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For sure, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair gets it. The West, he says, is under attack by an ideology -- and "its roots are deep, its tentacles are long and its narrative about Islam stretches far further than we think."
And, he warns, "a lot of people don't understand that this is a generational-long struggle. And I think one of the . . . debates we've got to have in the West is -- are we prepared for that?"
That truly is the question.