James Woolsey, a former Director of the CIA, was once asked whether threats against the USA portrayed on "24," the very popular TV show, were realistic or not. His reply:

"Unfortunately, they're quite realistic. The U.S. really is at risk from smuggled nuclear weapons and dirty bombs, and we really are at war with Islamic totalitarianism. Not all of the crazy ideologies out there spring from Islamic totalitarianism, of course, but there's little doubt that it poses the gravest threat. North Korea might prove nutty enough to launch attacks against the U.S.--it once flew missiles over Japan, but at this point it's mostly a threat to regional stability. Russia, for all the thuggishness of the Putin regime, is no longer in the business of sponsoring terrorism, as it was with the Red Army Faction and other groups in the '70s and the '80s. China could evolve from a trading partner into a military adversary, especially if it were to invade Taiwan, but that's not a foregone conclusion. When it comes to threats against our own safety and the stability of the West, Islamic terrorism is front and center."

It used to be a charge thrown at the military hierarchy in the Pentagon that they were always planning to fight the last war. It is clear that now the anti-war people are still protesting their last war. They prefer to think that China or Russia, in Cold War mode, are the major threat to our safety now, but are perfectly happy to ignore the threat of Islamic jihad. I suspect this is because the Bush administration has been steadfastly fighting Islamic jihad and the anti-Bush fanatics reflexively oppose whatever Bush does.

It may go deeper than that, however. There has always been an element which opposes US policy no matter what that policy is. One suspects that, were Bush to suddenly decide that opposing Russia or China and preparing for a major war with either was our primary focus, the anti-war people would turn on a dime and suddenly disparage the threat from Russia or China. A considerable percentage of politicians and the people genuinely think America is the root of all evil and oppose whatever actions America takes.

Michael Chertoff, in the middle of a speech to the Heritage Foundation, also reflected on "24" and the "real world." He said "And yet in the real war on terror, whether it's the war we fight here at home or the war we fight overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, as important as the courage and the intelligence and the skills is the steadfastness and perseverance. The fact of the matter is , American history shows that we cannot be defeated in a fight unless we lose our nerve or we lose our will."

The mainstream media and the Democratic Party have been, from approximately 6 minutes after 9/11, been engaged in the task of sapping the will of the American people to prosecute a war which will take decades to complete. That takes the the reflexive opposition to US policy to another level, one which creeps closer to an impulse to suicide than shown in prior conflicts.