As for Osama winning, Freedom House reports that in 2005, 8 countries plus the Palestinian Authority moved up in the freedom index, either from “not free” to “partly free”, or from “partly free” to “free”, while 4 moved down. Six of those 9 countries (counting the PA as a country) moving up were Muslim. None of the 4 moving down were Muslim. Seems like whether Osama has “won” in the US or not, he’s losing on the world stage pretty badly.

Now, I hesitate to link to this piece because it calls Bush a “king� and so forth, but read it and ponder what it means to live in America post 9/11.

The author of that piece doesn’t know the half of it. Then again, neither, it seems, do most of the MSM’s pundits and America’s politicians. Like them, he seems to be fixated solely on counter-terrorism efforts, which are just the tip of the Long War iceberg.

This war is basically a war of ideas, specifically between competing societal models. This begs two questions: (1) Can the American model of secular liberal democracy prevail over the Islamist model of institutionalized shari’a in the hearts and minds of the world’s Muslims (including those living in the U.S.), and (2) How far ought our government go to promote our model and/or demonize the other one? (To the point of silencing ostensibly non-violent but pro-shari’a Islamists, for example?) Neither question has an obvious answer, nor does either one relate directly to terrorism, but freedom-loving people like us ignore them at our own peril.