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What follows here is unavoidably political, and there isn't even a token reference to Macs or computers, so if that’s not your cup of tea, you may want to click along to another story. However, I wouldn't feel comfortable about letting this day pass without writing a few words about the sombre anniversary we’re observing.

Two years ago, I wrote here:

As we reflect on 9/11 + Two, one thing is unhappily clear; the cabal of freedom-haters and self-loathers who reflexively blame the West for all the world’s ills -- real and imagined, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Indeed, it is evident that these nattering nabobs of negativism long for nothing more fondly then a return to the world of 9/10, when an international clique of leftist diplomats largely ran the show through the auspices of the UN, advancing their ideological agendas through agency programs and appeasing dictators and thugs out of political correctness while America picked up most of the tab.

That’s over, and good riddance. The sleeping giant has awakened, and as I contended two years ago, nothing will ever be the same in our lifetimes. “A New World Order” isn’t just a throwaway bit of rhetoric.

Of course the latest boilerplate from the negativism crowd is that the Iraq mission has been a dreadful failure. Legions of Bush-haters, who of course reviled George W. Bush long before 9/11, almost gleefully point to the ongoing murder of American and British soldiers, other acts of terrorism in Iraq, and the lagging restoration of basic infrastructure there (the various phenomena are not unrelated) as evidence that the allied adventure in Mesopotamia has been a dreadful flop.

The continued attrition of young Yanks and Brits, as well as for that matter Iraqis, is of course horrible and tragic, but the bigger picture focus reveals that the now two-year-old war on terror has been in general a resounding success, despite the negativists’ prognostications of doom. In the 24 months since 9/11 America and its allies have:

• Prevented further terrorist attacks on American soil and in other Western nations.

• Won two wars very quickly while suffering extremely light casualties by historic standards.

• Deposed two of the vilest criminal regimes on the planet.

• Enhanced the freedom and dignity of 50 million citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq, with better days stil to come.

• Severely damaged al Quaeda, destroying its physical infrastructure, capturing or killing three-quarters of its key leaders, and keeping Osama bin Laden on the run.

As for the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s early days yet. Progress is being made, and it will consolidate and accelerate as the Americans and Brits gradually round up the criminals Saddam let out of prison, and put a lid on terrorism in the country. And, as William Safire observed this week, as chaotic as things are in Iraq, 11,000 elderly Iraqis didn’t die from neglect in this summer’s heat, which was hotter in Baghdad than it was in Paris.

But the nattering nabobs are having none of this. They want America to fail. They wanted U.S. forces to be punished by the mythologized “bitter Afghan winter” of 2001-02. They wanted both Afghanistan and Iraq to become a “quagmires” -- Vietnam redux. They desire nothing more fervently than to see America humbled and George Bush humiliated. And of course to hell with ordinary Afghans and Iraqis if they’re casualties of the process, not to mention the 3,000 who died in the 9/11 attacks, and who knows how many thousands more if America and its allies were to falter in the war on terror.

Last Sunday, Canada’s CTV network aired a documentary by Alexandre Trudeau, son of the late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who spent the war last spring “Embedded in Baghdad” with an Iraqi family. His hostess had spent six of her teenage years living in the US and speaks idiomatically perfect American English.

Trudeau is anything but an enthusiastic supporter of Operation Iraqi Freedom, but his film did strengthen my longstanding conviction that like most people everywhere, what ordinary Iraqis want is just normality -- to be able to live their lives peacefully and quietly. It’s hard to say whether the middle-class family Trudeau stayed with as a house guest represented typical Iraqi aims and aspirations, but they and their friends seemed like nice, civilized, people and Trudeau says there are many wonderful people in Baghdad. I don’t doubt it, and they deserve better than Saddam Hussein and his criminally insane sons, or the Shiite mullahs, or the gangs of thugs looting and bombing and sniping at GIs and blowing up pipelines.

“We just want to be free,” Trudeau’s hostess affirmed wistfully. That’s what this war is about, not just for Iraqis and Afghans, but for all of us. It is why I supported the war and still do. There are of course still plenty of thuggocracies in the world, but there are now two fewer in Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to George Bush and Tony Blair, and they deserve credit and congratulations for staying the course.

The war on terror, as Bush has warned from the outset, will not be won in a day, or a few months, or even a few years. It has actually gone a lot better so far than we might reasonably have expected. It’s a war that has to be fought, and anyone who doubts this should ponder what happened that achingly clear and sunny Tuesday morning in September two years ago.

CM

Charles W. Moore