"... this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come." Mat24:14

    As for Indonesia's friends overseas, it bears repeating that this gigantic new democracy of 220 million people dwarfs all other Islamic nations, especially the mostly repressive tiny kingdoms of the Arabian peninsula. Mr. Yudhoyono is the country's first president to be directly elected, and he deserves foreign support.
 
    That support will come mainly from the U.S., Australia, Japan and Britain, which also happen to be the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. That's no accident. Indonesia's fight against Islamist terrorism is part of the same war being fought in Baghdad, London, Kandahar, Islamabad, New Delhi, Ankara, Madrid and all the other places where bombs have deliberately targeted civilians for death.
 

    In a 6,000-word letter from Zawahiri, presumably in hiding in Pakistan, to al Qaeda's commander in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Zawahiri makes it quite clear that al Qaeda's ambitions extend well beyond the borders of any one country. The goal is a fundamentalist Islamic regime that begins in Iraq, extends into the neighboring secular nations of the region, assaults Israel and moves on from there.

    The long Zawahiri letter is a rough roadmap of the strategic vision for al Qaeda's intentions in Iraq and the global jihad. If it has a familiar ring, that's because George Bush has been warning the world about it for several years.
 

    An attack is included only if it was "committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, and usually only if loss of life occurred. . . . In several cases, the victims are undercounted because deaths from trauma caused by the Islamists may occur in later days."
 
    Muslim fanatics' war on civilization is pervasive, real and growing. And it must be dealt with harshly. Ignoring or appeasing the threat will not make it go away.
 

    Although Muslim spokesmen may condemn the killing of innocents—neglecting to make explicit who "qualifies" as innocent—few have spoken up to condemn and disown the Islamic doctrine of jihad. The reason may be that jihad, which means "to strive in the path of Allah," is so much a part of Islamic faith and history, it represents a permanent Muslim institution.
 
    The foundations of the institution are found in the Quran. Sura (chapter) 9 is devoted in its entirety to war proclamations. There we read that the Muslim faithful are to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them. . . . Fight against such as those who have been given the scripture as believe not in Allah. . . . Go forth, light-armed and heavyarmed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah. That is best for you, if ye but knew."
 
    From such verses in the Quran and in the "hadith" (i.e., words and deeds of Muhammad, recorded by pious transmitters), Muslim jurists and theologians formulated the Islamic institution of permanent jihad war against non-Muslims to bring the world under Islamic rule (Sharia law).
 
    "Even today, the study of the jihad is part of the curriculum of all the Islamic institutes," wrote Lebanese law professor Antoine Fattal in 1958. “In the universities of Al-Azhar, Najaf and Zaitoune, students are still taught that the holy war (jihad war) is a binding prescriptive decree, pronounced against the Infidels, which will only be revoked with the end of the world."

    Behind the scenes, they're telling Muslims not to cooperate with the FBI under any circumstances. One CD making rounds at mosques in Washington, D.C., warns the faithful: "There is no reason that anyone should ever, ever, ever talk to law enforcement as Muslims in the United States. The FBI is just a tool of whoever is wielding it. And right now it is very bad, it is very bad, it is very bad."

    No fewer than 26 chapters of the Quran deal with holy war and the rewards for martyrs, or shaheeds.
 
    The unpleasant truth is, Muslim terrorists are getting all these terrible ideas -- from violent jihad to self-immolation to even the beheadings we've seen in Pakistan and Iraq -- straight out of the text of their holy book.
 
    The full text of the verse Bush cited (according to the version of the Quran approved by the Council on American-Islamic Relations): "We ordained for the children of Israel that if anyone slew a person -- unless it be for murder or for spreading mischief in the land -- it would be as if he slew the whole people."
 
    In the footnotes, widely revered translator Abdullah Yusuf Ali interprets "mischief" as "treason against Allah." And the very next verse calls for guilty infidels to be beheaded. Sadly, the clause starting with "unless" can be cited by terrorists to fuel their jihads -- and it is, along with countless others far more direct in the Quran.
 

    Last week in Washington, President Bush dealt more frankly than ever with this threat. Speaking to the National Endowment for Democracy, he named "Islamic radicalism" as the ideology of the terrorists we are fighting. He pointed out that it is the enemy not just of the West but of the entire human race. He showed that it had killed more Muslims than those of other faiths. And for the first time he called on "all responsible Islamic leaders to join in denouncing an ideology that exploits Islam for political ends."
 
    As the respected British diplomatic historian, David Carlton, points out in his new book, The West's Road To 9/11 (Palgrave Macmillan), the rise of modern terrorism really began in 1970 when a secular Arab terrorist group seized several airplanes, landed them on Dawson's Field in Jordan, and threatened to murder their passengers unless their governments agreed to demands that included the release of their members from prison. The United States, Britain, West Germany and Switzerland surrender to these demands, they also put enormous pressure on Israel to release terrorist C whom the Israelis knew would immediately set about murdering more of their citizens.
 
    Since 9/11 the world's anti-terrorism cooperation has markedly increased.
 

    There are occasional comments in the Western media that the courageous Mr. Karzai is a "puppet" because of the U.S. presence. But U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad was much closer to the mark when he told me that for "70% to 80% the fear is not of American domination, but of American abandonment." My very unscientific street surveys make his figures seem conservative.
 
    "Not only do I not want international troops to leave, I want them to stay here for many years," said a man I encountered near a thoroughfare...

A 22-year-old called Farhad -- who'd spent almost all his life in exile in Iran, but had moved back -- explained things to me by placing a can of Coke (what else?) on a bench and putting his hands on either side of it. Talking of his erstwhile place of exile, he said: "Iranians see their country and see that on one side Iraq's been liberated, and on the other Afghanistan's been liberated. No one in Iran likes the fundamentalists. They are praying they are next. Bush has brought peace to Afghanistan, and he will do that to Iraq. Will he do that to Iran?"

"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
 
"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

"The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: 'Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just GOD, cannot long retain it.' "

    The greatest social revolution in history is underway all around us: The emancipation of women. Advanced in our own society, elsewhere the battle for women's rights lies at the heart of colossal struggles over the future of great religions and civilizations.
 
    The Global War on Terror is a fight over the social, economic and cultural roles of women. The core issues for the terrorists are the interpretation of God's will and the continued oppression of women. Nothing so threatens Islamic extremists as the freedom Western women enjoy.
 
    The greatest moral advance has been the attainment of basic human rights by women.
 
    We do not think of our troops abroad as fighting for women's rights. But they are.
 

2Thes2..10 ... did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved.
11 And for this reason GOD will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie,
12 that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

2Thes1..8 in flaming fire taking vengeance on those who do not know GOD, and on those who do not obey the gospel of our LORD Jesus Christ.
9 These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the LORD and from the glory of His power.

    "Forget the crap about it ain't being a culture war," says an American sergeant in Zamboanga, trying to explain why he regards the local Muslims as hostile. In "Imperial Grunts," Robert Kaplan surveys the U.S. military presence around the world. He finds brighter spots than this southern Philippine island but never a more succinct statement of the problem: In "Injun country," as the sergeant notes, you can't afford to be nonjudgmental.
 
    One of the more surprising of Mr. Kaplan's findings is that evangelical Christianity helped to transform the military in the 1980s, rescuing the Vietnam-era Army from drugs, alcohol and alienation.
 
    And in quiet moments the troops explain themselves in terms that call to mind an earlier America: God, country, honor, duty. "The clichés were spoken with utter seriousness," Mr. Kaplan assures us. "That's ultimately why these guys liked George W. Bush so much.... He spoke the way they did, with a lack of nuance, which they found estimable because their own tasks did not require it."
 
    "We're the damn Spartans," explains Maj. Kevin Holiday of Tampa, "physical warriors with college degrees." A civil engineer with three kids, he is a National Guardsman with an attitude. "God has put me here," he tells Mr. Kaplan. "I'm a Christian ... You see this all around you" -- the dust, deprivation and anxiety of Injun Country -- "well, it's the high point of my life and of everyone else here." It's not just officers, and not only the Green Berets. Cpl. Michael Pinckney, a Marine, tells Mr. Kaplan: "I don't want to be anywhere else but Iraq....This is what manhood is all about. I don't mean macho [stuff] either. I mean moral character."
 

    This past summer, I observed a U.S. Army Special Forces exercise in Africa that represented the quintessence of imperialism as it has been practiced throughout history and yet which no modern liberal could oppose.
 
    This is happening not just in Africa but throughout the world. U.S. Marines have engaged a two-year modernization of the Georgian armed forces to secure democratization following the Rose Revolution. In the southern Philippines, the Abu Sayyaf Islamic group has been marginalized by an Army Special Forces program that emphasized humanitarian relief in villages where the group had been most active, coupled with training of the Filipino army. In Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe's military and police units are being trained by Special Forces in the fight against narco-terrorism. In Nepal, from where I've just returned, a U. S. Air Force medical team was training emergency responders in the event of an earthquake.
 
    Such small-scale, bare-bones missions are far more indicative of how the U.S. military actually operates across the world than is the fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan. Without the experience of such missions, many of which are humanitarian, troops in New Orleans would not be able to perform as expertly as they have. National Guardsmen with whom I embedded in Afghanistan are now in the Big Easy.
 
    Moreover, given that humanitarian disasters increasingly occur in anarchic zones, the militarization of relief aid is not a trend to disparage. It is a fact to admit. It goes beyond the National Guard in New Orleans or U.S. sailors and marines in tsunami-wracked Indonesia: The situation is similar in many African countries, where civilian relief agencies often operate only in the vicinity of the capital cities for their own safety, leaving the rest of the countryside for militaries to handle.
 

    Classic imperialism is not merely an option, but a tried-and-true necessity for a better, more stable world. The danger is not that classic imperialism will undermine our financial solvency or our democratic values, but that it itself will be undermined by the drain in resources caused by the necessity of continued high troop levels in Iraq.
 

How odd, though, that when John F. Kennedy called in his 20th Century inaugural address to go anywhere and pay any price to extend the blessings of freedom, he received lavish praise. When Bush does it in this hopeful new century, he is regarded as a dope.
 
Bush's point is ignored at our peril. Only someone living on a different planet would miss the connection between the need to expand freedom and the dangers posed by Middle East terrorists' own reverse crusade against freedom.
 
It can't be said enough: Because we live so close to these events, it sometimes is hard to understand that these are historic times, when the free world is facing decisions of epic proportions. George Bush understands it.