My initial reaction, like that of countless millions the world over, was disbelief; how could the subhuman bastards have done such a rotten thing? Then there was the gut-grinding combination of fury and fear that had ripped into me sixty years earlier.

I remembered Pearl Harbor. Not as recounted in the few sterile pages in our grandchildren's history books, and not as portrayed in the convoluted dramatization now playing in movie theaters, but the stunning realization that we had been ambushed, that some 2,400-plus of our military folks had been killed, and that nobody knew what greater horror might be next to befall us. Cutting past the chase, we targeted the enemy, mobilized our strength and, within less than four years, laid a memorable ass-kicking on them and their sinister allies. Now this. Not 2,400 military people and their weaponry, but over twice as many innocent civilians and some of the architectural icons of the Free World. What next? As this is written, the answer is known to only two small groups of people-one wearing white hats and the other black.

It's 1941 all over again, with certain exceptions. This time, we couldn't precisely finger the perpetrators beyond that infuriating 'reasonable doubt' that is a Made- In-America haven for criminals and the shield wielded on their behalf by their lawyers and a few hemorrhaging hearts. But our leaders know (as surely as we know who made them little green apples) that a bearded Beelzebub named Osama Bin Laden had his bloody hand in it, and they know who shields him. Those same bloody hands are connected with the 1993 bombing of the now- demolished World Trade Center, the 1996 slaughter of US soldiers in Saudi Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and last year's attack on USS Cole in Yemen.

Why is this piece of crap still alive, at large, and presumably at work on his next unspeakable crime? And why are so many Americans entombed in smoldering rubble? In part because he's a clever devil, in part because he has the comfy cocoon of Afghanistan, and in part because he obviously has well-heeled heels backing him up. (Can you say "Sodamned Insane," boys and girls?) But there's also the fact that we didn't hunt him down and kill him years ago, instead of wringing our hands, wrangling in the UN, and screwing around with international extradition proceedings with about as much chance of success as a condom salesman in the Vatican.

We're a funny bunch about certain things that are not laughing matters. One of them is that our fierce defense of Constitutional freedoms is carried to such a ridiculous extreme that it may in the end take away our freedom from fear. Our leadership, sadly a 'followship' of pressure groups and narrow special interests, shrinks with feigned horror from the notion of assassination, clandestine espionage, and even effective police work. This has the same effect on crime and criminals as would the fighting of fire with fireworks.

When sufficiently provoked, as after Pearl Harbor, we suspend the niceties and do what needs to be done - up to a point. Even the spectacular victory in World War II was blunted by the gains made at the end by Communism, albeit when Russia and China were literally on life support. The great hope for world peace called the United Nations became too much of a cocktail party for what Truman called the "striped pants boys," in which our efforts to build (and finance) a better world got tangled in a "nyet" of partisanship.

We seem to suffer from the "damnear" syndrome which, according to the late Victor Borge, caused his uncle to stop experimenting after his invention of a soft drink called 6-Up. At the conclusion of WWII, we held back General Patton so that our Russian 'friends' could occupy enough of Europe to set the stage for Cold War I. At the Bay of Pigs, we withheld the air support that might have led to an early retirement for Fidel Castro.

More recently, over the reported objections of Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, we stopped short of making Saddam Hussein a footnote in the history of bullyism. We seem, it would seem, to have a pattern of "fightus interruptus," which prompts us to snatch partial defeat from the jaws of imminent victory. Already, one hears murmurings about gradualism, not rushing to judgment and the so-called "rule of law." This became war on September 11, 2001 - a war in which the friends of our enemies must be sought out and brought down...totally.

It is not the year of the sheep!