On GlennReynolds.com:
"September 11, 2001 wasn't the beginning of this war. In fact, fundamentalist Islamists had been making war on the United States for years, with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 (which was intended to topple both towers, but failed), all the way back, in some sense, to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran back when Jimmy Carter was president. For all those years, they were at war with us, but we largely ignored it. But September 11, 2001 was when we woke up, and realized what was going on. When people talk about the 1,000th casualty in Iraq, it's worth remembering that we had 3,000 casualties in a single day, in America, and that terrorists want to do much, much worse."