'When I take action," George W. Bush told Hillary Rodham Clinton and three other Senators the other day, "I'm not gonna fire a $2-million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive."

I don't suppose Senator Clinton cared for this implicit rebuke of her husband and his desultory Cruise-waggling over the Sudan, but she kept quiet. Not the rest of the world, though, or at least those portions of it under the purview of the anti-American elite media units. Instead of trying to figure out what they did to get these killers all steamed up, the Bush crowd are indulging in the kind of talk that will tragically only make the much-needed terrorist outreach even harder. As Rana Kabbani wrote, in The Guardian, she "hopes that the painful lesson that Americans have had to learn is not drowned out by cowboy ravings about 'getting the bastards.' " The "painful lesson" she refers to is the murder of thousands of American civilians, as well as hundreds of Canadians, Britons, Japanese, Australians, Koreans, Mexicans, Zimbabweans and, at the time of writing, the nationals of some 35 other countries, including France, where Ms. Kabbani resides. (And, incidentally, how come all these anti-racists and identity-politics obsessives reach instinctively for all this cheap cowboyphobia and rampant Texism?)

As it happens, Bill Clinton, no cowboy or Texan, asked Yasser Arafat to the White House more often than he invited any other world leader. In July last year, in the final stretch of his Presidency, he talked "Chairman" Arafat and Ehud Barak into holing up at Camp David and "going the extra mile" for peace. During these talks, by the way, last week's mass murderers were already well advanced in preparing their "painful lesson" for America: the British left may delude itself into thinking this is some sort of payback for Bush's hubris in rejecting Kyoto, but these fellows were busy taking their jet-flying courses even when Al Gore was ahead in the polls. Meanwhile, back at Camp David, Clinton schmoozed Barak into offering up concessions that no previous Israeli Prime Minister had ever contemplated -- including a Palestinian state with its capital in a shared Jerusalem. Okay, for Ms. Kabbani that might not be enough to justify calling off the "painful lesson," but you'd have thought it would be a basis for negotiation. Yet the great Chairman not only turned Barak down, he never even bothered making a counter-proposal.

If it were about Israel, it would be easy -- to cut them loose, to abandon them to their fate, to singalong to the current big pop hit in Egypt and Syria, called with admirable clarity "I Hate Israel." But it's not about Israel, except insofar as eliminating Israel is the first stage. The "painful lesson" I learned was a simple one: that these guys can kill me and my family, and do it very easily, using a couple of cellphones, credit cards, online booking and commercial airlines -- deploying Western technology to bury Western values. And, given that sometime soon they're likely to try again, I think it's worth doing something about it. Something "decisive," as the President said.

Now I know "Western values" elicits titters from the Guardian-BBC tendency. They've all had a grand old laugh at the sappiness of American media coverage: Danny Lee died on American flight 11, rushing home for the birth of his child; she was born two days after his death, Allison, 8 lb, 12 oz. Ha-ha, these Yanks are so sickeningly sentimental, aren't they? Christine Hanson, two years old, was sitting between her parents en route for Los Angeles. Lauren Grandcolas, two months pregnant, was on United flight 93 and called home, "There's a little problem with the plane, but I'm fine. I'm comfortable ... Please tell my family that I love them."

Ms. Kabbani would want to know why I'm not moved by the deaths of Palestinian mothers and fathers and children. Well, I am, and I realize that in this awful war, the West too will end up killing pregnant women, young sons, beloved grandmothers. But it's not me who accords less value to an Arab life than an American one. The Arab states do that when they deny their subjects the little bundle of rights and responsibilities loosely known as "liberty" that every American takes for granted. The Western media lefties diminish every Arab man, woman and child when they want to re-re-re-re-re-count every last dimpled chad in Palm Beach County while writing off the utter absence of democracy in the Arab world as just an example of quaint, charming, authentic Eastern "culture." In the Middle East, you can choose to live under a theocracy, an autocracy, a plutocracy or a nutocracy, but the only Arabs living in freedom are the two million who live in the United States and the others who live in Canada, Britain, Ms. Kabbani's France and the rest of Europe. If Washington treated Arabs the way Damascus does, you'd never hear the end of it at UN conferences.

As for Ms. Kabbani's cowboy clichés, take a look at some of the faces under those ten-gallon hats. The names of the dead of September 11th tell their own story: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Hispanic, Arab, Asian -- in a word, American. There is a reason why people of every conceivable hue and ethnicity lie beneath the rubble, and it isn't because of what Ms. Kabbani calls America's "unchecked arrogance."

Western liberal democracy offers its citizens longer, better, healthier lives, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to travel, freedom to trade, freedom to come here and become a wealthy, influential, famous cultural figure attacking the very notion of "the West" and "democracy" and their opposing forces, "rogue states" and "terrorism," as "counterfeit" "confections" concocted by a dark "unseen power" to "create content and tacit approval." Thus, Edward Said's latest meditation for The Nation, which with exquisite timing appeared on its Web site round about the precise moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Could Said, a New York resident, get paid for writing that stuff in Lebanon or Syria, never mind Afghanistan? For a counterfeit confection, the West is providing Said with a pretty nice living.

But then that's the genius of the system. As readers will know, I'm no fan of Trudeaupian "multiculturalism," but let us acknowledge at least that it's a unicultural concept: it exists only in the West, and the English-speaking world at that. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "There is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States." It is ever so. The 300 firefighters who died on September 11th died in part for their fellow New Yorker Edward Said, though he is too stupid and graceless to understand.