Arnold Ahlert: “[I]t took the toppling of the World Trade Center, damage to the Pentagon, a would-be attack on that very same White House targeted by ISIS – along with the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans – to snap the nation to attention. Yet even as the bodies remained buried under tons of smoldering rubble, the hand-wringers who reflexively look to blame America first began their tireless and ultimately successful efforts to take a paradigm historical shift and turn it into a national mea culpa. ‘Why do they hate us?’ gained an unseemly traction, ultimately leading to the ‘Bush lied people died’ campaign that itself was a lie. One based on 2004 Democratic presidential aspirations, as opposed to the realpolitik of Islamic savagery. … Unfortunately, that cynicism has metastasized. … [W]e have the emergence of a transnational caliphate that far too many Americans see as something that can be contained within the Middle East.”