Don't understand it well, do you, all pumped up with youth and adrenline, still with that cloak of the immortal that life lends us all on your shoulders, and looking at the television trying to imagine the dust of skyscrapers falling at your feet?

We head on a perilous path. If we travel it too soon, we travel to death, and we will take all that we love and all that we cherish and all that we value with it.

Are the Europeans frightened? I think so. They are frightened of Islamic extremism -- for they've seen more of it than we have, and have in fact seen more terror than we have in all this past century. But I think they fear us more: on our white horse, clear-eyed and certain, driving the Apocalypse before us. They fear us because we are their child and their friend, and they don't know quite how to talk to us in our pride and our power. They walk among the ghosts of past empires; they hear our steps there. They don't know how to explain they have heard the echoes of those steps before.

And we, who have never heard the echoes, don't know what they mean.

I'm beyond fear -- why should I care? My voice has ceased to matter.

If we continue our headlong travels, it won't matter who is saved. The world won't be worth living in, except in the sense it always has been, for its exquisite and heartless natural beauty. But our civilization -- our context for understanding our beautiful home -- our freedom and our law, will collapse and the dust of their collapse will fill our lungs and cloud our eyes. Win or lose, it will be all the same: our way of life will be shattered.

It's too soon for war. We have only the power to destroy. The power to rebuild is not ours, but belongs to the captive peoples themselves. They need the tools, but will not be able to accept them from bloody hands, should, indeed, they survive at all.

The only hope I have left is that this is the biggest hand of poker ever played and that the object is occupation, a kind of destabilization by attrition, a game that makes it possible not to shoot by making one's opponent very sure that shooting is imminent.