"One's past in America fades before the present, as ideology, degrees, parentage, and breeding mean little in the here and now - the present pulse of the market of ideas and consumption being the sole arbiter of success. No wonder most of the world fears, envies - and is dumbfounded by - us." - Victor Davis Hanson

America: Hard to Beat

Victor Davis Hanson's worthwhile essay in National Review Online marvels at how America's weaponry and special forces "reflect the fruits of secular research, the bounty of capitalism, the discipline of civic militarism, and the spirit of egalitarianism sanctified by America's real concern, both spiritual and legal, for its soldiers in the field." But even that is not sufficient to explain how America could with no advance preparation topple a hostile regime halfway around the world in just nine weeks - in a place no less, that critics said couldn't be conquered.

Hanson says America's unrivaled power is partly due to our Western heritage that reaches back through the Renaissance and European Enlightenment to the Greeks and the Romans. "Consensual government, individual freedom, secular rationalism, free markets, egalitarianism, and self-criticism and self-audit, when applied to the battlefield, result in better-disciplined, better-equipped, better-supplied, and better-spirited armies," says Hanson. No doubt, the fighters of al Qaeda and the Taliban understood this rather well as they cowered in their caves at Tora Bora.

Europe has the same heritage, but America's power has evolved beyond, a "dividend" of our nation's "radical efforts to destroy the barriers of class, race, pedigree, accent, and any other obstacle to the completely free interplay of economic, political, cultural, and military forces," Hanson says.

America was "supercharged" by September 11, not short-circuited, he says, asking "What were bin Laden, the mobs in Pakistan and the West Bank, the nuts in al Qaeda, and their opportunistic supporters in the Middle East drinking? We shall never know, but their attack on a country such as this was pure lunacy.

"Thank God we do not have to fight anyone like ourselves," he concludes.

Of course, there is no one else like us. Which, of course, is why we are under attack. And why we will win.