It is three years now since I woke in my little flat, showered, made coffee, looked lazily at a paper with yesterday's news, tried to return a phone call to New York, and was told by a recorded voice: "All lines to Manhattan are out of service at this time." This was my tip to turn on the radio, then the Internet, then anything else I could find to turn on. Then I found myself writing the first of some 400 articles on the "terror war". It has become almost a beat.

"The purpose of terrorism is to terrify," I began, after quoting Rudyard Kipling, "so that the first response to it must be the Gospel response: 'Be not afraid.' No matter how horrible, no matter how many casualties, no matter how evil the enemy, who exults in his lair, we must not give him the satisfaction of our fear. ... The immediate task is to sift through the rubble."

To me, the attack was not entirely surprising; I'd been waiting for it since the Jihadis' first attempt to knock down the World Trade Centre in 1993. But to most others, it was something that made no sense at all. That, in a line, is why I've felt an obligation to write, continuously, on this subject. Not because I know a great deal, but because I am aware that others know even less. I have tried to explain, in something like half a million words, the nature of an assault on the West, that was gathering while we slept, and is still imperfectly apprehended.

The Western world, in its post-Christian decadence, still does not comprehend the fire that burns in the souls of our adversaries. In the savage but not entirely unfair estimate of an Iranian correspondent, whose own life is in constant peril: "You were scared. But now you have eaten, and you have copulated, and you want to go back to sleep."

Not entirely fair, for while Canada sleeps, the U.S. continues its vigil. In Iraq, it is fighting, sometimes hand to hand in towns like Fallujah and Samarra, with gunmen of the same irregular army that struck it that beautifully clear morning in 2001.

Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born deputy of Osama bin Laden -- an intellectual who is among the theorists of "Islamism", as well as one of its generals -- appeared on a new tape Thursday. It was an acknowledgement of the third anniversary from the other side. Zawahiri declared:

"The American defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan has become just a question of time, God willing. In the two countries, the Americans are between two fires: if they remain there they will bleed to death, and if they withdraw they will have lost everything."

With much of the world eager to cheer any U.S. setback, and President Bush's domestic opponents sounding the Vietnam-note of defeatism, the terrorist's analysis should not be casually dismissed.

The tape, which was aired to the Muslim world by the Al Jazeera network -- which serves as the Jihad's public notice board -- is almost certainly authentic. Simultaneously in Iraq, a group that calls itself "Zawahiri's followers" (Ansar al-Zawahiri), posted a declation that, unless Silvio Berlusconi's government capitulated to its demands within 24 hours, Italy would "never know the fate" of two young Italian women they have seized.

In three years, the U.S. has liberated 50 million Muslims from abject and murderous tyrannies -- has overthrown the Taliban and Saddam Hussein -- and created openings that would not otherwise exist for people in Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. Mention this to my media colleagues, and I can expect hoots of derision and eyeball-rolling. But if I mention it instead to the people I have communicated with daily on the ground in Afghanistan, or Iraq, I find that it is still considered a miracle, like the fall of the Berlin Wall.

What the U.S. does not know, though it try, is how to create an alternative, sane political order in any of these countries, to defeat the Jihad. For that is, finally, up to the people among whom the Jihadis have nestled. The alternative being "black glass" on an unimaginable scale.

The U.S. can, and probably will in a second Bush term, escalate the battle, join it on new fronts, and I hope, pull fewer punches. But on the third anniversary of 9/11, the full seriousness of the Islamist menace -- of the lethal ideology that is still spreading mind to mind through the Muslim world -- is not yet appreciated.

Over the coming decades, either "Islamism", or the West, will be destroyed.