"In the end, the explanation for this long, long war -- which grows longer -- doesn't lie in anything we've done but in who we are: a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Has there ever been a doctrine more subversive to the despotisms of the world? What we in the West do, right or wrong or neither, is but an excuse for the war being waged against our civilization by a rapacious enemy. It is what we are that threatens them: a beacon. Ideas have consequences; they can spread of their own accord. That is why we are such a threat to their closed societies. It is what we represent: freedom. And freedom attracts by its very existence. Eternal vigilance, it turns out, isn't just the price of liberty but of our existence." --Paul Greenerg, editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.