9-11: Whatever else you might think of the 9-11 Commission's exhaustive study of the terrorist attacks on America, it does something few people in politics these days dare to do: It identifies the enemy. How refreshing.

For nearly three years we've heard that the enemy is a bewildering array of terror groups, ranging from al-Qaida to Ansar-al-Islam to any number of strange offshoots. For many, it's all so confusing.

Who are these groups? What do they advocate? What do they want? How do we know which to fight, and which to leave alone?

The 9-11 report admirably clarifies this. In the global war on terror, we're not fighting nations. Or even something as nebulous as "terrorism."

Nor is our enemy "poverty" or "despair," as some suggest.

No, we're fighting a specific group of people who, regardless of nationality or group affiliation, adhere to a common set of beliefs.

As the 9-11 report says: "(The) enemy is not just 'terrorism,' some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism — especially the al-Qaida network, its affiliates, and its ideology."

Why is this so important?

As the old saying goes: Know thy enemy. If you don't, you can't fight effectively. And, make no mistake, this is the fight of our lives. Because our enemy — radical Islam — wants to either convert us or kill us. There's no middle ground, no point of compromise. Those are the enemy's terms.

Unfortunately, for too long, we've failed to recognize this. We pretended that if we just put more pressure on Israel, or said nice things about Islamic culture, terrorism would disappear.

It won't. Nor will we be made safer by ignoring the reality of the threat here in the U.S.

Airline screeners, for instance, aren't allowed to pull more than two men of apparent Mideast descent from a line for security checks. Why? To do so might be discriminatory — if not impolite.

So if three terrorists, say, attempt to board a plane, chances are good only two will get checked. Not very smart, but politically correct. And dangerous for all Americans.

While such a policy might make the American Civil Liberties Union happy, it won't make you safer.

Let's be clear: All the hijackers that flew the planes into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Pennsylvania countryside, killing thousands, were radical Muslims. So were the people who sent them on their errand of death.

And more terrorists are being created every day, in schools of hate located in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere across the Mideast. This virulent form of Islam despises us with an intensity that most people don't understand.

It is fueled by a mixture of envy and shame in the Islamic world, as Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis has argued. They envy our material wealth, and are ashamed at not being able to keep up.

Yet, there are some 1.7 billion Muslims on the planet. Most are hard-working, pious and without animus toward the U.S. Only a tiny sliver of their number is terrorist. But even a tiny sliver of 1.7 billion is a lot. And they are the enemy.

With this in mind, the 9-11 report bolsters President Bush's war on terror and his efforts to spread democracy in the Middle East. "Our strategy," it says, "must match our means to two ends: dismantling the al-Qaida network and prevailing in the longer term over the ideology that gives rise to Islamist terrorism." Exactly.

We'll have more to say about the 9-11 report in the coming days — some of it, no doubt, critical in nature. But on this topic the bipartisan 9-11 commission got it just right.

We must know our enemy, and confront it. If we fail to do so, we'll have no one but ourselves to blame for the damage done.

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