The alarm sounded decades ago – not on 9/11, as so many uninformed Americans hold. We just slept through it, as well as through subsequent assaults – Beirut to Pan Am 103 to World Trade Center I to the USS Cole – that have become increasingly violent and more frequent through the years.

This is already America’s longest war, and certainly the Judeo-Christian world’s most crucial conflict since World War II – when Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini also were determined to erase every value, every concept, every belief we hold dear. And there’s no doubt in my military mind that America and our allies will still be fighting this ruthless, relentless, radical terrorist enemy on the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, the 20th-century conflict that was supposed to end all wars.

Our fumbling government’s response since Beirut – during both Republican and Democratic administrations – has been to cut and run, or to flat ignore this growing threat, apparently hoping it would go away. Or occasionally our leaders would retaliate against a terrorist attack with a few missiles or an air-strike accompanied by the standard barrage of toothless threats.

Meanwhile, the international terrorist movement has only been getting stronger, acquiring catastrophic weapons and developing bolder tactics while its dedicated operators have become more cunning and more organized, expanding and setting up in virtually every nation in the world.

True, Bush & Company responded smartly to 9/11 by jump-starting the Department of Homeland Security, thundering into Afghanistan, blowing the Taliban out of business and sending al Qaeda scurrying to the hills. But then came the invasion of Iraq – our country’s biggest military miscalculation to date – where we virtually ignored the main military objective of destroying al-Qaeda, as well as the important socio-economic opportunity to rebuild Afghanistan into the same sort of shining example for the Muslim world that West Germany once was for the Soviet Bloc states.

Fortunately, it’s still not too late to develop a comprehensive global strategy to eliminate our real enemy. This new direction might not be great for the warmongers, neoconservatives and war profiteers, but it would go a long way toward giving all of our grandkids a future the way our World War II victory gave one to my generation and my kids.

And we’d better get cracking immediately – before the next 9/11 blisters in and takes an even bloodier toll. 

–Eilhys England contributed to this column.