This is an easy call to make.

When you’re terrorized, the terrorists have won. And Americans remain terrorized.

When a democracy is spying on its own people, when it claims the right to do this with impunity, when it’s attacking the right of college students to research history, when it claims the power of the executive is absolute, when it is engaging in torture, you can bet that democracy is terrorized.

When the supporters of a government call the other side “traitor” and mean it they’re scared. That’s the goal of terrorism, to scare you, to force you to become the evil they see in you, to make you unhinged.

Americans today are unhinged.

This has been a natural over-reaction in America since its foundation. We acted like Communists in the name of stopping Communism, engaged in ethnic cleansing in the name of stopping Fascism, we forced people into the Army at the point of a gun to fight slavery. We even, in the earliest years of the Republic, copied the worst excesses of the British system because we hated them so much.

It’s called projection. We copy our enemies thinking they are better, that they might have a point, that they might be right. We punish ourselves, we engage in proxy wars, we burn down the villages in order to save them.

When it’s over we always apologize, and the world always seems to forgive us. But the world never really trusts America. The world does not believe in American Exceptionalism, except as it refers to our exceptional military, with its exceptional soldiers, who will do the impossible or die trying. At this point, only Americans believe American rhetoric anymore, and as the terrorism continues those numbers keep dwinding.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s true for politicians. But it’s also true for nations. Corruption isn’t just driven by greed. It’s also a product of fear, and when fear becomes paranoia the corruption does indeed become absolute.

Nations suffer under corruption, regardless of its cause. They lose power. Their economies lose steam. Their people lose faith. Their armies become occupiers, and are treated as such.

In 1946 James Cagney starred in a movie called 13_rue_madeleine, as an OSS agent behind enemy lines in France. What he’s engaged in, primarily, is terrorism – blowing up bridges, harassing the enemy. He wants them to send people behind the lines and worry about him so there will be fewer troops at the front lines.

He is, in other words, a terrorist. And America has always engaged in terrorism as a technique of war. Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo in 1942 had no military value. It was terrorism, an attack on civilians. And it was glorious.

You can’t really beat terrorism once it’s in your heart. You can only beat it within your heart.

The best way to fight is the way the British did, both in World War II and, later, during the Irish troubles. They refused to give in. They went about their daily business. They engaged the enemy, but never made themselves the enemy.

It would have been easy, throughout the 1980s, for the British people to see all Irishmen as evil, to spy on them, to lock them up, to assume the worst and (thus) get the worst. They didn’t. And while it took a generation (because hate in the heart is so hard to stamp out) they finally exhausted their foes. The IRA has placed its weapons beyond use, and mostly the British now fear friendly fire, the violence of Protestants who see any compromise as “giving in to terrorism.”

There are great lessons there. But we can’t begin to learn them if any discussion of ways and means is condemned as treason, as giving in to the enemy. We can’t learn these lessons if we’re giving in to madness, if our leaders are acting out of fear, no matter its motive.

Until we stop letting ourselves be terrorized, either by the enemy or our own defenders, the terrorists win. Osama bin Laden’s victory is complete until we can beat the madness within us.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.