At the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer elucidates the simple reason why so many of the “experts” were so wrong about the reaction of the “Arab street:” Victory Changes Everything.

The Islamic street exploded after Sept. 11, not because of rage — the rage is there always — but because of triumphalism. The war that began with the 1983 bombings in Beirut had finally been taken to the American homeland. America lay bleeding, “filled with horror and fear from north to south and east to west,” bin Laden boasted. This was their day and they were going to seize it.

Turns out it is not their day. Osama was wrong. America is no paper tiger. The street now knows it. The world knows it. Which is why it is time for us to seize the moment.

Our astonishing display of power has demonstrated the deadly seriousness of the Bush Doctrine. We will no longer fecklessly go after low-level terrorist operatives in a New York court, or even more ridiculously in The Hague. We are, instead, at war with their leaders and, even more important, with the regimes that harbor them. It is now a capital offense to harbor terrorists. Literally. Harbor them and your regime dies.