Shelf Life.(The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win; An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism; Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election; How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas)(Brief Article)

--Michael A. Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and cocontributor to National Review Online, is one of America's most valuable experts on terrorism. In The War Against the Terror Masters: Why It Happened. Where We Are Now. How We'll Win (St. Martin's, 262 pp., $24.95), he provides an impressive analysis not just of the particulars of our current struggle but of the overarching truths about American identity that will be the source of our eventual victory. Just like the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets, writes Ledeen, the Taliban "grossly underestimated our enormous capacity to rapidly unite to accomplish a national mission. . . . It is because we feel ourselves part of a common enterprise -- the advance of freedom -- [that] we spontaneously organize ourselves to achieve that enterprise."

This is absolutely correct: The distinctive genius of the United States is to combine immense -- indeed, unprecedented -- military power with a remarkable lack of militarism. We don't seek out opportunities for war, in fact we do our best to avoid them; but when we are provoked, we fight to the death in the cause of peace and freedom. Ledeen explains what, specifically, this fight will entail in the coming months and years. He warns us not to "oversimplify the war by describing it as a war with Islam, or a war with Islamic Arabs. . . . While there are many peaceful Muslims, the terror masters follow a tyrannical and bellicose version of Islam" -- one that Ledeen contends will rapidly fall out of favor among Muslims once reverses on the battlefield prove it isn't history's wave of the future.

Ledeen's book is bracing but optimistic. He notes our national "tendency to overrate the terrorists and underrate ourselves" -- and gives us good reason to believe that if we stay focused on the need for regime change in terrorist-sponsoring countries, we'll win this war decisively:

Creative destruction is [America's] middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law. Our enemies have always hated this whirlwind of energy and creativity, which menaces their traditions (whatever they may be) and shames them for their inability to keep pace.

America, thy name is freedom -- and woe to its enemies.

-- Also just published is An Autumn of War: What America Learned from SeSeptember 11 and the War on Terrorism (Anchor, 240 pp., $12), an anthology of Victor Davis Hanson's important writings on the current crisis. Hanson -- who recently won the 2002 Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Journalism -- is a frequent contributor to National Review Online, and readers of his columns have come to cherish his solid, accurate diagnoses of the progress of the war. "These essays," he writes in his introduction, "reflect a deep belief that September 11 has reminded us how Western civilization and its more radical manifestation of liberty and capitalism in the United States are very different from other cultures past and present."