When Richard Perle and I published An End to Evil at the beginning of the year, we touched off a nasty literary brawl. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times sputtered that our work was "absolutist . . . cocky . . . swaggering . . . smug . . . deliberately provocative." The Economist huffed about our "reckless disregard for complexity." And so on and on it went.

Well, we can't complain. We started it.

Richard and I began work on An End to Evil because it seemed to us that much of our political and policy elite was losing its stomach for the fight against terrorism.

Sen. John Kerry, now the Democratic presidential nominee, even argued in a January, 2004 television debate that the war on terror should revert to being primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement matter: the same strategy that failed so dismally in the 1990s.

Our purpose in writing An End to Evil was to do our part to help summon Americans back to the mood of determination and resolution of September-October 2001.

Not everybody agrees, of course. But for too long, those who disagree with the strong anti-terror policies of the Bush administration have evaded their responsibility to offer adequate and convincing alternatives.

Should we leave Iraq? No answer. What, if anything, should we do about Saudi Arabia? Radio silence. And how about that Iranian bomb? Mumble, mumble. What we get instead is a lot of angry shouting about "neocons."

And yet, through the yelling, we seem to hear the same themes and errors repeated again and again. Richard and I group these into three main categories: errors of the intellect, errors of the will, and errors of the heart.

Errors of the Intellect

One common criticism of An End to Evil is that Richard and I slight the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

This line of criticism is based on a pair of assumptions: (1) that the creation of a Palestinian state would somehow ease our terrorism problem, and (2) that this state could be swiftly achieved if only the United States would put more pressure on Israel to offer greater concessions. Our critics, however, never quite articulate these assumptions. Would it be a good thing to solve the Palestinian problem if it could be solved? Obviously yes. Would such a solution ease the terrorism problem? Well, Osama bin Laden himself has repeatedly made clear that the Palestinian problem constitutes only one of his grievances, and nowhere near the most important.

As for the fancy that the creation of a Palestinian state would somehow discredit extremism in the Islamic world, throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration set the creation of a Palestinian state as one of its supreme foreign-policy priorities and pushed the Israelis to one concession after another. And yet the harder the U.S. worked to gain independence for the Palestinian Authority, the faster Islamic extremism seemed to grow in Egypt and the Gulf.

But if the overestimation of the importance of a Palestinian state is the most pervasive error about terror, it is far from the most blinding. That dishonor can be claimed by Daniel Benjamin, in his Jan. 23 review in the Globe and Mail, who complained of our "absolute certitude" that "the high road to destroying al-Qaida is through the demolition of the rogue regimes that supposedly nourish it."

This, he said, "blinds Frum and Perle to the reality that we face a global insurgency of radical Islamists who have nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, Iran, or Syria. Globalization and technological advances have placed enormous destructive power in the hands of non-state actors who cannot be deterred and whose religious ideology resonates in the minds of dissatisfied people spread across the globe."

This concept of al-Qaida as some virtual-reality entity, operating above and beyond the reach of the governments of the Middle East, was a favourite conceit of the Clinton administration's counterterrorism team. Yet even as the Clinton administration was describing al-Qaida as a "non-state" actor, al-Qaida forces were building a terrorist infrastructure on the territory of one state (Afghanistan), using hundreds of millions of dollars raised with the indulgence of another (Saudi Arabia). No dispute: al-Qaida is not the agent of some Middle Eastern government. But it could never have achieved its murderous effectiveness if the governments of the Middle East had all been hostile to it.

Errors of the Will

A great many reviews have complained that An End to Evil is too blunt, too bold, too unnuanced. It was this that incensed Michiko Kakutani, disappointed the editors of The Economist, and offended my old friend Fareed Zakaria, who reviewed the book for the Sunday New York Times. Now, of course, nuance is a very fine thing. But right now, the great problem afflicting American foreign policy is not lack of nuance, but lack of direction. The leaders of the Democratic party are now denying that the war on terror is a war at all.

And the administration itself is wracked by doubt and conflict over future policy toward Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The war on terror is new, and it has disturbed many comfortable and profitable old relationships. In the face of this kind of entrenched opposition, how can those who recognize the need for new ideas force change? In American policy, there is one sure way to transform any debate: Invite the public to join it. And if you want to invite the public in, you have to send them an invitation in a language they can read.

Errors of the Heart

Since 1940, American democracy has faced three great ideological enemies: first Nazism, then Communism, and now militant Islam. During the Cold War, many Americans succumbed to the ideology of the enemy. Nazism was, and militant Islam is, much less attractive to Americans.

But in both cases, many Americans wished to opt out of the fight--not because they loved the enemy, but because they so intensely hated one of the enemy's targets: Britain in 1939-41; Israel today. It was no surprise to Richard and me that An End to Evil earned generally negative reviews from Middle Eastern officials and their state-controlled media.

A columnist for the Beirut newspaper Al-Hayat charged on Jan. 24 that Richard and I belonged to the real "axis of evil; Israel, neo-conservatives and all those supporting or protecting them . . . the reason behind the global hatred of the U.S., and the crazy terrorism that everyone suffers from."

This style of rhetoric was reproduced on March 1 in The American Conservative, a magazine that seeks to redefine the American right. Pat Buchanan says Richard and I are "dangerously close to imbibing the poisonous brew that drove Jonathan Pollard to treason: If it is good for Israel, it cannot be bad for America." It is bizarre, however, to be accused of being next door to treason by a writer who can shrug off the possible deaths of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans as if it were a thing of little importance. Buchanan writes: "How is our survival as a nation menaced when not one American has died in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11"? Yes. 3,000 Americans died that day. But so what? "Three thousand men and boys perished every week for 200 weeks of (the) Civil War." And even if al-Qaida were to acquire weapons more deadly than 19th-century musketry--well again, so what? "Germany and Japan suffered 3,000 dead every day in the last two years of World War II, with every city flattened and two blackened by atom bombs. Both came back in a decade." A year ago, I noted Buchanan had affixed blame for 9/11 to the United States itself. On Hardball on Sept. 30, 2002, he said: "9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted." But even I never imagined he would advance to explicitly accepting the risk of massive further American civilian casualties as preferable to a policy of national self-defence that in his imagination might offer collateral benefits to Israel.

Throughout the writing of An End to Evil, Richard Perle and I strove to do our part to revitalize the patriotic consensus of the first weeks after 9/11--to give Americans a definition of victory in this war and a plan for how to achieve that victory. We stand ready to be criticized and corrected. But too many of the criticisms and corrections we have thus far received reflect not the failings of our work, numerous as those surely are, but the blinders, weaknesses, and prejudices of the opponents of this war and this administration.

These must be overcome--not for the sake of any one book or any two writers-- but for the sake of victory in the great conflict of our time.

David Frum is a resident fellow at AEI.