"Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after.

Only a house, quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem."

-- Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

"It was the furies of the Arab world, not Afghanistan, that struck America eight years ago today.

...Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the "electronic herd." We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.

Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven't been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing."

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and an adjunct fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, is the author, among other books, of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq" (Free Press, 2007).  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574402822520657510.html#mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_opinion