Two weeks ago, a relative was in town for the Big East tournament. Over lunch, I remarked on security precautions at Madison Square Garden. He blamed our problems with terrorism on our response to 9/11. Never mind Iraq; even Afghanistan was an overreaction. We squandered the world's good will. On 9/11, 'we had the world on our side and we blew it.'

Of course we didn't have the world 'on our side'. We had Britain and Australia on our side. Everybody else sent sympathy cards. We later learned that many of those make-believe sympathizers were taking heavy bribes from Saddam to circumvent sanctions. And of course, a long list of terror attacks preceeded 9/11.

It was an opinion you'd expect from a high school cheerleader - but this middle-aged man had graduated from Dartmouth College and Yale Law School at the top of his class. He valued expressions of pity from our moral betters (France, Germany, Russia) more than any action we might take in self defense.

It was the easy thing to believe, of course. Why bother to confront ugly questions when you can take refuge in childlike fantasies? The refusal to grow up is going to get a lot of people killed.

I failed to explain why his comment, so typical of the left-liberal elite, bothered me.

If you start a train of thought with a false premise and a naive, self-indulgent worldview, you will never arrive at an effective course of action. That's why, more than five years after 9/11, democrats still haven't come up with a strategy to confront the spread of Islamist terror.

Growing up requires that we put away comforting fantasies and face the dangerous real world.

Face it, and accept it. That's harder, for me at least.