Our country's awful mass-media (have you seen the softballs they've lobbed at Iran's leader, lately?) often speaks of the "Arab Street." Here military historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson writes on the "American Street."

There is an American Street that is a far more powerful, and a more responsible force than any such populace in the Arab world. Like many of you, I tire of hearing "Death to America" from the mobs in Teheran or Jericho, and am sick of the usual coffee-house Middle Eastern hack intellectual that CNN drags out from London, who, during the past 5 years, in his condescension and pompous diction, and in the safety of a host Western humane society, starts listing various perceived grievances against the West, and then issues warnings (!) about the furor of the temperamental "Arab Street."

I respect and fear the American version far more, because its anger is fueled by reason and is slow and steady and furious when released. The world should not worry when the half-educated, fueled by zealotry and nursed on conspiracy theory, starts chanting; but it should when a rational and patient American slowly fumes and decides he has had it with the Iranian "President", Hezbollah's fascism, the various thugs on the West Bank, the Sunni Triangle's murderers, the primordial of the Hindu Kush, or some subsidized dictator in Pakistan or Egypt lecturing us.

As Hanson himself notes in "Carnage and Culture," in warfare, Americans are the most effective killers on the planet. Our mix of religiosity, capitalism, and republican constitutionalism makes "American justice" swift, overwhelming, and lethal in ways the less-free always fail to realize.