The Commander-in-Chief does mention Al Qaeda's role in the attacks, but chooses once again not to discuss the far larger threat of anti-American Islamist extremism that continues to boil from the northwestern tip of Africa to the tribal heartland of Pakistan. If this were the middle of the Second World War, it would be like Roosevelt talking about a particular pack of German submarines in the Atlantic in 1941 without bothering to point out to his nation -- in this speech, or any other -- that practically the entirety of Europe and North Africa had already been overrun by Hitler's legions.

This deliberate obscuring of the longer-term menace is unhealthy for American culture and foreign policy. The longer that Americans remain uninformed about the origins of Islamist terror and imperialism, the more they will be susceptible to bogus conspiracy theories that Al Qaeda and allied Islamists are justified in their attacks upon an "evil, imperialist America waging a racist war on innocent Muslims." Time to wake up. Time for the Commander-in-Chief to tell the troops why they're fighting -- and remind the rest of us that we are fighting.

Jonathon Narvey is the Editor of The Propagandist