Although I am not a great fan of recycling old stuff – I don’t think I have ever done that – today, September 11 is the moment to re-run my piece of last year, scroll down to read This is just the beginning.

The reason for the re-run? It’s as accurate and prescient as 12 months ago. What happened on that fateful morning three years ago was a turning point, suddenly the world woke up to a conflict that had been brewing below the surface of public perception for decades. The past year has provided us with even more evidence of a widening war between the depraved radical fringes of Islam and the more secular world. Kidnappings and beheadings in Iraq, a bloodbath on commuter trains in Madrid, ethnic cleansing in Darfur and this week the bomb attack on the Australian Consulate in Jakarta to name the most visible ones. And then, another turning point: Beslan. Why was the terror in North Ossetia so crucial in the unfolding war with radical Islamism? Firstly, because it could not be linked in any coherent way to the United States, making it once and for all clear that we are dealing with a far wider conflict than many would have us believe. It was a wake-up call for those that preferred to stay asleep after September 11. And secondly, as hundreds of children perished it all of a sudden started to register in some pockets of the Muslim world that all was not well and that somehow they ended up on the wrong side of history and humanity.

What we have learned this past year is that waging a stoic and determined war is by itself not sufficient. As the lessons from Iraq are clear we need to make every effort to let democracy take root, arguments that freedom and elections can not be imposed because these countries are alien to the concepts are both ludicrous and futile. When starting on a course as important as this, one has to go it all the way. Democracy was imposed on Germany and Japan, hardly examples of flexible and open societies at the time, after the Second World War. And it worked, to this very day with a continuing presence of US troops. But more than that there needs to be a buy-in: the Muslim world at large needs to see that the journey laid out by radicals is ultimately a road to nowhere, a journey into the dark. A renaissance for the Islamic world is badly needed, a tough order on any day and in the face of today’s violence it will require the bravest of the bravest to pull something like that off the ground.

Wage war, create democracy, Muslim rebirth. All three are required, not necessarily in that order and not all have to be to be implemented by the just US or the West at large, although they will play the leading role. We’re still at the beginning, but despite the horrors of last year we have seen the first feeble rays of hope of where we should be going. I am optimistic that we will get there, but pessimistic that it will take a long time.

UPDATE: Pejman, Chrenkoff, PoliBlog ,Glenn, and Winds: lots of links, thoughts and round-ups