Three years ago, evil surfaced in the Western world in a way it had not in six decades, since the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor. Americans were forced to confront pure human wickedness in a way we had not in generations. And in that moment we rose as one nation to the challenge — led, fortunately, by a leader who had the clarity of vision to recognize that evil for what it was, and to rally America and the world against it. Even many of the most committed liberals seemed to have their compasses reoriented in the face of that unmistakable act of war and crime against humanity.

But nearly three years have passed. And in the intervening time our wounds have healed, our senses and memories dulled. The nation rallied behind its leader long enough to expel the state sponsors of evil in Afghanistan. Yet by the time the confrontation with Iraq presented itself, our courage and moral certainty seemed to fade in the face of partisan bickering and posturing. We toppled a murderous dictator in Iraq — and yet now the political left and the Democratic Party are trying to use the demanding aftermath of the war to exploit our national cause for their own political advantage. How could we allow ourselves to forget so soon? Evil exists. It is real, and it means to harm us. I believe this strongly, and not just because of my Catholic faith, although that's the root of it. When you work in the news business, you deal with the ugly side oflife. Every day across your desk comes story after story about man's inhumanity to man, from mass murderers to child molesters to mothers who drown their children to husbands who murder their pregnant wives. These stories push the limits of our ability to imagine man's potential for depravity, and yet they are horrifically true.

Still, isolated events like these pale beside the pure evil of September 11. How could anyone witness the horrors of that day, or the mass graves discovered in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and dismiss the idea of evil? And yet many people do — most of them political liberals. Even when they can bring themselves to acknowledge the brutality of a venal tyrant such as Saddam Hussein, they qualify it. "We are not deny ng that Saddam is a repressive dictator," they say, "but we don't believe we should have attacked Iraq without giving him more time to comply with the U.N. resolutions." For the appeasement-minded liberals of our country, there's always a "but."

It's difficult for liberals to see such moral questions clearly, because most of them are moral relativists. They reject absolute standards of right and wrong. In their worldview, man is perfectible, human nature is on a linear path toward enlightenment, and the concept of sin is primitively biblical. In their view, society's unfairness compels people to break the law. To them people like Saddam and Osama bin Laden are not morally depraved murderers, but men driven to their bad acts by the injustices of Western society.

The emphasis is always on giving bad actors — domestic and foreign — the benefit of the doubt, never on personal accountability. After all, if we can blame externalcircumstances or internal imbalance, then we can avoid the messy business of calling the evildoers to account. This kind of thinking s all too familiar from our courtrooms at home. The justice system today is crawling with "experts" eager to exonerate the most heinous criminals on the grounds that they're "genetically predisposed" to murder, rape, take drugs, or otherwise endanger the welfare of others; the media fills its airwaves with liberal advocates eager to sympathize with murderers on death row, instead of the families of the innocent victims.

The trouble with tolerating evil, of course, is that while we're averting our eyes, the evil itself only grows and festers around the world. This has been true throughout history. Neville Chamberlain assured a wary England that an appeasement pact with Adolf Hitler would lead to "peace n our time." Cold War liberal elitists ignored or downplayed the atrocities of communism, from the gulag of "Uncle Joe" Stalin to the killing fields of Cambodia. Bill Clinton stood idly by while Islamic terrorists attacked American targets throughout the 1990s, in a long prelude that should have alerted us to their burgeoning war on America.

The primary evil we face today is terrorism. But we will never triumph over the terrorists until we realize that groups like al Qaeda are not working alone. Wthout the deep pockets of terrorist-friendly dictatorships like Saddam Hussein's Iraq to support them, the loose networks of Islamic terrorism would pose only a fraction of the danger to civilization they currently do. And those dictatorships, we must realize, are the same brutal regimes that have oppressed their own people for generations.

As President Bushhas declared, we can no longer wait around for terrorists to attack us. We must take the war to them, rooting them out of their swamps and destroying the despotic regimes that furnish their lifeblood.

But the president also warned that this would be a war like no other. It would be fought on a variety of levels, against a largely invisible and unconventional enemy. Sometimes our efforts would be conducted out in the open, for all to see; at other times, though, they would be as invisible to the public as the terrorists themselves ...

Nearly three years have passed since that tragic day in September. Since then, our wounds have healed, but our senses and memories have dulled.

At first, the nation rallied behind its leader. But by the time the confrontation with Iraq presented itself, our courage and moral certainty seemed to fade in the face of partisan bickering and posturing.

Now the political left and the Democratic Party are trying to use the demanding aftermath of the war to exploit our national cause for their own political advantage.

How could we allow ourselves to forget so soon?--from Deliver Us from Evil

Sean Hannity's first blockbuster book, the New York Timesbestseller Let Freedom Ring, cemented his place as the freshest and most compelling conservative voice in the country. As the host of the phenomenally successful Hannity &Colmeson the Fox News Channel and The Sean Hannity Showon ABC Radio, Hannity has won a wildly devoted fan base. Now he brings his plainspoken, take-no-prisoners style to the continuing War on Terror abroad — and liberalism at home — in Deliver Us from Evil.

"Evil exists," Hannity asserts. "It is real, and it means to harm us." And in these pages he revisits the harsh lessons America has learned in confronting evil in the past and the present, to illuminate the course we must take in the future. Tracing a direct line from Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin through Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, he reminds us of the courage and moral clarity of our great leaders. And he reveals how the disgraceful history of appeasement has reached forward from the days of Neville Chamberlain and Jimmy Carter to corrupt the unrepentant leftists of the modern Democratic Party — from Howard Dean and John Kerry to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

As Americans face the ongoing war against terrorists and their state sponsors around the world, Sean Hannity reminds us that we must also cope with the continuing scourge of accommodation and cowardice at home. With his trademark blend of passion and hard-hitting commentary, he urges Americans to recognize the dangers of putting our faith in toothless "multilateralism" when the times call for decisive action. For only through strong defense of our freedoms, at home and around the world, can we preserve America's security and liberty in the dangerous twenty-first century.