By CLIFF MAY, Scripps Howard News Service

The 20th century was a time of great and terrible revolutions. The Russian Revolution of 1917 promised a communist utopia. It delivered man-made famines, the Gulag Archipelago and at least 20 million murdered. The Chinese Revolution of 1949 brought the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; estimates put the death toll as high as 65 million.

What took place in Gaza and Israel over the past three weeks was not a war -- it was one battle in a war. Or, to be more precise, it was one battle in what the soldier/scholar John Nagl has described as a "global insurgency" aimed at overthrowing the existing order, what we used to call -- in a more confident era -- the Free World.

The essential facts of the Hamas/Israel conflict are not complicated: Hamas is a client of Iran's ruling mullahs whose rallying cry is "Death to America!" Hamas' ideology is indistinguishable from that of al-Qaeda. For these two reasons alone, it cannot be in the U.S. interest for Hamas -- or any similar group -- to prevail anytime, anywhere.

Palestinian civilians continue to be murdered in cold blood -- several dozen just last weekend. Many of the victims were gunned down inside hospitals and schools.

A thought experiment: Imagine that Hamas announces it will immediately cease and desist from firing missiles into Israel, that there will be no more such attacks in the future, and that it will release Gilad Shalit, the Israel soldier kidnapped two and a half years ago and held incommunicado ever since -- with not even the Red Cross allowed to see him. What would happen then?

A few months ago, I was listening to an interview with a PBS producer who had been on assignment in Iran. He was saying that, despite almost 30 years under a revolutionary Islamist regime, Iran remains a surprisingly normal country. For example, visiting a mosque, he was reminded of "Lutherans worshipping in the Midwest."

It's of little consequence to most of us what historians of the future will say about George W. Bush. More important is whether there will be historians in the future who can work in freedom. That, in turn, depends on the outcome of the war now being waged against the world's free nations.

The price of gasoline is down -- from over $4 a gallon to about $1.70 a gallon. That's because the price of oil is down from almost $150 a barrel to around $40 a barrel. This is good news for moms who chauffeur their kids to soccer games, music lessons and religious school, and for truck drivers moving products from factories to stores.

The attack in India was not the test of Barack Obama's mettle that Joseph Biden has predicted. But it was a test. The terrorists were communicating who they are and what they want. Obama, like the rest of us, can choose to understand or we can wrap ourselves in comforting illusions.

"Afghanistan is the most foreign country in the world," says William Wood, the American ambassador in Kabul. I ask if I may quote him on that. He hesitates, then says it's all right, then adds: "It's a ferociously foreign country."