Yes, Rudy Giuliani didn't see terrorism as a threat before 9/11. Neither did most of America, Republican and Democrat, with the Clinton Administration being key among those who missed the threat level after the 1993 truck bomb in the World Trade Center.

Today, Rudy Giuliani has learned from that mistake following the horror of 9/11 -- but the Washington Post seems intent upon minimizing the reason for the change in his evaluation of the terrorist threat.

As Rudolph W. Giuliani campaigns for president, he rarely misses a chance to warn about the threat from terrorists. "They hate you," he told a woman at an Atlanta college. They "want to kill us," he told guests at a Virginia luncheon.

The former New York City mayor exhorts America to fight back in what he calls the "terrorists' war on us" and accuses Democrats of reverting to their "denial" in the 1990s, when, he said, President Bill Clinton erred by treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, not a war.

Democrats, he said in July, have "the same bad judgment they had in the 1990s. They don't see the threat. They don't accept the threat."

It is a powerful message coming from the man who won global acclaim for his calm and resolve after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is undercut by Giuliani's record as mayor and by his public statements about terrorism since the 1990s, which document an evolution in thinking that began with a mind-set similar to the one he criticizes today.

And therein lies the difference -- in the 1990s, Rudy followed the prevailing wisdom that terrorism needed to be treated as a crime problem and handled by the courts. Today, he recognizes it as a national security problem that needs to be handled by other means. Democrats still want to handle the problem with cops and judges.

What it comes down to is this -- in a post-9/11 world, do we continue to follow 9/10 strategies. Rudy, who lived the devastation of 9/11, understands that we cannot. Rather than being criticized for holding a different view on handling the terrorist threat today than he did a decade ago, Giuliani needs to be applauded for moving forward rather than sticking with the failed policies of the past.

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