WASHINGTON — As we read the news about this Pakistani jackal who admits to planning a cowardly assault on hundreds of innocent people in New York’s Times Square a thought that occurs to me is, how endlessly interesting history is. Often things take place that one never would have imagined.

For most of the last decades of the 20^th century America girded its loins to defeat world communism, at the time led by the Soviets and the Chinese. We lived in fear of nuclear holocaust. We feared Soviet domination. Once our partners in thwarting Nazi domination of the West, the Soviets had replaced the Nazis as our enemies. Their war machine was even more deadly. It could bring down on the globe eternal night.

We expended up to nine percent of our GDP annually to protect ourselves. We devised policies to neutralize Soviet aggression. Finally, when President Ronald Reagan faced down the Soviets with a vast arms build-up and a resolute, albeit flexible, foreign policy, his Liberal critics warned that we faced nuclear world war.

Of a sudden the Soviet Union collapsed. And what was the Liberals’ response? Well, it was one of history’s surprises. The Liberals announced that the Soviet Union had been a paper tiger all along. It had been destined to collapse from day one. All our military appropriations were a waste of money. Oh yes, and one other surprising detail. It was not Ronald Reagan’s vigilance and resolve that ended the Cold War but Mikhail Gorbachev’s good sense — though practically every one of his policies and policy pronouncements was a failure.

In, say, 1985, if you had asked me what the national response in America would be at the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union by the end of the decade, I would have predicted national jubilation. I would have predicted that Liberals (many of whom, certainly up through the Johnson Administration, were vigilant opponents of communism) would join with conservatives in a general feeling of goodwill. Both could take credit for their successful defense of democracy against tyranny. Instead the Liberals told us that our efforts against the Soviets were a waste.

Surprise, surprise — yet the Liberals’ response to Islamofascism surprises me more. Islamic terror is anti-Western, anti-democratic, fundamentalist reactionary, nihilistic, and repressive of some of Liberalism’s supposedly favored groups, women, gays, and household pets, namely dogs living indoors. It is also fascism with a Koranic prescribed beard and burka. Yet the Liberals do not even want to use the term Islamic terror. The mosque is about the only house of prayer that they have any sympathy for. They depict the Tea Party movement as more troubling than fundamentalist Islam protesting in the streets.

Just hours after this Islamic brute attempted to kill the peaceful denizens of Times Square, many of whom were doubtless followers of Islam, Mayor Bloomberg speculated to the press that the perpetrator of this attempted atrocity was “a homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or somebody with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something….” Later, there was more. He would not tolerate “bias or backlash against Pakistani or Muslim New Yorkers.”

Now the mayor was manifesting the Liberals’ time-honored suspicion of his fellow Americans. Those of us who have studied the Liberals’ bugaboos as they pollute our political culture (we call the phenomenon Kultursmog) are familiar with this idiocy. We saw it during the Cold War when suspicion of communist infiltration of government was described by many Liberals as a senseless “Red Scare.” With the release of the Venona files and of research from the KGB’s archives we now know many of the accused Reds were in fact communist spies.

We also saw the Liberals’ suspicion of ordinary Americans—or at least conservative Americans—when their first suspects after a communist assassinated President Kennedy were Dallas conservatives unnamed. Now the mayor’s first suspects upon the discovery of a bomb in Times Square are opponents of the health care monstrosity.

Returning to the Liberals’ sympathetic treatment of fundamentalist Islam, let me proffer an explanation. Liberals are sympathetic to it because it is anti-American and anti-Western. In fact, that is the only explanation. Liberals such as Mr. Bloomberg are not very comfortable with their fellow Americans. That is one of history’s surprises.

Mr. Tyrrell, editor in chief of the American Spectator, is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.