Now for more context. We could have averted the present moment by closing both eyes to what was going on, by ignoring the war. A war that Iraq was waging? One, at least, that it was encouraging and facilitating. No Iraqi-Al Qaeda connection has been unassailably shown. But if you stand on tiptoe for a look at the scene as a whole, despotic, anti-Western radicalism in the Arab world can be understood as a machine with coordinated parts: some larger, some smaller, all deadly.

There has been some tendency to treat the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction question as a detective thriller. We await Sam Spade's lifting off of the blanket to reveal the weapons cache. That is not what this thing is about. What this thing is about is people who want to kill lots of Americans and who must be stopped before they succeed.

We could have pretended otherwise. Buying into the French version of reality would have bought peace for America, but it would not have stopped the war. The war was on. It remained only for us to show whether we were going to fight or appease.

This wretched war -- who could welcome such an occasion, doves or hawks either one? When you are in a war, nevertheless, the intelligent thing to do is to fight, just as Gen. Franks is doing: all the while doing better than a speed-obsessed American culture can appreciate without effort. As the Sunday morning quarterbacks sharpened their cleats, Gen. Tommy Franks pronounced the American achievement to date "truly remarkable."

Know what? He's right.