The Gathering Storm
Canadian columnist David Warren says the time for war is here.

America, Britain, and the entire Western world, continue to be under the direct threat that was announced from the skies over Manhattan on the morning of Sept. 11th, 2001. The Iraq of Saddam Hussein has presented itself as the immediate enemy, but is part of a nexus. Our enemy is diffused and diverse, and yet united around a single goal: the destruction of U.S. power, and through that, of the civilization it protects. Our choice was plain from that morning in September: to defend ourselves, or surrender to it. There is no "third way", and there never was one. The war in Afghanistan was only the beginning, the taking of Baghdad will be far from the end.

By now, there can be no doubt that war is upon us. After the eerie calm of 2002 - equivalent in its way to the "phony war" of 1939 and early 1940 - we have reached the point where even those who live in denial can no more deny. They may continue to dispute the cause, but not for long. War changes not only the physical but the mental landscape it has touched, and nothing remains the same. There were those who blamed the rise of Hitler and Nazism for the gathering storm of World War II, and those who preferred to blame the war-mongering rhetoric of Winston Churchill. The war itself changed all that, and people who subscribed to the latter view could not even remember that they had done so, when the war was over.

You know what they say. Read the whole thing.