Special Section: At War - Eight Thoughts on Mass Murder: The grim truths.(Brief Article)

1. You don't win wars by defending yourself. You win them by attacking the enemy. People say, "This is war," and they're right. But if our policy is merely defense and counterattack, this war can't possibly be won. The U.S. must take the initiative. The president should tell his service chiefs: Give me a plan of attack, now, against any known terrorist or terrorist state. They are all our sworn enemies.

2. The U.S. ultimatum to Afghanistan. By the time you read this, we may already have delivered an ultimatum to the government (such as it is) in Kabul. We needn't and shouldn't wait for the investigation of the September 11 massacres to finish. We know what bin Laden is-and if he didn't mastermind this mass murder, we want him anyway, because we don't play games with terrorists anymore. It is Afghanistan's job to find the man and hand him over. Our ultimatum should read: You have so many hours to turn him over, or prove to our satisfaction that he's not in Afghanistan. If you don't, we'll declare war and systematically destroy everything you own, every building and field, every shop and sheep in Afghanistan, one by one, until you hand the man over or there's nothing left. (Of course we'll always tell you our next target, so you can evacuate if you care to.) And if we wreak havoc and still don't get our man-in the future, bloody-minded states might think twice before sheltering aspiring murderers.

3. The topic is "guilt," not "responsibility." The president spoke well on the evening of the 11th. He spoke about "justice" and "evil." But in some ways we are still confused. People say that we have to find the "responsible" parties. What they mean is the guilty parties. Back in the '70s, terrorists would murder people, and ignorant, oblivious reporters would announce: "The PLO [or some other bloodthirsty barbarian group] has claimed responsibility." Every time you heard that phrase, your blood ran cold. Those reporters had turned themselves voluntarily into propaganda machines. They should have said: The PLO has "admitted guilt," or "claimed guilt"-a gruesome phrase that says something important. In the '70s, all sorts of enlightened Americans were politely interested in terrorism. We still haven't fully recovered from the harm they inflicted.

4. Hunt and punish. The president said on the 11th that we would hunt down these murderers and punish them. Henceforth, when Israel hunts down terrorist murderers and punishes them, I assume the State Department will be enthusiastic.

5. Closing the barn door. Experts have warned us for years about the self-imposed weakness of American intelligence, especially human intelligence. Our weakness reflects not merely the tragic moral confusion of recent decades (especially the late '70s), but our blind- idiot's faith in technology. Who needs mere "human intelligence" when we have the world's fanciest, highest-tech ...