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 "signals intelligence"? (And who needs well-trained, well-armed servicemen when we have so many fancy machines?) We will now attempt to fix our intelligence-gathering operations. How many other catastrophic defeats will we suffer before we pay attention to our other screaming weaknesses? We've known for years that criminal nations would like to shoot missiles at us (or be able to threaten us with missiles) and are frantically trying to figure out how. We need a national crash project: ABM defenses within twelve months. We've let our military deteriorate, relentlessly politicized it, and allowed too many of our military training programs to be turned into jokes. Our guiding spirit has been: We're so rich and powerful, no amount of incompetence can hurt us.

6. Remember Nablus. Yesterday we saw men, women, and children take to the streets to celebrate mass murder. We should never forget those pictures. Some organization ought to run a full-page Nablus photo with a headline like "Oslo? This is Oslo. Any more bright ideas?" We ought to round up a flock of multiculturalists — the all-cultures-are-equal types — and show them what Nablus and East Jerusalem looked like yesterday.

7. Freedom and democracy had nothing to do with it. The president and secretary of state said that the massacres were an attack on freedom and democracy. Don't believe it. These murderers don't even know what freedom and democracy are. Their goals are to create suffering and death. Suffering and death for their own sakes are what they believe in.

8. Pride. New York and Washington were attacked, not Paris and Rome — and something tells me that Mideast terrorists are not about to attack Paris or Rome. No doubt internal Arab politics had something to do with the massacres, but in the end there is one reason why the United States is the target: We are the only nation in the world with the decency and heart to stand up for Israel. If Japan and Europe and the new democracies of Asia and South America cared about Israel's right to exist, and to defend herself, and if they stood up and said so — I'll wait while the laughter dies down — if they all were to say: We are against cold-blooded murder in America and Israel, we reject the ludicrous and evil claim that "moral equivalence" holds between Palestinians whose goal is to murder Jews and Jews whose goal is not to be murdered . . . how could the mass murderers ever choose among so many juicy targets? They'd be paralyzed. But they're unlikely to face that dilemma, ever. Every man, woman, and child who died in the September 11 massacres is a witness to the greatness and majesty of the United States. They didn't ask or deserve to die for American greatness, but they did. We ought to tell the world: Save your crocodile tears. These are dead not merely to mourn but to honor, and we dare not fail to avenge them.