Paul Danish is a resident of Boulder, CO. The following is his piece in today's Colorado Daily, fwiw:

Make no mistake, what occurred in New York and Washington yesterday was an act of war. The question we must now answer as a country is what's to be done.

The easier question to answer is what's not to be done. We do not have the option of responding to yesterday's attacks as though they were criminal acts and that it is sufficient to bring the perpetrators to justice as though they were common criminals. That is the way we have responded to terrorist episodes such as the bombing of Pan American flight 103 or the previous attack on the World Trade Center, or the bombing of American embassies in Africa for the last 30 years. We cannot continue on that course.

We do not yet know who perpetrated yesterday's attacks, but this much we know:

We know that modern terrorism has political and religious roots. We also know that certain governments provide terrorist organizations with sanctuary, aid and comfort. We know that while the regimes are not always the outright sponsors of terrorism - although frequently they are - they are clearly terrorism's enablers. And now we know that this can no longer be tolerated.

This is no time to mince words. There are six regimes that have institutionally sponsored terrorism and institutionally incited violence against Americans. They are Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and the Palestinian Authority. The first thing that must be done is that these regimes must be held accountable.

These governments must be given an ultimatum: Shut down all known organizations engaged in terrorism against the United States on your soil, arrest their members, and turn them over to the United States.

If they fail to do so, Congress should formally declare war on them. At the same time we should leave no doubt that we have no interest in winning their hearts and minds. Our only interest must be bringing about a permanent change in their behavior or bringing about their destruction.

This might seem a harsh doctrine, but the alternatives are worse. The first alternative is to respond as we have in the past - to bring out the dead and begin a criminal investigation aimed at finding surviving members of the group directly responsible - the result will be further attacks, because there will have been no real consequences for terrorists. Any response that leaves the terrorist infrastructure intact and maintains the pretense that the attack was something less than an act of war is an open invitation for even bloodier assaults.

The second alternative is even worse. It is to assume a defensive posture in which America tightens domestic security to the point where it in effect suspends fundamental civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. That response would be an act of national self-immolation and would be a strategic victory for the country's terrorist enemies.

However, America's responses cannot be confined to a military campaign against terrorism and its sponsors. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are the same sort of defining moment in American history as the attack on Pearl Harbor; they signal not just that we cannot continue to ignore our enemies, but that we must become more engaged in the affairs of the planet.