As ground forces, Army Rangers and other Special or Covert forces begin face-to-face confrontation with Taliban forces, the American public must realize that these strikes are only the beginning. With his newly declared “war on terror,” President Bush has made it his administration’s goal of uprooting and destroying the global terror network. Operation: Enduring Freedom has only just begun.

The truth of the matter goes deeper than that. In countless interviews since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the recent bioterror threat at numerous media outlets and the U.S. Capitol, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described the fight against terror most directly. In his Sept. 21 column to the New York Post, he began it with this blunt statement: “What is at stake today is nothing less than the survival of civilization.”

Netanyahu should know. During his tenure as Israel’s Prime Minister (1996-1999), just like today, his nation was victim to suicide bombings by HAMAS and many others. He knew who these murderers were; the ones who supported them, and he tried what he could to lessen the efforts of HAMAS, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad on Israel.

This is the type of undertaking that now awaits us. Fate has thrust upon us the moniker of Eradicator of Terrorists and we must ensure the survival of the world, as we know it.

So then who is next? That seems like the most obvious question once Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network has been brought to justice and destroyed.

Do we help out longtime ally Israel and their fight against known terrorist groups like HAMAS, Hezbollah and other groups like the Palestinian Liberation Front? And if we do, does this mean that our nation will finally admit what has been revealed over the past 30 years, that Yassir Arafat is nothing more than a terrorist hiding behind a diplomat’s veil? Or for once are we going to make him accountable for the actions of these terrorist groups?

Or is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq the next target? We have to realize that his nation is one of the few to have the means to create nuclear or bio-chemical weapons. Is his government supplying the anthrax? We’d know, but Bill Clinton pulled out weapons inspectors in 1998. That way, we don’t know if Baghdad Memorial Hospital is really a place to treat the sick, or a chemical weapons plant in hiding. Or is Hussein that twisted to make it both; making our military the bad guys for blowing it up, while he willingly put those people in danger?

This is the type of world that we now live in. Where the goal of trying to keep the world safe will run right into political and economic considerations.

So as this war wages, we must keep its mission clear, concise and intact: take out the terrorists. But even more important than that is not letting the coalition members decide the missions.

This becomes increasingly difficult every day. The State Department has major terrorist hotbeds, supporting not only anti-Israel terrorists, but also possibly even bin Laden. Currently, Iran has agreed to assist in retrieving any downed U.S. pilot in Afghanistan, and Syria was just elected to the U.N. Security Council as the Middle East Representative. Not even the letter to the Security Council from John Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., explaining the U. S.’ actions in Afghanistan could stop Syria from asking for help to hide its own terrorist activities through its new position.

Even Saudi Arabia, our ally since Desert Storm, is changing its position on a daily basis. First denying the use of military bases for launching attacks on the Taliban, to daily reports of Saudi Princes laundering money to al-Qaeda’s bases in Somalia, making the West wonder just who are the moderate Muslim states in all this?

Perhaps the best option for many of these Muslim/Arab states is to find their own Kemal Ataturks that will pull them out of the 7th century and into the 21st. Ataturk is responsible for bringing Turkey out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and into the modern world. He proved to Muslim states at the time, that Islam could co-exist in the present and could be maintainable for generations to come without the fundamental extremes that bin Laden and his kind preach.

Perhaps it is this way that this region of the world can finally go from being one of the most difficult, to one that preaches democracy and peace.