BRITISH AUTHORITIES DISRUPTED a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up several aircraft midair between the U.K. and the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage . . . That’s how this morning’s edition of the WSJ Online, which I use for my Internet home page, opens. The news is a steely reminder that we are at war. This terrorist plot out of the UK we are told, has earmarks of al Qaeda going for a global statement on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. The alleged terrorists are all Pakistani in background. One of the leaders hiding in Pakistan is accused of murdering his uncle in 2002.

We have been at war for over 25 years now, since 1979 when militant students of radical Islamism took 52 American citizens hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran, during the failed administration of Jimmy Carter. Four years later Hezbollah, formed in the mid-70s as the militant organized terrorist arm of Syrian and Iranian foreign policy, bombed the US Embassy in Beirut killing 63 people and then executed the homicidal suicide attack on the Marine barracks also in Beirut, killing 241 Marines. The Marines were there to secure a safe retreat for the Lebanese army and PLO factions at risk by Hezbollah’s aggression into southern Lebanon and the subsequent violent conflict with Israeli forces defending their northern border.

The list of radical Islamic violence targeted against military and civilian populations around the world needs to be recounted in the mind of Western peoples everywhere for we are at war, a war between two civilizations, and the world as we know it and the hope for a better future hangs in the balance. Who will win? What of our way of life if we were to lose? These are real questions everyone on the side of Western civilization need to recognize and answer. Our enemy is set on world disruption, the annihilation of the Jews, the domination of all peoples by radical fundamentalist Islam, and the destruction of America.

Christians don’t get to sit this one out any longer. We must choose sides in this great contest and do so reluctantly but choose nonetheless. It is no longer a matter of living blind to the fierce, strange cultural realities of the Middle East while enjoying our privileged comforts in the West. The Middle East and the West are inextricably bound together now, though at present in a death struggle: the result of over 100 years of failed foreign policy and weak resolves in the West, of our living off the misappropriated natural resources of other peoples and nations in the Middle East, and of being complicit in the rule of Middle Eastern autocracies so anathema to our own way of life in their oppression and degradation of their own people, yet supported by us for our own convenience. Nonetheless, we must choose one way or the other. And how are we to live with our choice as Christians? How are we to live spiritually?

There is sin abounding on all sides in this latest and most dangerous world war. Yet the past and how we got to the present is no longer the matter of the day. These are dangerous, troubling times demanding firm resolve and clarity of purpose. We must deal with now and how we do will determine whither goes our future and the future of world civilization. The first and immediate need is to cut off the radical terrorists and their ability to do violence, at the same time standing down their supporters principally in Iran and Syria, and if possible enabling and empowering new orders of indigenous governance and control in all the nations of the Middle East. Then and only then can everyone together set about the long term work of redressing the imbalances that are at the root of the hostilities. For now though the work of the day is cutting off terrorists.

All will change, both the Middle East and West in this great conflict of civilizations, and yet all will be for the better, all will be well in the end. The Lord our God will make it so. The hard part for us as Christians in the West will be in sanctioning the use of force in response to the real and present dangers of rampant State-sponsored terrorism. Admittedly the underlying issues will not be resolved by engaging the terrorists with deadly force, but the issues will never be addressed without first capping the violence at its evil sources. You expect police to keep your neighborhood safe and intervene when violence occurs (preferably before it occurs), so too should we expect the same of our military and law-enforcement agencies in these troubling times. Or to say the same thing differently using a healing metaphor, you would not deny the doctor’s knife or laser or chemotherapy in the hope of removing a cancer from your body, nor should we deny the use of force for the purpose of achieving a greater good for the global body.

Pushed to choose between a West that has learned over the centuries how to moderate their own extremist tendencies including when appropriate the use of proportional force to protect innocent civilians or a Middle East that has not shown any will or ability to control the radical Islamists and their homicidal bombers and paramilitary terrorist organizations, I choose the West. Pushed to choose between what motivates the peoples of Christianity or Islam in the main – and I believe this choice is a matter of life or death for civilization as we know it and hope for it in the future – I choose the West. I choose the West knowing in my Christian heart that in the end, having won, we will make a greater, just peace for the peoples and nations of the Middle East than they would do or support if the winners, on our behalf. We’ve done so before in Germany, in Japan and will do so again in Afghanistan and Iraq and soon, if necessary, in Syria and Iran. Meanwhile, what has Islam done in over 500 years?

In a word, I have no desire to see my children’s children at the mercies of a radical fundamentalist mullah. The issue for me then is how to support the good fight and advance true civilization. I would not have us advance as arrogant Christus Victors. I would rather have us advance as humble Christian men and women resolutely seeking the holy ground of an inclusive, open, transparent, free and forgiving society. Let us then advance in Christ's image toward what once was called confidently the Kingdom of God and not with Christians only but with people of good will everywhere.