Shakespeare wrote elegantly about "a tide in the affairs of men," and the actress once remarked to the bishop that "timing is everything," as we and our alliance of the willing are about to discover. For the war we are about to fight is not the war we wanted, and its intensity and its dimensions are likely to be far greater than we anticipated when the strategy was first designed. We have waited too long, and our enemies have prepared a common strategy.

A year ago, it might have been possible to deal with Iraq, and Iraq alone--but no more. The Iranians, Syrians, Saudis and North Koreans know that a free and successful Iraq will undermine their legitimacy by demonstrating that a Shi'ite Arab country is quite capable of managing its own affairs without a vicious dictatorship.

To survive, they believe they must do everything possible to deny us a clear victory in Iraq, or pin us down there for an extended period of time and hope that we lose our stomach for prolonged conflict, or engage us in a war on two continents, hoping to deliver a devastating blow either in Iraq or in Korea.

Iran and Syria have already prepared a terrorist campaign against the allied forces in Iraq. Not for nothing did Iran's hardline Hashemi Rafsanjani proclaim last week that the presence of American troops in Iraq would be worse than Saddam Hussein.

This was a clear declaration of war on us, and we should expect attacks from the full panoply of terrorist groups, from the dreaded Hezbollah to Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda, Hamas and the rest. Thus the war in Iraq will very quickly become a regional conflict.

The terrorists' task would be aided considerably if they were seen by the Iraqi people to be fighting against an imperial American presence, for they could credibly claim to be resisting a foreign occupier. But it would be impossible for them to claim to be freedom fighters if the allies quickly empowered an Iraqi government led by men who have long been fighting against Saddam for the liberation of the country.

Better yet, a government representing all major groups in Iraq would be able to call upon the Iraqi people to hunt down the terrorists in their midst, thereby turning the tables on Iran and Syria. Instead of providing support for the terrorists, the Iraqi people would support allied forces, and create a model for the war against terrorism throughout the region: Free countries don't support terrorism. They fight it.

Ahmad Chalabi, the talented leader of the Iraqi National Congress--the umbrella organization that unites all segments of Iraqi society--is alarmed by the talk coming from some of our top diplomats of late, suggesting that the Bush administration is contemplating an American-led military government in Iraq that would last at least a couple of years.

Chalabi rightly describes this as insulting to the Iraqi people, and a betrayal of the president's promise that U.S. troops are fighting to liberate countries, not to dominate them.

He is certainly right on both counts, and the plan for a long-term military government is strategically foolish as well, both because it would help the terrorists gain popular support within Iraq and, perhaps worst of all, because it would discourage popular uprisings in the neighboring countries.

This sort of strategic confusion stems from our obsessive focus on Iraq to the exclusion of the other sponsors of terrorism. If we understand that we are facing a regional challenge, it is easier to see that we want to see a free Iraq, governed by Iraqis, as quickly as possible. That is because we also want to see a free Iran and a free Syria, along with a free and moderate Saudi Arabia, and a North Korea freed of its weird dictatorship.

Many people call such a strategic vision overly ambitious and unrealizable, but in fact it is quite realistic and entirely appropriate to the war we are waging. The common denominator of our enemies is tyranny, surely not Islam (Kim Jong Il is no Muslim, and Saddam and the Assads in Syria came to power as secular radical socialists).

We are not engaged in a "clash of civilizations," but rather in the same fundamental struggle between freedom and tyranny that created the United States in the first place.

If we just act like Americans, supporting the freedom fighters and fighting the tyrants, we'll do fine.

Michael Ledeen is a resident scholar at AEI and author of The War Against the Terror Masters.