The conventional view is that respectable growth will return--the freeze will thaw--once the Iraq situation is resolved. The shooting may have started by the time you read this, though it has not as of press time; in any case, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has predicted that the war might take six days or six weeks, but probably not six months. After that, with Saddam sorted out, we can all get back to spending and investing.

Chances are good, though, that it won't work out quite that way. The conventional view is based (as it often is) on an old model and plenty of hope. The more likely reality is that we're seeing the start of a fundamentally new model of how we live our lives and do business in the U.S.

The old model was formed after the previous Iraq war, won in a few weeks of dazzling high-tech battle, with few U.S. casualties and a relatively clean end. And, oh, what followed almost immediately: The end of a recession, the beginning of the longest continuous economic expansion in our history, and the relaunch of the greatest bull market ever. You can't blame anyone for wanting to hug that scenario this time around.

But another critical event occurred in that same year of 1991: The Soviet Union gave up. For the first time in decades, the U.S. suddenly faced no large, persistent threat from outside. The psychological liberation of this change is hard to convey, but it was significant. The threat of total annihilation takes a toll. We all lived with it, way back in our minds somewhere, rarely thinking about it overtly. But every single day we carried around the Cold War concepts of mutual assured destruction, megatonnage, and the gruesome original meaning of an expression so lightly spoken today: overkill.

To have that burden lifted was a profound change and a key ingredient in the '90s formula for economic growth and stock market euphoria. For one solid decade--until Sept. 11, 2001--we Americans believed we were at long last exempt from significant outside threats to our security. And we got used to it.

So the first Iraq war happened at just the moment--coincidentally--when the largest, most intractable threat to America was evaporating. This time around it's the opposite. This Iraq war is happening--not coincidentally--as we realize painfully that a large, intractable threat to our security is solidifying. We finally have to accept that Sept. 11 wasn't an interruption of our ten-year holiday; it was the end of it. Now we're installing the concepts of global terrorism into those parts of our brains previously reserved for the Cold War.

That's the new model. Our burden isn't going away. We'll have to live with it. Saddam will get dispatched one way or another, but that won't carry us into a bright, threat-free future.

We'll suffer other attacks in the U.S. American interests around the world will be targets. It could get a lot worse if Kim Jong Il decides to sell nukes or if some other nut case develops them. We'll worry about those things every day.

We can carry on under constant threat, just as other countries do. Colombia, the global leader in kidnappings, has a growing economy. So do Lebanon and Pakistan. Not that they are anyone's ideal of a modern economy, but they show what people can achieve in environments far less secure than ours.

We can't stand around waiting for our economy to thaw. It's frozen because we're frozen, and under the new model, victory in Iraq won't warm us up much. We'll start spending and investing, and our economy will start growing, when we internalize the new reality and decide to go ahead with our lives anyway.