Ted, Better intel means catching terrorists before they blow something up.
How exactly do we do that? People are quick to associate the Madrid bombings with the Iraq war, but that answer dodges the more fundamental question of how we could have caught the bombers before the bombs went off. (Not only that, but that answer also led to Spain pulling out of Iraq, which most people agree is a victory for terrorism.)
No one including the Europeans accepts the third choice.
Actually, Spain just did.
I suspect we will have to learn to live with number one [the JF choice], and at some point, when we get an enlightened president into power, do some of the stuff Z [choice number two] is talking about without the neocon's penchant for war. If we do the latter [Z's choice], the fears from number one should begin to ameliorate.
Learning to live with terrorism is not an easy thing to do. The chances of dying in an attack may be low, but the psychological impact is too real to ignore or deny, and the cost of cleaning up and rebuilding is substantial. After all, it wasn't just the 3,000 lives who died in the WTC, but also the billions of dollars in cleanup, lost business, and general disruption due to the red alert and the grounding of all flights. And that's not even counting the billions of dollars spent in Afghanistan, Iraq, "homeland security," etc.
Tenchusatsu |
