Ken writes:

> I find your thesis unconvincing.  I almost said something last week when you
>  wrote that there was no defense against terrorism other than rooting out
the
>  core cause.  In that case it's hopeless, because the core cause is human
>  free will.

You may be overinterpreting what I'm saying. If the attempt to stop terrorism
is done only here, defensively, the strategy is bound to fail. The great
problem with the current situation is its extreme asymmetry. We represent an
open, wealthy society with a near-infinity of targets. They represent the
shadows hidden in a wasteland of rubble, extremely difficult to find and
possessing nothing of high value to destroy. Indeed, they are hardly anything
more than a very toxic idea, and how do you kill an idea other than with
another idea?

We can't possibly begin to protect every asset without fundamentally ruining
our own lives and our values. As Steve Dirickson has said, this isn't war.
The World Trade Center bombings represented an act of extreme criminality,
but it wasn't the declaration of war of one nation state against another.

If we are going to "win" this war -- in the same sense that we can win a war
on crime -- then we are going to have to root out its causes. Doing this
means more aid and support for moderate movements and governments in the
region. It also means a greatly increased investment in psychological
warfare, where a Radio Free Afghanistan tells an aggressive truth, but the
truth nonetheless. It also means more economic opportunity for individuals,
however we might be able to help provide that. And it means the closure of
all money paths in the western nations for all of the networks of terror that
exist. And of course it means developing an accurate and detailed legal case
against those people who actually commit these crimes and bringing these
people to trial.

But what it doesn't mean is carpet bombing of large stretches of desert. That
not only tends to accomplish nothing, it does us great harm in the eyes of
the people we need to convince the most. At the moment, we have the moral
high ground. If we exploit it well, we can hurt the fundamentalist extremists
where they are most vulnerable: in their pocketbooks and in their population
of recruits.

Doing all of this obviously won't be quickly accomplished, but we can do it.

Wirt Atmar

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