and yes, it is a war. When they blew up the World Trade Center buildings, they killed people from several countries including Great Britain, Belgium, and even Pakistan. This creates natural allies in the coming fight. We need to pool our intelligence information on these terrorist groups and hit them with massive force. We need to try to disrupt their funding by forcing the Swiss and other countries to relax their bank secrecy laws. We need to have every civilized nation treat those countries that sponsor or harbor terrorist groups as international pariahs - no diplomatic relations, no trade, no foreign aid, no nothing. We need to untie the hands of the Special Ops forces and clandestine intelligence services and let them commence "wet work" against the terrorists.

One other thing, and this might be the most important of all, we need to get prominent Islamic leaders to loudly denounce the notion that Islam supports terrorism against non-believers. Terrorists seem to spring from either the hopelessly disheartened or the spiritually manipulated. Bin Laden is said to be a very knowledgeable Islamic scholar. His writings are well researched, his Arabic is perfect, and he is very convincing to those who either have nothing to lose or who see this as a holy war against the West. We can kill bin Laden (assuming we can find him), but killing his ideas is a lot harder.