I'm beginning to think people here have short-term memory problems.

From the State of the Union address--yet again:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

This is a clear statement of America's outlook on this subject.

I have discussed here a number of times that in the age of terror attacks it is almost impossible to detect the "imminent threat" of a terror attack before it actually takes place.

We are no longer talking about seeing armies line up on your borders, or seeing missiles moving to launch positions, or navies moving toward your coasts.

As many people have pointed out, you don't get a "smoking gun" until it has been fired.

As an exercise, please try to develop a scenario showing what level of evidence of a planned terror attack would justify a military attack on the nation harboring them or supporting them. Blueprints? Videos of planning sessions? Bin Laden going on TV in August and saying he's going to blow up the WTC on September 11? Films of Saddam shipping tiny containers of anthrax to Hamas by mail?

Think about another related scenario: had we captured the September 11 hijackers while they were still training and planning in America, and found out exactly what they had intended to do before they actually did anything, would this have justified a military attack on Afghanistan? Why or why not? At what point would the actions of the hijackers justified an attack on their home country? At what point would their plans or activities generally be accepted as an "imminent threat?" Other than actually carrying out the attack?

Most of the antiwar people seem to have a huge blank spot in their thinking when they actually have to analyze the real world results of their rhetoric. This is no exception, and I expect more of the same non-answers I've been getting up until now.

You can make a legitimate argument that the evidence of threat was not good enough in the case of Iraq, but that does not invalidate the main principle that, in this age when fifteen men can kill 3,000 people and lay ruin to part of a city, we can't wait until after the fact to do something any more.