Based on their perceptions of the events in Spain for the last few days, do you think Al Queda will be more likely or less likely to try similar attacks in other countries, especially those with major elections underway?

Based on their past statements, I would say that their main objective is to make sure that free elections are things of the past. In that, the Spanish have arisen magnificently to the occasion and have voted. They have continued to exercise their political freedom in spite of an act of viciousness that might have inspired them to cower in their houses.

The result was not what some of the people in this country would have wanted. That's too bad. This is not Spain. The Spanish will walk their own path. We will still have more in common with them than we do with al Qaida, or even, for that matter, with the current Chinese leadership.

Based on what international law enforcement learns about these people whenever they attempt to strike, successfully or not, what is the likelihood that they will screw up more and more often, fail in their attempts, and be arrested or shot for their trouble? They are clever, but they have limited resources, both human and financial. Their cannon fodder is plentiful. Their organizers are more scarce, and are picked up more and more often.

It doesn't matter if their perceptions accurately reflect what happened in the Spanish elections yesterday. Their perception is their reality.

If it doesn't matter whether their perceptions accurately reflect what really happened, then who cares what their perceptions are? If their perception is their reality, what makes it imperative for the rest of us to conform to it? It's their fantasy world. They don't get to inflict it on us unless we allow it.

It's up to us to live our lives like sane people. Let the police worry about the perceptual reality of a bunch of violent loons: police need to do that kind of thing to develop profiles. If we spend our time trying to guess which way to jump so as not to do what we think that maybe the murder junkies might want, instead of being who we are and acting the way we act because we want to, we will redefine ourselves within their reality, or a mirror-image of it. If we redefine ourselves in any way that they control, they win.

It's a head game played with fear, rage and explosives.

I read often here that al Qaida wants to destroy the West, and indeed, I believe that's their objective. But what is "the West", really? Is it a nation? No. A region? No. An historical period? No. A political alliance? No. An economic system? No, not even that. "The West" is a way of looking at humanity and its place in the world. "The West" is a way of looking at the world itself, from tiniest particle to the cosmic sea on which it floats. "The West" is an intellectual and cultural heritage that can be modified and shared with any nation on Earth. It's a way of thinking.

A way of thinking is tough to destroy in a frontal attack because it lives inside people. But it's also fragile, because people can be turned by manipulating their negative emotions. Fear, to make them cower; rage, to make them lash out. Either way, the violence of the emotions undermines anything based on thinking.

The loons understand this. What they seek to do is to undermine that way of thinking by playing head games on us and controlling the way we think (and act) through the application of fear and rage. Don't let them.