Yes, I know. We are in Afghanistan now because they have boxcutters and we have a crummy communications system when it comes to analyzing intelligence. I'm still not sure why we're in Iraq. The reasons change like fashion. I don't know how being in Iraq will fix things in Pakistan, but if we had finished things properly in Afghanistan, that might have helped.

The FBI's computer system pre-911 was a joke. It needed upgrading desperately, but false starts and squabbles with Congress over funding delayed the project repeatedly. Hardware failure contributed to 911.

You know what, Tom? The first computer this family ever got, years and years ago, had a flight simulator on it. One of the aircraft you could choose was an airliner. One of the flight plans you could choose was over Manhattan. One of the things you could do with your airplane was to fly it into the World Trade Center. Of course, it didn't make a hole in the building in the simulation. On September 11, I remembered this vividly. When Condi Rice said she couldn't imagine using aircraft as missiles, I wondered if she or anyone in the President's inner circle hadn't had a flight simulator loaded on their PCs, and if they had never turned an eight-year-old loose on it, or if she was just lying through her teeth. If it's the former, we also have imagination failure, and no number of troops can protect us from that.

Re: Japan:

Japan had never, ever been colonized or occupied. Japan had a lively sense of nationhood. Japan had, at the end of the Second World War, at least a millennium's history of cherry-picking what it wanted from neighboring cultures and adapting it to Japanese forms. They were and continue to be geniuses at this. And, at the end of the Second World War, Japan still had its sense of honor and the Emperor, Hirohito, who was willing to shoulder the burden of helping his people to make the transition from his divine rule to occupation, and from occupation to a parliamentary government with a pacifist constitution. The surviving population of Japan still had memories of Japan as a prosperous nation that ruled itself, and a memory of the development of representative governmental bodies under the Meiji Emperor, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Granted, because of their attachment to the Emperor, and the strong nature of the Meiji imperial bureaucracy, this government was closer to the Prussian model than the British one; yet the tradition existed and was not a completely new and foreign thing inflicted by the occupying Americans.

The Japanese had not had a lot of experience with liberty, but they had a great deal of experience with self-rule, and they had a cohesive society. To compare post-war Japan to Iraq ignores too many factors to make it a valid comparison.

Germany would be an even worse choice. It was dismembered. We promised not to do that to Iraq.