FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM REQUIRES FACING UNPLEASANT FACTS

By Cynthia Tucker

Just suspend disbelief for a little while.

If you can do that -- forget those annoying facts, ignore the complexities of world affairs and disregard chaos theory -- you can believe that President Bush (news - web sites) will win the war on terror. You can believe. You CAN believe.

But it requires some selective amnesia.

You have to forget that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) -- "We'll smoke him out of his cave," Bush declared three years ago -- is still at large and planning murderous attacks. You have to ignore the aggressive insurgency in Iraq (news - web sites), ordinary Iraqis' resentment of the U.S. occupation, and the failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction or evidence of a significant relationship between Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and bin Laden. You have to forget that there were more substantive terrorist attacks worldwide last year than the year before.

Here is what both Kerry and Bush ought to be saying: The security Americans have long known on these shores is gone -- at least for my lifetime. (I can only hope that future generations will regain it.) Americans will have to get used to living more like Israelis, who have learned to cope with a frequency of suicide bombings that is grotesquely routine.

And that may not be the worst of it. The worst would be an attack by a terrorist armed with a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb -- the plot of the Tom Clancy novel-turned-movie, "Sum of All Fears." That sort of attack would kill hundreds of thousands and render a metropolitan area uninhabitable for years.

Fighting against that kind of terrorism would require a radically different approach from the president's; his invasion of Iraq has only made things worse. Kerry's emphasis on multilateralism makes more sense. But even he has failed to be honest about the costs -- financial and otherwise -- of a smarter war.

The rest is here at Yahoo News