After we have cheerfully flattened training camps from twenty thousand feet, and flown back to the carriers, do we just go home until they rebuild again, or do we have to do something about their Islamist government? How?

If terrorism is a cancer, everybody hopes for a nice, solid tumor that can be cut out so the patient can go home the next day.

"Hey, look, we blew up all the camps, and here's bin Laden's head. Guess that's that." Or maybe "Hey, look, we beat the Iraq Army and caught Saddam. Guess that's that."

Unfortunately, terrorism is more often like a cancer that has metastized through the body, and a long, painful route of chemo and radiation are necessary for a cure. For a while, the patient is a lot sicker than he looked when he came in. Do we have the guts to hold out for the full cure? Lately, it's not looking like it.

As Israel discovered in Lebanon, and we discovered in Afghanistan and Iraq, you aren't going to cure a cancer meshed in with the healthy cells by using surgery and amputation. It would be no different in Somalia, or anywhere else in the world.

The unpleasant truth is that even if we had stayed out of Iraq, or even Afghanistan, sooner or later it was going to come down to regime changes somewhere else, and the same long, messy, deadly and possibly absolutely necessary, results.