As always, Tom, you mistake any deviation from your position as hopeless sentimentality, weakness, and pandering to bullies. We need Arabic speakers not just to empathize with our foes, but to monitor their websites, listen to their telephone conversations, watch their TV, infiltrate their businesses, and to translate for our troops and investigators and cops, and eavesdrop on their commuications, in real time. We need to have full understanding, not only of their terrorist groups, but to support our friends, to take the pulse of all the elements in their home societies, even those who are our allies. We need to know as much about them as they do about us. Every person in the world with the equivalent of a high school education speaks English. We can't even talk to the people picking our vegetables and raising our kids.

The dollar cost of damage terrorism does to us is not merely the destruction involved, it also includes the cost of the countermeasures we employ to combat it. Every dollar we spend on airport security is a victory for Al-Quaeda, they can now focus on other vulnerabilities. But we keep on spending it, and more and more. We haven't been successful at stopping air piracy and terrorism, they are simply developing new targets.

My position on this issue is not that different from yours, I simply don't believe that the current administration knows what it's doing, and I don't think pointing that out is the equivalent of surrender.