The signal error of the Bush administration was to embrace the terrorist rhetoric of war, and then to militarize a conflict that should have been handled all along as a matter for the police, the intelligence services and public diplomacy. The struggle ought to have been focused as a fight against malicious individuals, not their aberrant ideologies, against small criminal groups, not the vast civilizations they claim to represent. (A report from the James A. Baker III Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002 tried to make this point before we went into Iraq, but alas …)

I could ask the same question that makes most anti-war people clam up, and that is to ask exactly how the "cops" would handle terror camps in Afghanistan, Somalia, northern Iraq, Pakistan, and several other places where the cops aren't exactly on the opposite side of the terrorists. Dickey tries to slide past this definition by calling the unmistakably military actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere "police actions."

If a nation is willing to accept a certain level of terrorism in its borders, swatting each new set of flies as they come in while letting the dump that breeds them go untouched, "police actions" might be acceptable, but they would also have to include countless military raids into sovereign nations, destroying camps and safe houses with missiles, and accepting a certain level of civilian deaths in those nations.

I don't think that many Americans want the first line of defense to be the streets of New York.

And as long as the "aberrant ideology" thrives, so will the terrorists.