Here's a story relating to British intelligence findings.

The survey Lee is referring is here.

As Lee points out, this is in Britain. The backpack bombing Muslims that blew up that underground had been born there. Think about THAT for a while.

We aren't quite talking "a dozen people," are we? I wish to God we could end the whole thing by killing bin Laden or arresting a few terrorists. How simple that would make things.

People are grasping at any straw that will "prove" that we are not facing a real threat, but enemies solely inspired by the actions of America and Bush. The real threat is something they not only don't want to handle, but something many of them can't handle.

Notice how many people have deflected, sometimes with fountains of rhetoric, the simple question: How would YOU deal with it?

The only retreat they have left now is "if OUR guys had been running things, the problem wouldn't exist!" What to do now? Nothing. Nothing at all. In fact, some of them can't even describe exactly how "their guys" would have dealt with it. Bowser just spews. Raoul says let the cops arrest them--if they can--as they arrive in your country to kill you.

Believe it or not, I heard a lot of the exact same rationale during the last parts of the Cold War. In some people's view, the ONLY reason the Soviets were a threat is because they were forced unwillingly into confrontation and arming themselves by the buildup of Amerika's insane military-industrial complex, and Amerikan imperialism.

The same kind of rationalization, the same avoidance of the horrible concept that there may really be bad forces in the world that we can't just vote out of office.

dtb, the war in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, was an attempt to find an alternative to the genocide you are worried about. A hope that creating more pluralistic societies from tyrannies would reduce the breeding ground for terror.

Whether, as one side says, the effort was sabotaged from our own side, or whether, as the other side says, the effort was stupid and useless from the beginning, if it doesn't work, the next war will be different.

When we pull out of the Middle East, it is not going back to sleep, any more than it was asleep before 9/11. It is not going to settle into the back pages of the newspaper like Vietnam as they kill off whatever pro-Westerners do not manage to flee.

The next war, maybe ten to fifteen years from now, maybe less, will be one of desperation, and ghastly weapons from high altitude. No American troops will die this time around. I wish I could say the same for the American and/or Israeli civilians that will have died to make the point yet again.