I keep saying to myself, forget it, there's no point in trying, but the facts of the matter are critical enough that I keep trying.

...top notch intelligence Tom based on solid (and entirely Constitutional) police and spy work and cooperation from the rest of the world. (That last part is particularly important) When you find them, you take them out with tiny surgical strikes that don't involve significant collateral damage.

If you look at this process in the real world, it ain't easy.

Let's say you are in charge of these special forces and "surgical strike" teams.

Police operations only work where the police force is on your side. This applies to many places, like Europe and England, and in these places, police work has been very effective in dealing with terror cells and preventing attacks.

You are going to get NO such cooperation from the kind of states where terrorists congregate in large numbers. Western Pakistan has, for all intents and purposes, been written off by Musharraf. His own forces have given up on enforcement out there. We had no police and military cooperation from Taliban Afghanistan, and will get none now from nations like Iran, Syria, Somalia, and others. We will get token cooperation from nations like Saudi Arabia, and some others. Sometimes.

Believe me, Morocco is not the main problem here.

In none of these places will the local government approve of "special forces" type attacks by the U.S., or any other outside nation. All such attacks will, by most definitions, defy international law.

So there's your starting point.

Now let's look at intelligence.

A reading of the PreWar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" is very instructive here.

There are many sources of information. Satellites, spy planes, sensors, and above all, human intelligence sources. The latter is where it becomes a real bitch. Yet in most cases, where a terrorist outfit is holed up in a civilian area, this is the only way to get solid information.

Somebody tells you this building is going to have a large-scale al Qaeda meeting on a given day. Or that a certain person is a terrorist. Or that someone in a particular village is building car bombs.

Now what? Is he telling the truth? Is this an old source, or a new one? Are we dealing with real info, or is this guy just using you to settle a score? Is this someone with a political axe to grind that's not necessarily yours? If you're paying him, is he ratting out an innocent person for the cash? The CIA learned a lot about this the hard way. All of these things have actually happened.

Only in the movies can you send James Bond in disguise to check it out. So you have to rely on multiple sources, luck, other data, experience, and whatever else you can scrape up. And guess what: Your time to do this is measured in days. Sometimes hours.

Okay, let's say you decide the intelligence is good. Now look at the target. It will be surrounded by civilians. The terrorists have learned, from both the U.S. and Israel, that you DON'T "stray outside the protected environment." Are the targets--assuming they're actually going to be there--going to be worth the inevitable collateral damage? Another case where the military/intelligence people earn their pay the hard way.

You make the first stage decision. A Predator drone violates national airspace--technically an act of war if the nation is not Iraq or Afghanistan--finds the spot, and circles. Detailed shots are taken of the target, and more decisions made. Your enemies look just like everyone else. There are no uniforms, no headquarters flags flying, no markings on the vehicles. Sweat, as the clock ticks.

You go to the next level, and decide to make the hit. A Hellfire missile takes out the target, and dozens of people die.

Now, the aftermath. Assume for the sake of argument that there actually were terrorists in that target zone.

Still everyone in the neighborhood will insist to their last breath that there were no terrorists there. That all the dead were women and children, innocents to the last burned corpse. If you're really fortunate, you have covert or sympathetic resources on the ground for mopup and analysis. This won't happen often. You hope that help is reliable.

The aftermath continues. Reporters interview people on the scene, and get the story from "random" bystanders. The story is always the same. Innocent people killed. Photos of the damage and the dead, some of them set up or faked, come out.

Your people in the Pentagon, if it has been lucky enough to have gotten enough data to draw its own conclusions, releases information on a successful strike. Few people believe it. The Pentagon, after all, lies all the time, right?

We are treated to outrage on this board about the Evil Military killing yet more innocent bystanders.

Now, imagine the aftermath if it WAS a mistake, and there were no terrorists there.

Now what? You wait for the next opportunity.

That's just an aerial surgical strike. I could write another page or two on the issues involved in a "special forces" ground mission inside a hostile state.

The above is an oversimplification of what the words "tiny surgical strike" means. We could have some fun with what will happen in the U.N. afterwards, or where our various allies come down on the situation.