We have to destroy all risk before it gets to us regardless of how little the odds are of any of it personally affecting any one individual. 9/11 was a pisser to be sure but, if we had an event like that each year for the rest of our existance, the odds of it affecting any one of us would still fall far below the risk we assume each day simply going out our doors. That's not to minimize the psychological and economic impact it has. We need to certainly learn from any attack and try to prevent it but overreaction is worse than difficult and messy low level intelligence steps that are fraught with their own brand of peril.

This spoke to me of a rather laid-back attitude toward a physical attack on our country. Perhaps I read it wrong.

If a serial killer takes out a citizen of my city once a month, you could make a valid case that the odds of any one of the hundreds of thousands of people here getting hit are next to nothing. That the odds of being killed in a car accident are greater.

Any cop trying to make this point to show why they shouldn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and risk policemen's lives hunting this bastard down, would be fired. Even though everything he said was perfectly accurate.

We are now dealing with a group of people who want to obliterate everything that doesn't fit their idea of how the world works. They have demonstrated how they destroy humanity in those places they control or have controlled. They have demonstrated their willingness to kill anyone at all around the world to reach their goals. They have stated clearly their desire to acquire weapons that would allow them to wreak the kind of damage they really want to. Nobody on the planet has the slightest doubt that if bin Laden could have place a megaton warhead in Manhattan, that he would have.

You are not going to stop this kind of activity with policemen, by sending the Peace Corps to al Qaeda camps, or by making sure all the bin Ladens of the world have nice childhoods. Bin Laden grew up wealthy, and earned college degrees. As I write this, thousands of Muslim children are being taught in Wahabbi schools and mosques that the infidel must be destroyed. Some may grow past that teaching. Others will not.

The main problem I'm having with you in this discussion is that if you are forced to identify the existence of evil, you have to admit that it needs to be destroyed, and you just won't go there. In that, you're not alone.