Perhaps I should clarify my own feelings on what should be done. I certainly do not call for indiscriminate attacks on civilians. I see a long term effort to identify the whereabouts of those individuals who target us; followed up by whatever level of force is required to get them and to overcome any resistance to our taking them. I do not see any reason to attempt to seize and hold any ground for more than the time it takes to get those whom we have targetted. The Russians tried to hold ground; that is not within our purpose.
I also don't think push button warfare is the way to go other than as backup. It is too easy to make a mistake that will not be discovered until far too late. Ground forces will know if they are getting return fire and they will know if they have found their objective.
I think we need a real air cavalry, able to strike a pinpoint target in the middle of the mountains with sudden and overwhelming force. And whose members are fully aware of the possibility of taking massive casualties as well as giving them.
If certain safe harbours of these people try to protect them, those governments should be made to suffer, not the general civilian populace if we can help it.
I have nothing against Islam or Moslems. I have some sympathy for those who have suffered wrongs. But it is too late now. There will be more attacks on us, and I'm afraid it is not all that long before they go nuclear. That, above all, is something we should be prepared to pre-emptively strike at, any time, any where. I am much afraid that we can only delay the inevitable. There is insanity in the world, and the larger our total population grows, the larger the absolute numbers of the murderously insane becomes.
We will delay the inevitable as long as possible, but I fear that the day of the urban area ended this week. People will have to disperse infra structure so that there are no real targets with the high kill factor that now exists. No matter what we do, there are those who will commit these acts. In the world we now live in, what others will do to us has to a great extent become divorced of our actions. If we ignore them, they will kill us. If we are nice to them, they will take our gifts and then they will kill us. If we attack we can perhaps hold the gates awhile longer while they kill some of us. Otherwise we must abandon our cities, disperse our populations, and build a distributed infrastructure, dying in our thousands and tens of thousands all the while.
I do not like the implications of the world that began on Tuesday September 11th; but I also can not ignore them and cannot turn the clock back. Bin Laden has birthed something new and terrible into the world and there is no way it can be shoved back into the bottle now that it has been loosed upon us.
The barbarians really are at the gates now.