Take off the gloves! Hillary 2008!

actually, civil liberties would be included under "healing". these variables have wide interpretations. Safety, in my eyes, is much more robust than justice in our country. we can blow the hell out of our entire planet.. alot more than once, but our identities and liberties are being incringed upon more and more while the bureaucrats give themselves ridiculous wage increases and politics presides over human dignity.

we may be going to hell in a hand-basket, but dammit.. we'll kill anyone who tries to take it from us. and maybe we'll grab a few others just because we can.


"my missiles are better than yours" is not really my idea of a pleasant world to live in.

Hillary? So the Dems WANT to lose again? Mkay...!

No but Paolo's post was about civil liberties. Of which we are surrendering many for the illusion of safety.

A determined terrorist has no empathy for pain or the loss of human life. The more they can take out, the happier they are. They act on any opportunity that they find to embrace their ideals through violence. It doesn’t matter how many people you strip search at the airport, by the time we have reacted to their treachery they will have killed and moved onto to seek out the next vulnerable area of our infrastructure to try yet again.

Surrender of our civil liberties, in fact, makes us more vulnerable.

Healing in the broad sense as it applies to a population, is an illusion as well. We can strengthen our country, build on our infrastructure, improve our foreign relations, but the twin towers will always be gone.

So I can't see where having one would exclude the other. Strengthening our country, improving our infrastructure and economy and improving foreign relations with the rest of the world would all serve both purposes without surrendering civil liberties.

No, I really don't, and I'm not being obtuse. I was unaware that America had any healing to do other than trying to get out of this huge deficit hole.

I understand that we were "wounded" when we were attacked on 9/11. And yes: we had to "heal." But now? Nearly 4 years later? Do we still have to "heal"?

Perhaps I'm too focused on trying to find Osama bin Laden. It's just boggling my mind that there isn't even a -- I mean, I can't name an American organization that's actively searching for the one, the ONLY, Osama bin Laden.

I hear a lot about anti-terrorist committees, though. I also read articles about how the manhunt for the one, the ONLY Osama bin Laden is too disorganized and how no one corresponds with each other (it's spread out in several countries as well).

I'm just terrified that I'm going to be telling my grandkids about 9/11 and they'll ask me if he was ever caught and I'll have to say, "No, babies, they never found him."

when i referred to healing, i didn't mean some psychotherapeutic type of healing.. i meant financial, ecological, civil liberties, etc.. etc..

"healing" as in healing the things that are wrong with our country. in my opinion, the amount of weight on our shoulders from corruption, deficit, and anything else that falls under this description is a whole lot heavier than my fear of personal safety from any malevolent origin, intended or not.

i apologize for any misconceptions due to my poor choice of wording.

I think Billy defines healing in some other way than what you have defined it as, though.

Thanks for the clarification

I think you are, actually.

Consider the analogy of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor. Who was the parallel to Osama Bin Laden there? Three possibilities:

Admiral Yamamoto: the actual strategic architect of the plan. He was killed halfway through the war. Did that end the war? Absolutely not, though it was certainly a major coup. It wasn't about obtaining revenge against just one man.

General Tojo: As prime minister and head of the armed forces, Tojo was responsible for Japan's military policy, including the decision to attack the United States. He was arrested and executed after Japan's surrender, but his fate is really a footnote of the war, and a side effect of accomplishing the real goal of the War in the Pacific: eliminating the strategic threat posed by Japan.

Emperor Hirohito: He may actually be the best fit as a Bin Laden proxy, since he was the *spiritual* leader of Japan, as Bin Laden is the spiritual, not operational, leader of al Qaeda. Yet not only was Hirohito not killed, nor tried, nor even arrested following the war, he was allowed to remain in power. Not only was his destruction not a war aim, his preservation was actually a vital part of the successful post-war follow-through.

It's a mistake to personalize the conflict, to narrow it down to an individual. Modern wars are not about individuals; the last war that *was* about an individual may have been the Trojan War, and I'm skeptical even about that. If we can eliminate Islamic terrorism as a strategic threat -- something that I believe cannot be done in the span of a single Presidential term, regardless of who is in charge at the White House -- and yet Bin Laden still remains at large, then I think we could still legitimately claim victory.

(And I happen to think that we are on the right track to accomplishing that goal -- recent events in Lebanon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are quite encouraging -- but that's actually a different argument.)

Well, at least we attacked Japan after Japan attacked us, and not South Korea instead.

And what was the first place the US invaded after Pearl Harbor?

North Africa. About as far away from Pearl Harbor as you can get and still be on the same planet.

My point is that, like WWII, this conflict is bigger than any one individual, bigger than the need to avenge any one terrorist act, involves more than just the perpetrators of that attack, and started long before 9/11.

After that attack, President Bush concluded that the real "root cause" of the problem we were facing was tyrannical government and lack of freedom in the Arab world. Reasonable people might disagree with that.

He decided that the best way to start to address this problem was to tear down one of the worst regimes in the Arab world, and build something better in its place. Reasonable people might disagree with that.

What's *not* reasonable is to think that you can solve the problem by sending Joe Friday into the hills of Pakistan to slap the cuffs on Bin Laden, declare victory and go home. It's bigger than Osama. It's bigger than Al Qaeda. And its been building since before most people on this forum were born.

Billy, you're the perfect illustration of the power of fear mongering. If the Bush administration had claimed that an alien invasion from outerspace was imminent and used it as an excuse for, er... anything at all... you'd now be claiming what a triumph it is that space invaders haven't destroyed us. That's the whole point of fear mongering. Do you not understand that?

My answer was very plain: There is no choosing between the two; they are intermingled. Rose quite eloquently paraphrased my position, and others have pointed out that the terms "safety" and "healing" may have radically different individual interpretations. The problem, as I see it, is with the form of the question; it is binary in nature when it should be presented in essay format. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer to this question, and in my mind, safety as defined by US governmental policy infers a reduction in civil liberties.