[SloanSteady]

Helluva topic for my first post. It seems just a few days ago I was bemoaning the slow news days we were having.

I don't normally get too bent out of shape about these things - OK City didn't really get me ... the last time I can remember being flipped out was the Challenger disaster, and this obviously blows that away.

I think the thing that gets me most is the sheer brilliance of it.

Our cost: Thousands dead, millions/billions of dollars in damage, the psyche of the nation totally rocked, financial markets shut down, travel and communications crippled.

Their cost: 4 guys who wanted nothing more in the world than to die for the cause.

If you can be dispassionate about it, it's a brilliant way to wage war.

But like many others, I wonder what the goal was. Surely they know that this isn't going to make us lay down and quit. It will just "wake the sleeping giant."

My advice as a former soldier, though, to those of you eager for war is think it through. War does have a nasty way of spiralling out of control, and bringing out the beast in all of us.

What we need to do IMO is to a) figure out a way to convert commercial aircraft from a proven effective weapon into a secure method of air travel. (Are any of you eager to get on an airplane right about now?) and b) reinstate our right to openly and actively assassinate political leaders. Covert ops are a nightmare. We need to be able to say to the world, "XXX is responsible for terrorism, we can prove it, and we're going to kill him and string him in a public square in Manhattan."

Trying to wage a war against Afghanistan, if it's Bin Laden, is going to kill a lot of suffering Afghanis. Going after reveling Palestinians is just kicking 'em when they're down (it's not illegal to not like America and they've got their own problems.)

On a different note, did anyone else find Bush's reaction pretty damned wussy? It took him 11 hours to settle back into Washington and address the nation (he's just getting ready to speak). He should have headed back much sooner and shown himself to be a strong leader. Probably not right to bash the American leader so soon after the tragedy, but he IS supposed to be a leader. Hiding on AF1 didn't seem very leaderly.

But that's just an opinion ... flame me if you must, avoid it if you can.

SloanSteady