Just a thought: Why is it that everyone (well, 93% of the US population) is jumping on the war bandwagon after this attack, but there was little or no move for massive retaliation after the 1993 WTC bombing?

If that bomb had succeeded it would have resulted in roughly 60,000 fatalities (the number of people in both towers on a given weekday afternoon), yet we didn't have a huge upheaval of the political landscape on a global scale, just because someone underestimated the strength of the building's foundation?

In any other war I can think of, the reaction has been tied to both the size of the invading force and the number of casualties. In a terrorism model, the invading force is so small, and the casualties so high, that we don't know how to treat it.

$40 billion to wage a war that is in any way akin to a 'conventional attack' would likely be missing the point, end up killing countless Afghan citizens who are not part of the extremist movement, and would likely give rise to countless more dissatisfied Islamic people willing to join the extremist movement, in whatever country they happen to live.

There's a fascinating article from US News, written in January, describing how cells form, disperse, and rebuild to avoid elimination. This kind of article exemplifies how attacking a geographic region will do little but call others to join extremist movements, letting other cells grow.

It's a different kind of problem. It's a war against terrorism that we've already been fighting for decades. Of course, with terrorism, stopping the attack 90% of the time isn't good enough, and it's the kind of game where the CIA, NSA, and FBI can't gloat about their successes. We only see the failures.

Obviously we can't do nothing, or have it appear that we're doing nothing, but even so, I believe that changing the way we fight the war won't work either, we just need to fight the way we are fighting better, and use this tragedy as a worldwide poster-child to help us commit other nations to a 'with us or against us' position, effectively allowing us to fight that war with better resources in more cooperative environments.

To write any more would probably be rambling (too late?) but I welcome your response, vehement though I fully expect it to be.