No WMD in Iraq?

The Beslan massacre is a litte more chilling after you read this. And I wouldn't relax just yet: terror cells operate over years and decades, not months. Let's hope this stuff isn't part of a current plan.

Hey electorate: in a free society, terrorists are WMD. Me and 20 other guys could shut this country down for a week with rifles and fertilizer bombs, so let's stop pretending anyone needs Anthrax to make terror in the US. These people mean business, and they've got nothing to live for but death.

In the late 20th century, two entire countries, countries with long histories of civilization, decided pretty much as a whole that the ends justified the means in their game of global domination. Their warriors knew on some level that what they did was for the good of the world. To defeat those countries, we had to kill their warriors, and even their civilians, with such zeal and skill that there was no question in the survivors' minds how far we were willing to go to win. The bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as cruel and seemingly unnecessary as they were, were required to make clear to both fanatics and non-fanatics in those societies that as far as they were willing to go to get their way, we were willing to go farther.

We're going to have to do that again, and squabbling about the fine points of how and why is a frickin' waste of time we don't have. I sure hope we don't have to have more tragedy to get on the same page about Islamic terror.