Yes. Yes I do. Or rather: of course we should kill terrorists etc. etc. What we should not do is pretend is the concern over Islamic terrorism is more important than concerns over individual liberty and constitutional government.
There are sometimes huge emergencies, like waves of invading troops, or massive natural disasters, that call for temporary - temporary! - prioritizing of various concerns over individual liberty.
Al-Quaeda is not it. They wish they could come close. They can't. They're illiterate, worthless goons, half insane and inept and the other half cowards and the fact they got blazingly, impossibly lucky once does not change that. In fact even if they do get lucky every 20 years it will not change that.
What we should do, of course, is operate on the assumption our enemy is full of superior military strength... just hand over Czechoslovakia. We've heard that tune, too.
Sometimes getting
blazingly impossibly lucky is enough. If a British officer in the American Revolutionary War had
read the note he'd been given rather than stuff it in a pocket, Washington would have been defeated at Trenton, and if that had happen, could America have won her independence?
AQ "got lucky" on 9/11/01. And we got "un"lucky; if the FBI had followed through on reports by flight instructors that some odd people wanted to learn how to fly but didn't care about take-off or landing, 9/11 might have been prevented.
But we messed up; like the military intel guys who thought the greatest danger in Pearl Harbor on 12/7/41 would be sabotage, so they had all the planes lined up in neat rows -- making strafing them so much easier for the real attack force which, BTW, was presumed to be heading toward the Philippines.
AQ "illiterate worthless goons.? ? ?" In my earlier post I referenced Hitler. Years ago I read a analysis by a psychologist named (IIRC) Robert Waite titled
The Psychopathic God. He concluded that Hitler was a borderline disfunctional personality. He had other interesting remarks about Der Fuhrer as well, none of them particularly complimentary. Despite the shortcomings Hitler accomplished a great deal of evil. I think one of the greatest "allies" he had was he had such an improbable beginning; as I said, who'd believe some nut in a prison cell would write a book, title it "My Struggle," and then actually come so close to achieving it. No one believes prisoners will ever amount to anything.
And I think relegating AQ to a one in twenty year pest is equally as dangerous. Sure, a lot of things they've tried are inept but all we need to do is ignore them, and maybe the'll learn to weed out their "little Hitlers" and develop into a real power.
Not that I agree with everything we ARE doing or everything we've done, but what we've done is better than handing off the Sudetenland one more time for an ephemeral promise of
"peace in our time."