I spotted an editorial in the Washington Post this weekend:


My friends in the peace movement who dissent from this country's response to the Sept. 11 attacks have another take on what must be done to free us from terrorism and restore security. Look, they say, at what America is doing to make people fly planes into buildings. They cite our "miserly" $6 billion foreign aid budget to help the world's poor vs. more than $300 billion "for the power to kill." Rather than crusade against wickedness, America should halt the arms trade, lift sanctions against Iraq and curb the CIA, they argue. Correct, they demand, the 50-year imbalance in the U.S. stance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ("the most important source of hatred for the U.S. throughout the Muslim world"). Embrace the United Nations, the Kyoto agreement on global warming, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Law of the Seas agreement and an international war-crimes court. To quote one author, "Until we take responsibility to try to lift up that which is good in us and cast out that which is bad, the scourge of terrorism will continue to torment us."

Sorry, but I don't think that's going to quite cut it with al Qaeda.

Author Colbert King goes on to say that short of wiping Israel off the map, converting to Islam and instituting a Taliban-like totalitarian government, nothing we do will satisfy Islamic terrorists like al Qaeda. For them, killing innocent (read: children and non-American or non-Jewish) people is a means to an end, and any means is justified.

He doesn't offer a solution, but he puts up an awfully good argument that those who seek only to appease our enemies in the Middle East won't solve the problem and will more likely make it worse.

Worth a read, whatever your political bent.