No will, no way.

Are things really as hopeless as some of us think? Yes and no.

There's no question that the terrorists don't have the power to carry out their professed goals, but whether we have the will to take them on is in doubt. If one of our cities were nuked, what good would our nuclear arsenal do us? We've pretty much ruled out the use of our own nukes for anything other than deterrence and we wouldn't know anyplace to target. Even if Iran were to develop nuclear weapons and attack us, it's doubtful that we'd bomb Teheran in response, for the same reasons the press and the liberals opposed overthrowing Saddam. We've known that for some time, which is why we have kept up our conventional forces, but now it's doubtful whether we can even use them, even with an all volunteer military. Our technology has become so expensive that even with historically low casualty rates, popular support can't be maintained for more than a year.

I have little doubt that we can defeat terrorism, but I'm afraid that we're going to have to suffer a lot more before we really begin to take this seriously. We've been infiltrated by Muslim radicals financed by Saudis and various terrorist organizations, but we're shackled by our own laws against racial profiling and other extensions of civil liberties imposed by courts who never imagined people willing to blow themselves to bits to kill us.

I'd like to believe that we're smarter than this, but there seems to be a lot of Ostrich in the American Eagle these days. As I type this, I'm watching a courtroom scene where the defense is portraying the defendant as a victim of the obesity epidemic, who was targeted by a person who attacked him because he was fat. This is what passes for a serious issue. This and Wal-Mart. Are we really committed to that war?