I was about to say kudos for Salon, then I realized this article was bought and paid for and the author is not on staff. Compare it to what Salon's staff writers have to offer, and this excellent piece easily outshines them all put together.

Maybe at this weekend's Salon retreat Joan trims the fat?

This was a fine article and I found Suskind's points cogent and illuminating (I've just finished reading "The One Percen Doctrine" and recommend it for its insight). However, I am dismayed to find even Suskind (and Salon) falling into the rhetorical trap of wrongly suggesting that foiling this latest bomb plot was somehow the doing of the US rather than the British. Here are just two examples:

"when we break up an attack, there's a kind of a scattering phenomenon".... [w]e may have broken up, clearly, a significant cell that was coming from London bound for America, but there may be al-Qaida operatives inside of America who remain a mystery to us."

Have I missed something? Was this indeed a collaborative effort all along between our two countries?

Sadly, no. Much as I anticipate the MSM and the Bush Administration shamelessly, subtly claiming that "we" thwarted the next 9/11 attack, I also fear that the Administration will miss cricial lessons that led the British to be successful this time: tireless investigation and judicious use of intelligence, surveillance and infiltration over posturing, fear-mongering, and military might.

And they do.

Oh, they're not perfect. But no real army has tried to conquer our country since 1812, and none ever will in our lifetimes. The U.S. is virtually invulnerable to a real military attack. This is a quiet little truth that's noticible only by how vociferously it's denied.

Now a dirty bomb or a little ricin in a subway or a bit of smallpox spread around.... well, what's so darn scary about that really? Most of us wouldn't know the difference any more then we notice that New Orleans is still a wreck.

Global warming is much scarier then any ooga-booga terrorism.

What ptotcts us is our freedom, unless we give it away because we've been made scared of our shadows. We are the only country whose face is the face of all mankind.

with his strangely calm analysis of what we should fear, how much we should fear it, how vague it is, this fearful "thing", and how very concrete not only this most recent aborted "plot" is. Then there's the really loud clank in the middle of it all:

"The fact of the matter is, it may mean absolutely nothing that they haven't attacked us in the past five years."

It also may mean nothing because just how likely would it be for 19 guys to take down four airliners and the World Trade Center (or then trans-Atlantic airliners)at the same time, armed only with boxcutters and some cursory flying lessons (or some as-yet-to-be-explained mysterious liquid explosives)? Oh, I'm not saying it didn't go down that way - only that the law of averages finally caught up with us on that particular day. The chances of that or anything like it ever being pulled off again (or even the first time) are infinitesimally small (You do the math - I did the thinking already). Suskind seems to want to make us believe there is a well-organized and disciplined sociopolitical group of sociopaths out there who have made it their sole business to bring death doom destruction down on our heads. We are so inured to critical thinking, owing the the combination of nothing but distorted news reporting and the White House helping with the distortion, that we cannot hope to see that life is a dangerous proposition at best and that our governement can only react to disasters, whether they be idiot's luck or acts of God. The fact that this administration reacts more slowly than any other in history just compounds our dread.

I agree with Suskind - a society as open as ours and a geography as large as the US and Europe are physically indefensible from isolated terrorist attacks. The Islamo-fascists are using a very subtle long-term strategy to whittle down our resistance to them. Keep in mind that their long-term goal is for Islam to conquer the WHOLE world. To achieve this they use a combination of ruthless force and politics. We are losing on both counts. They have terrorism, which is surgical - we have nukes, which we cannot use because we abhor mass destruction. Our democracy allows them to infiltrate us - their closed societies are impervious to us. Our acceptance of different views allows local moral relativists to breed self-doubt - their religious fanaticism makes them willing to sacrifice their own children to achieve their political goals.

I repeat, they are whittling down our resistance so we eventually accept the superiority of Islam and Sharia Law.

What can we do to keep our liberal democratic societies? We have to be as ruthless as they are. We have to make it POLITICALLY EXPENSIVE for them to continue their attacks. Keep in mind that they gain their support from Muslim societies. Only when the Muslim societies withdraw their support will they be stopped.

How do we cause (or force) the Muslim societies to withdraw their support? A terrorist attack kills 1,000 of our people - we respond with a bombing barrage in a Muslim country that kills 20,000. They escalate - we escalate. We have to be as ruthless as they are.

This tactic should be preceded by changing our laws so our internal security services are given more leeway to monitor and arrest suspected local terrorists - with racial profiling being part of the methods used. If the Muslims among us want to remain in a liberal democratic society they will have to accept the price of staying here. If peace ever breaks out between Islam and the liberal democratic societies then maybe we can go back to the way it was. Until then, they have to sacrifice because, unfortunately for them, they share too many characteristics with the people that want to kill us.