In the war on terror, what is needed is a military deterrent. We had deterrents in the cold war and except for people who like oppressive police states, (a.k.a. Jimmy Carter), that war turned out to our liking. The Soviet Union didn't nuke us for fear they would be handily wiped into the Arctic Ocean. Of course, despite their propensity for dumb economics, paranoid police state infrastructure and shared sacrifices, the various Soviet peoples were mostly civilized. I haven't been convinced that the foes of today share that attribute.

Today's approach to war is insane. The United States seems willing to go to war just so long as no one in the target nation is hurt or no one in our country who may identify with the enemy is offended. Further, we seem to believe that in order for the defense of our country to be valid we must get permission from the United Nations, the European Union and any nation neighboring the target country. It gets worse.

A lot of the nations that we are trying to ally with are socially, ideologically, religiously and economically tied to the very groups we're at war with. We are not allowed to single out for extra scrutiny, people whose origins, backgrounds or ethnicity matches the people who attacked us. In our airports we search African American grandmothers, white teenage girls and airline pilots to show how fair and tolerant we are. Our borders are still open and illegals of every nationality are pouring into our country by the thousands. The only border debate going on is "should the United States be sued for not providing water stops in the desert for the lawbreakers."

How did things get to be so absurd? Why are we tolerating such stupidity at the highest reaches of our government? We may have already lost. Are we just marking time until our final defeat? We are conceding to the enemy that we don't have a right to exist as a nation. We are telling our own people that our borders are meaningless; that citizenship in the United States doesn't count for anything. We are acting as though the liberty and freedoms we enjoy are expendable just to prove we have them. We may all end up dead, but thank goodness the people who kill us aren't inconvenienced.

The people of the United States are subjected day after day to news reports telling us how dreadful our country is for offending the enemy. We are told that our allies the Israelis are guilty of humiliating their enemies. Somehow humiliation is worse than blowing up babies in pizza parlors. We even have an internal press that creates massacres that haven't occurred in order to make the good guys look guilty of something. To top it off, our own leaders are going on television to tell us that we are definitely going to be attacked again. What are we doing about it? We are making sure that anyone who would enter our country to do us harm aren't thirsty. We are making sure we don't single out anyone who might actually highjack an airplane for fear that their feelings might get hurt. We are pointing fingers at our government leaders trying to decide if the enemy is really us(we).