Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

The presidents I served under don't have anything to do with my politics.

So the idea that you could put Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni Arabs in a nice, liberal, federal system in Iraq in a short amount of time, six months or a year, boggles the mind.

As many critics have pointed, out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

While people out there on the spot certainly have to be held accountable for what they've done personally, the chain of command responsibility for this strikes me as just as important and should be dealt with.

The whole notion of land property rights in the Arab world is different from that in Europe.

In reality, I don't think that many of the policies we've attempted to apply to deal with it are going to have any serious effect.