[shield]

This will only make people feel unsafe and will want to re-elect GWB...are these people stupid!!!

[geekchick]

Stupid perhaps, but strategists with a few successes under their belts (and, I suspect, many failures dealt to them over the past few years by fine intelligence, military, law enforcement, and financial services folks around the world).

IMO, terrorists seeking to derail President Bush's re-election would not try to do it through an attack here -- because look how Americans rallied after the 9/11 attacks. Not to mention all our LE and plenty of the public will be on constant high alert status through Election Day, making a homeland attack more complicated and probably more expensive for the terrorists to pull off.

Seems to me they would be more likely to stage a massive attack in Iraq. A *really* massive one on a scale larger than anything they've been able to pull off yet, designed to weaken our resolve and turn us against the war (and, therefore, the wartime President). Perhaps anticipation of that kind of attack is part of the motivation for recent clean-up activities in the holdout areas like Fallujah.

[MarMema]

I think a lot of people, liberals, think that we are being attacked because of our own behavior. I have had some debates with them this last week.

So in their minds, if we just left the rest of the world alone, we'd be left alone. It's a faulty belief but they don't think there is a real threat.