But do not kid yourself about the nature of our enemy. We are not fighting an isolated band of outlaws. We cannot ensure our safety by treating this as a police operation.
There is a context to these attacks and a system that supports the perpetrators. The context is fundamentalist Islam, and the system that supports it includes everyone from Saddam Hussein to the imams who preach war to the people celebrating in the streets of East Jerusalem.
This IS a clash of civilizations, just like WWII. Would it have been right for us to kill more Japanese than absolutely necessary? No, of course not. But it was necessary to destroy the Imperial cult and reconstruct Japan as a modern liberal democracy.
We may need to do the same thing in the Islamic world.
If you'll read some of my comments on other threads you'll know where I'm coming from on this. I call for invasion and occupation of all those nations on our "terrorism sponsor list."
All you say is correct, but I have neighbors and acquaintances who are Muslim, and they are not the enemy. In fact, many of them, particularly my Iranian friends, are here because they lost everything and had to flee for their lives when the radical fundamentalist Islamic revolution went down.
But they didn't change their religion because of the actions of fanatic extremists.
I wonder if anyone has stopped to think how bad things would be if radical Christian extremists ever got hold of enough recruits and arms? I doubt there'd be a whole lot of difference in the outcome.